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Twentieth-century critics sought writing by women that captured authentic female voices of the past, but primarily found derivative texts: translations and paraphrases. These texts were deemed emblematic of a patriarchal dynamic, with women silenced by the male-authored source text. The disappointment palpable in this scholarship, where women's texts are seen as insufficiently subversive, has long affected the critical fortunes of early modern women's writing in English. This thesis argues instead that the authentic female voice is a misnomer for the real interest of derivative texts, namely evidence of women's authorship: the will and capacity to make. Far from mechanical exercises, women's translations and paraphrases abound in all that we associate with canonical genius: creativity, intellectual vigour, political comment, and formal experimentation. My chapters address writers as various as Anne Lock, Mary Sidney, Margaret Tyler, Anne Dowriche, and Lucy Hutchinson. Moving between a range of literary genres in which they wrote, as well as a range of derivative modes, I demonstrate the diverse interests of these writings, including many areas of thought and action typically assumed to exclude women. Far from constituting a distinctly female tradition, their derivative texts demonstrate the continuity of women's engagements with the intellectual mainstream. As such, they reveal that the mainstream was never entirely male to begin with.

Paraphrases are prevalent in ontological debates. Their main target is to avoid ontological commitment to particular (kinds of) entities. For example, a sentence such as 'There is a chance of rain' apparently commits to the existence of chances. However, as we can paraphrase this sentence to 'It is likely that it rains' which is not ontologically committed to chances, it seems as if we can avoid the particular commitment to them. The first part of this thesis is devoted to the relation between paraphrase and ontological commitment. In particular, it considers what different paraphrase strategies are to be found in the literature and what problems they encounter. Only Alston's so-called symmetry objection is generally recognized, but I argue that there are at least four more problems. Moreover, I argue that criteria of ontological commitment are problematic, too. I consider several candidate criteria and show that they are unsatisfactory. Furthermore, I argue that criteria of ontological commitment are in some sense equivalent to criteria of adequate paraphrase. Regarding the latter, I argue (i) that satisfactory criteria of adequate paraphrase need to resolve the problems such as Alston's symmetry objection and (ii) that the common candidate criteria don't even jointly resolve them. I conclude that there are no adequate criteria of ontological commitment. I take it, however, that giving up on paraphrase is implausible in light of paraphrase examples such as the above one. To make sense of such paraphrases, the second part of my thesis proposes to understand them as explication proposals. In the rest of the thesis, I develop my understanding of explication which is called 'tolerant explication'. Tolerant explication is build on Carnapian and Quinean explication, but it is more widely applicable. In particular, I argue that the notion is superior to other like notions, but also subsumes them as special cases. Lastly, I propose to understand conceptual engineering as my tolerant explication by showing how tolerant explication resolves particular issues riddling conceptual engineering. One such problem is Strawson's objection that explication and conceptual engineering are just changing the topic instead of addressing the problem as posed. Another problem is that conceptual engineering forces us to commit to particular understanding of what's to be engineered, namely concepts.

This empirical exploratory study quantitatively analyzed content similarity indices (potential plagiarism) from a corpus consisting of 360 dissertations and 360 published articles. The population was defined using the filtering search criteria human resource development, training and development, organizational development, career development, or HRD. This study described in detail the process of collecting content similarity analysis (CSA) metadata using Turnitin software (www.turnitin.com). This researcher conducted robust descriptive statistics, a Wilcoxon signed-rank statistic between the similarity indices before and after false positives were excluded, and a multinomial logistic regression analysis to predict levels of plagiarism for the dissertations and the published articles. The corpus of dissertations had an adjusted rate of document similarity (potential plagiarism) of M = 9%, (SD = 6%) with 88.1% of the dissertations in the low level of plagiarism, 9.7% in the high and 2.2% in the excessive group. The corpus of published articles had an adjusted rate of document similarity (potential plagiarism) of M = 11%, (SD = 10%) with 79.2% of the published articles in the low level of plagiarism, 12.8% in the high and 8.1% in the excessive group. Most of the difference between the dissertations and published articles were attributed to plagiarism-of-self issues which were absent in the dissertations. Statistics were also conducted which returned a statistically significant justification for employing the investigative process of removing false positives, thereby adjusting the Turnitin results. This study also found two independent variables (reference and word counts) that predicted dissertation membership in the high (.15-.24) and excessive level (.25-1.00) of plagiarism and published article membership in the excessive level (.25-1.00) of plagiarism. I used multinomial logistic regression to establish the optimal prediction model. The multinomial logistic regression results for the dissertations returned a Nagelkerke pseudo R2 of .169 and for the published articles a Nagelkerke pseudo R2 .095.

This dissertation is a study of the practice of musical paraphrase in the long 20th century. Musical paraphrase is defined as the adaptation, alteration, or embellishment of musical material, often borrowed from another source. My project is built around a single guiding question: If a composer borrows music from another source and alters it for use in a new context, how is this accomplished, and what are their motivations for doing so? This collection of five case studies provides a representative (if not comprehensive) sample of the many practices we might call paraphrase. In Chapter 1, I explore the metaphor of musical translation. In Chapter 2, I examine the practice of altering music for use on television, which I call "copyphrase." Chapter 3 is a study of musical caricature. The final two chapters are about musical paraphrase as creative stimulus--using pre-existing music as the aesthetic point of departure for crafting something new. In Chapter 4, I focus on the film music of John Williams, and in Chapter 5, I explore the late works of Alban Berg.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is an unconventionally written sequence of about 700 short remarks which often contain brief dialogues between the author and many unidentified voices. This unconventional form poses major difficulties to interpretation, particularly together with Wittgenstein’s professed intentions of criticizing the very activity of philosophy, maybe to the point of ending it. Between two broad camps of interpretation—readings attempting to paraphrase the book into standard argumentative forms, and ‘therapeutic’ readings which see the book’s criticism of philosophy as an achievement of certain of its elements fundamentally resistant to paraphrase—this dissertation supports the latter, arguing that the Investigations lacks a complementary relationship between its formal structure (distinct, non-hierarchicallyordered remarks) and its rhetorical structure (in its use of ‘signposting’ at salient structural locations to guide the reader’s progress). Failing to satisfy these conventions, the book does not permit an argumentative reading, and thus lacks a structure permitting paraphrase into argumentative form. This reading begins with a survey of ‘signposting’ rhetoric through the entire text, then selects four key locations for suggesting argumentative structure: §1, §65, the ‘philosophy sections’ 89–133, and the final remark. A close reading of each shows that the text permits a conventional, ‘argumentative’ interpretation only when the reader distorts the text; and that it permits an unconventional, ‘therapeutic’ interpretation when the reader attends more carefully to his own role in identifying what happens in the text, using its formal and rhetorical features as checks on interpretation. After this argument concerning large-scale structure, an objection that the book’s many brief dialogues constitute arguments is addressed with an interpretation of the unusual dialogue in §28. The dissertation concludes with two essays in practical criticism. The first concerns textual features and critical concepts which must be at the forefront of any attempt to capture a stronger sense of resistance to paraphrase—that the reader has to read the Investigations ‘for himself’. The second considers how a paraphrase-resistant reading and a focus on ‘therapeutic’ criticism of philosophy are reinforced by a different perspective on the Investigations’ place in the history of philosophy.

The subject of modeling, or borrowing, has been very important for noted scholar J. Peter Burkholder. In his work on Charles Ives, Burkholder had to devise several categories for the many ways in which Ives quoted themes or modeled his works on other composers’. Francis Poulenc is another composer who often employed these techniques in his compositions, making for a diversified musical style. It is my hope to clarify some of Poulenc’s compositional practices by applying Burkholder’s categorization in the piano works of Poulenc. I begin the document with a discussion of Poulenc’s background and stylistic influences. These include Mozart, Couperin, Liszt, Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Prokofiev, which contributes to the diversity of Poulenc’s style. A discussion of the emerging field of modeling is followed by a look at three of Burkholder’s categories, and how they feature in Poulenc’s works: Modeling, Paraphrase, and Stylistic Allusion.

Undoubtedly, Totentanz has been one of the most famous works by Franz Liszt. Totentanz has been recorded by many pianists and addressed in much of the vast literature about Liszt and his works; however, little research has been focused on this work. Most studies of Totentanz address only the historical background of the piece in relation to the theme based on Dies irae. Currently, there are no specific studies about the solo piano or two piano versions and only one recording was located. Liszt's own piano solo transcription of this famous work is an excellent addition to the concert repertoire. Totentanz consists of six variations that include canonic and fugato sections. The main theme is based on the Gregorian chant Dies irae, a melody that has been used by many other composers, most notably Berlioz in Witches Sabbath of Symphonie fantastique, op. 14 and Rachmaninoff in Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This study contains five chapters. Chapters I and II provide background information, historical background and influences of Totentanz. Chapter III presents an outline of Liszt's achievement as a transcriber. Liszt revised his own works numerous times from the 1840s and 1850s, including Transcendental Etudes, Paganini Etudes, and piano and orchestra works. Like in the case of Totentanz, transcribed form piano and orchestra into piano solo, Liszt transcribed and paraphrased hundreds of other composers' works as well. Chapter IV discusses and compares the two main versions for solo piano and piano and orchestra. Form and harmonic language in particular the use of tritone in Totentanz is discussed. The adjustment required in transcribing the work for piano solo is discussed in detail, followed by a conclusion.

The use of imitation exercises—writing activities employing model texts and the modeling of writing-process behaviors—in the First Year composition classroom can have many benefits for both student writers and teachers, and offers practical solutions to some of the problems facing student writers in today's colleges. First Year writing students are often unaware that they are part of a larger academic community. They often lack exposure to and understanding of academic standards. They don't understand that "good" writing is not a blanket-concept but is determined on a situational basis, and they are frustrated by the vaguely expressed expectations of their writing teachers. These problems are interconnected and so are all addressed in this study, but because they offer so many potential avenues for discussion, the focus of this project will be limited to the benefits of clear expectations that the use of modeling activities in the classroom can bring about for both students and teachers. An in-depth look at the materials, methods, and results of student participation in the activities of a single semester of English 1105, the first course in Virginia Tech's First Year Writing Program will be the dominant component of the project; it will be supplemented by a review of literature and a contextual discussion of what Stephen M. North calls the "Practitioner" mode of inquiry—the gathering of pedagogical information through the active classroom application of educational theories and practices.