Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages? These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role of language in comics, graphic novels, and single-panel cartoons, analyzing the intersections between the visual and the verbal. Contributions examine the relationship between cognitive linguistics and visual elements as well as interrogate the controversial claim about the status of comics as a language. The book argues that comics tell us a great deal about the sociocultural realities of language, exploring what code switching, language contact, dialect, and linguistic variation can tell us about identity - from the imagined and stereotyped to the political and real.

Gender is a hotly debated topic in the field of education. The role that language plays in educational contexts especially in the classroom has long been acknowledged. Innovatively combining approaches in the analysis of classroom discourse this book offers rich empirical findings as well as being theoretically interesting and valuable.

A masterclass in persuasion from the inspiring philosopher who has taught a million people to argue through his popular open online course Our personal and political worlds are rife with arguments and disagreements, some of them petty and vitriolic. The inability to compromise and understand the other side is widespread today. What can we do to change this? In Think Again philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong draws on a long tradition of logic to show why we should stop focusing on winning arguments and instead argue in a more constructive way. Based on a hugely popular online course with more than a million followers around the world, Think Again explains how to analyse, evaluate and make better arguments while also spotting bad reasoning and avoiding certain fallacies. Through lively, practical examples from everyday life, politics and popular culture, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong offers brilliantly straightforward, wise advice that we can all use at work, at home and online.

This study advances a model for Critical Discourse Analysis which draws on Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics, applied in a critical analysis of immigration discourse. It will be of special interest to students and researchers with which to explore new perspectives in CDA.

Key practitioners and researchers explore how people routinely and at particular sites are discursively constructed as deficient in ways that may affect their life chances. The book offers examples of how adopting multiple perspectives on research can provide a rich explanatory analysis of the construct of 'deficit' in a range of domains.

An investigation of the historical evolution of figurative language within the framework of cognitive linguistics. It examines how and why metaphors evolve through the ages; discusses the role of culture; patterns of metaphor evolution; how many people use particular expressions.

Competence encompasses or overlaps with notions of efficiency, success, accountability, excellence and self-justification. This collection explores ways in which individuals, teams or groups in organizations discursively present themselves as competent to perform tasks or functions, possibly at a superior level.

Academics Writing recounts how academic writing is changing in the contemporary university, transforming what it means to be an academic and how, as a society, we produce academic knowledge. Writing practices are changing as the academic profession itself is reconfigured through new forms of governance and accountability, increasing use of digital resources, and the internationalisation of higher education. Through detailed studies of writing in the daily life of academics in different disciplines and in different institutions, this book explores: the space and time of academic writing; tensions between disciplines and institutions around genres of writing; the diversity of stances adopted towards the tools and technologies of writing, and towards engagement with social media; and the importance of relationships and collaboration with others, in writing and in ongoing learning in a context of constant change. Drawing out implications of the work for academics, university management, professional training, and policy, Academics Writing: The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation is key reading for anyone studying or researching writing, academic support, and development within education and applied linguistics.

This edited book analyses the relationship between discourse and conflict, exploring both how language may be used to promote conflict and also how it is possible to avoid or mitigate conflict through tactical use of language. Bringing together contributions from both established scholars and emerging voices in the fields of Discourse Analysis and Conflict Studies, it argues for a discourse approach to making sense of conflict and disagreement in the modern world. 'Conflict' is understood here as having a national or global focus and consequences, and includes verbal aggression and hate speech, as well as physical confrontation between political and ethnic groups or states over values, claims to status, power and resources. Themes explored in the volume include the language of conflict, hate speech in online and offline media, and discourse and peace-building, and the chapters examine various national contexts, including Lithuania, Brazil, Belgium, North Macedonia, Sri Lanka, the USA and Afghanistan. The chapters cover conflict-related topics within the fields of Political Science, International Relations, Sociology, Media Studies, and Applied Linguistics, and the book will be of interest to students, researchers and experts in these and related fields, as well as professionals in conflict and peace-building/peace-keeping.

An examination of how the commercialization of professional practice is implicated in its organizational discourses. Drawing on a study of ELT colleges, the book explores how teaching practices are permeated and challenged by a 'discourse of commercialization' through which market priorities become normative in teachers' professional lives.

Employing a discourse analytical approach this book focuses on the under-researched strategy of humour to illustrate how discursive performances of leadership are influenced by gender and workplace culture. Far from being a superfluous strategy that distracts from business, humour performs a myriad of important functions in the workplace context.

An investigation of the developing discourses of English Language teachers in teaching and training. Showing how teachers are shaped by the discourses they participate in and how they shape these discourses. By analyzing professional development through professional discourse the book sheds light on what teachers do and why they do it.

Identity Trouble assembles contributions from a variety of discourse fields to discuss the pressures on traditional understandings of identity. The focus is on failures and uncertainties in people's construction of their identities when faced change and the contributors raise critical questions about identity and how it may be reconfigured.

Rhetoric was once an essential part of western education. Aristotle wrote an important treatise on it and Demosthenes remains famous to this day for his skills as a rhetorician. But skill with rhetoric today is no longer admired. Rhetoric is often seen as a synonym for shallow, deceptive language-empty words, empty rhetoric--and therefore as something quite negative. But if we view rhetoric in more neutral terms, as the "art of persuasion," it is clear that we are all forced to engage with it at some level, if only because we are constantly exposed to the rhetoric of others. In this Very Short Introduction, Richard Toye explores the purpose of rhetoric. Rather than presenting a defense of it, he considers it as the foundation-stone of civil society, and an essential part of any democratic process. Using wide-ranging examples from ancient Greece, medieval Islamic preaching, the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill, and modern cinema, Toye considers why we should all have an appreciation of the art of rhetoric.
About the Series:
Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

This volume takes a critical discourse approach to the ways women's magazines contribute to the social construction of particular kinds of female body - as ideal, beautiful, ugly, overweight or engineered. Looking at the language used, it provides an insight into the experience of the female reader, and the likely impact upon her self-image.

How were social media posts, scripted speeches, traditional news media and political cartoons used and understood during the Brexit campaign? What phrases and metaphors were key during and after the 2016 Brexit referendum? How far did the Remain and Leave campaigns rely on metaphor to engage with supporters in communicating their political positions? These questions, and many others, can be answered only through a systematic analysis of the actual language used in relation to Brexit by the different parties involved. By drawing on a range of data sources and types of communication, and presenting them as 'frames' through which individuals can attempt to understand the world, the author provides the first book-length examination of the metaphors of Brexit. This book takes a detailed look at the rhetorical language behind one of the major political events of the era, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of linguistics and political science, as well as anyone with a special interest in metaphor, rhetoric, Brexit, or political communication more broadly.

Can discourse analysis techniques adequately deal with complex social phenomena? What does 'interdisciplinarity' mean for theory building and the practise of empirical research? This volume provides an innovative and original debate on critical theory and discourse analysis, focussing on the extent to which CDA can and should draw on the theory and methodology of a range of disciplines within the social sciences.

The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation. The introduction of theory into English studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of investments at the same time that institutional conflicts between them became more intense than ever before. Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures who shaped and were shaped by this new landscape-including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour-the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than is usually understood from the perspective of either literature or composition alone. Possessing a clear view of the entire discipline is essential today as the contemporary corporate university pushes English studies to abandon its liberal arts tradition and embrace a more vocational curriculum. This book provides important conceptual tools for responding to and resisting in this environment.

This book presents an innovative institutional transpositional ethnography that examines the textual trajectory of "the life of a calling script" from production by corporate management and clients to recontextualization by middle management and finally to application by agents in phone interactions. Drawing on an extensive original research it provides a behind-the-scenes view of a multilingual call center in London and critiques the archetypal modern workplace practices including extensive use of monitoring and standardization and use of low-skilled precariat labor. In doing so, it offers fresh perspectives on contemporary debates about resistance, agency, and compliance in globalized workplaces. This study will provide a valuable resource to students and scholars of management studies, communication, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology.

Discourse studies, the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts, is a fast-moving and increasingly diverse field. With contributions from leading and upcoming scholars from across the world, and covering cutting-edge research, this Handbook offers an up-to-date survey of Discourse Studies. It is organized according to perspectives and areas of engagement, with each chapter providing an overview of the historical development of its topic, the main current issues, debates and synergies, and future directions. The Handbook presents new perspectives on well-established themes such as narrative, conversation-analytic and cognitive approaches to discourse, while also embracing a range of up-to-the-minute topics from post-humanism to digital surveillance, recent methodological orientations such as linguistic landscapes and multimodal discourse analysis, and new fields of engagement such as discourses on race, religion and money.

While organisations become more and more global, they also become more and more dispersed and virtual. This challenges the sense of a shared organisational identity and the ability of employees to communicate personally held knowledge. To address these challenges this book offers an innovative multidisciplinary approach to knowledge communication in global organisations. The book develops a multidisciplinary analytical lens through which to understand employee identity formations and knowledge communication practises. Using detailed analyses of interviews from a real organisation, the book builds an understanding of how 21st century employees make sense of a virtual organisational reality characterised by multiple simultaneous projects and virtual, dispersed teams. These analyses are conducted using a new discourse analysis method for analysing research interviews, Discursive Sensemaking Analysis. Using these methods and findings, researchers, project managers and HR professionals will be able to analyse their own organisations to discover how employees make sense of the complexity of 21st century global organisations.

Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking investigates silence as a normal, ubiquitous, and indispensable element of political thinking, theory, and language. It explores the diverse dimensions in which silences mould the different core features of the political, as a highly flexible power resource, both enabling and constraining major social practices, traditions, and currents. Departing from the typical focus on intentional silencing and the dominance of logos, the book instead highlights the concealed and unrecognized ways through which silence pervades socio-political life and adopts the guises of the unspeakable, the ineffable, the inarticulable, and the unconceptualizable. Drawing extensively from historical, philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytical, theological, linguistic, and literary viewpoints, the book demonstrates the common threads that connect silences to those different disciplines, alongside the features that pull them asunder. In extracting and decoding their political implications, it explores both academic literature and colloquial, everyday discourse. Michael Freeden uses select case-studies to explore topics such as Buddhist nondualism, Locke's tacit consent, the submerging of historical narratives, state neutrality, Pinter's miscommunications and menace, and the separate ways ideologies integrate silence into their beliefs. The book offers an analysis of silence from a multi-perspectival range of disciplines, providing a comprehensive and holistic view of silence and the political.

Why in the early 1970s does The Times reject the idea of a national lottery, as rewarding luck not merit and effort, but warmly welcome one by the 1990s? Why in the 1970s do the Daily Mail's TV reviews address serious contemporary themes such as class- and race-relations, whereas forty years later they are largely concerned with celebrities, talent shows, and nostalgia? Why does the Conservative Chancellor in the 2010s mention 'Britain' so very often, when the Conservative Chancellor in the 1970s scarcely does at all? Covering news stories spanning fort-five years, Michael Toolan explores how wealth inequality has been presented in centre-right British newspapers, focusing on changes in the representation may have helped present-day inequality seem justifiable. Toolan employs corpus linguistic and critical discourse analytic methods to identify changing lexis and verbal patterns and gaps, all of which contribute to the way wealth inequality was represented in each of the decades from the 1970s to the present.

Discourse analysis considers how language, both spoken and written, enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis examines the field and presents James Paul Gee's unique integrated approach which incorporates both a theory of language-in-use and a method of research. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis can be used as a stand-alone textbook or ideally used in conjunction with the practical companion title How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit. Together they provide the complete resource for students studying discourse analysis. Updated throughout, the fourth edition of this seminal textbook also includes two new chapters: 'What is Discourse?' to further understanding of the topic, as well as a new concluding section. A new companion website www.routledge.com/cw/gee features a frequently asked questions section, additional tasks to support understanding, a glossary and free access to journal articles by James Paul Gee. Clearly structured and written in a highly accessible style, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis includes perspectives from a variety of approaches and disciplines, including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthropology and communication to help students and scholars from a range of backgrounds to formulate their own views on discourse and engage in their own discourse analysis. This is an essential textbook for all advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of discourse analysis.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics provides a comprehensive overview of this important and dynamic area of study and research. Language is indispensable to initiating, justifying, legitimatising and coordinating action as well as negotiating conflict and, as such, is intrinsically linked to the area of politics. With 45 chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, this Handbook covers the following key areas: Overviews of the most influential theoretical approaches, including Bourdieu, Foucault, Habermas and Marx; Methodological approaches to language and politics, covering - among others - content analysis, conversation analysis, multimodal analysis and narrative analysis; Genres of political action from speech-making and policy to national anthems and billboards; Cutting-edge case studies about hot-topic socio-political phenomena, such as ageing, social class, gendered politics and populism. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics is a vibrant survey of this key field and is essential reading for advanced students and researchers studying language and politics.