Of interest in their own terms as a significant cultural practice, reading groups also provide a window on the everyday interpretation of literary texts. While reading is often considered a solitary process, reading groups constitute a form of social reading, where interpretations are produced and displayed in discourse. The Discourse of Reading Groups is a study of such joint conceptual activity, and how this is necessarily embedded in interpersonal activity and the production of reader identities. Uniquely in this context it draws on, and seeks to integrate, ideas from both cognitive and social linguistics. The book will be of interest to scholars in literacy studies as well as cultural and literary studies, the history of reading, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, digital technologies and educational research.

Theorizing Digital Rhetoric takes up the intersection of rhetorical theory and digital technology to explore the ways in which rhetoric is challenged by new technologies and how rhetorical theory can illuminate discursive expression in digital contexts. The volume combines complex rhetorical theory with personal anecdotes about the use of technologies to create a larger philosophical and rhetorical account of how theorists approach the examinations of new and future digital technologies. This collection of essays emphasizes the ways that digital technology intrudes upon rhetorical theory and how readers can be everyday rhetorical critics within an era of ever-increasing use of digital technology. Each chapter effectively blends theorizing between rhetoric and digital technology, informing readers of the potentiality between the two ideas. The theoretical perspectives informed by digital media studies, rhetorical theory, and personal/professional use provide a robust accounting of digital rhetoric that is timely, personable, and useful.

Since the global economic crisis of 2007-2008, 'capitalism' has been the topic of widespread general discussion in both mainstream and social media. In this book, Christian W. Chun examines the discourses of capitalism taken up by people in their responses to a street art installation created by Steve Lambert, entitled Capitalism Works for Me! In doing so, he considers several key questions, including: How do everyday people view and make sense of capitalism and its role in their work and personal lives? What are the discourses they use in their common-sense understandings of the economy to defend or reject capitalism as a system? Chun looks at how dominant discourses in social circulation operate to co-construct and support capitalism, and the accompanying counter-discourses that critique it. This is key reading for advanced students of discourse analysis, language and globalization/politics, media/communication studies, and related areas. A video lecture by the author can be accessed via the Routledge website (www.routledge.com/9781138807105) and the Routledge Language and Communication Portal (www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/languageandcommunication).

Despite the U.S. and China's shared economic and political interests, distrust between the nations persists. How does the United States rhetorically navigate its relationship with China in the midst of continued distrust? This book pursues this question by rhetorically analyzing U.S. news and political discourse concerning the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 U.S. midterm elections, the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and the 2014-2015 Chinese cyber espionage controversy. It finds that memory frames of China as the yellow peril and the red menace have combined to construct China as a threatening red peril. Red peril characterizations revive and revise yellow peril tropes of China as a moral, political, economic and military threat by imbuing them with anti-communist ideology. Tracing the origins, functions, and implications of the red peril, this study illustrates how historical representations of the Chinese threat continue to limit understanding of U.S.-Sino relations by keeping the nations' relationship mired in the past.

'Complex Worlds: Digital Culture, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication' is a collection of thought-provoking scholarly essays by teachers and industry practitioners in professional communication and technology-oriented fields. Scrupulously edited for a range of readers, the collection aims to help familiarize advanced students, teachers, and researchers in professional communication, computers and writing, literacy, and sister disciplines with key issues in digital theory and practice. An emphasis on the situations of and audiences for digital communication identifies 'Complex Worlds' as a rhetorical approach. In an era when globalizing markets and digital technologies are transforming culture around the world, readers should find the collection both engaging and timely. The collections' twelve essays constitute a diverse and thematically coherent set of inquiries. Included are explorations of topics such as cyber activism, digital 'dispositio', citizen and open-source journalism, broadband affordances, XML, digital resumes, avant garde performance art, best pedagogical practices, and intercultural communication between East and West, North and South. The text is especially well suited for advanced courses in professional and applied writing, contemporary rhetorics, and digital culture. The complexity highlighted in the collection's title is brought into relief by authors who address how the digital is daily unmaking our assumptions about the boundaries between work and school, the global and the local, the private and the public. 'Complex Worlds' offers readers an opportunity to build on their rhetorical awareness by expanding their understanding of the means, aims, and strategies of effective communication--today and in the future.

Since the global economic crisis of 2007-2008, 'capitalism' has been the topic of widespread general discussion in both mainstream and social media. In this book, Christian W. Chun examines the discourses of capitalism taken up by people in their responses to a street art installation created by Steve Lambert, entitled Capitalism Works for Me! In doing so, he considers several key questions, including: How do everyday people view and make sense of capitalism and its role in their work and personal lives? What are the discourses they use in their common-sense understandings of the economy to defend or reject capitalism as a system? Chun looks at how dominant discourses in social circulation operate to co-construct and support capitalism, and the accompanying counter-discourses that critique it. This is key reading for advanced students of discourse analysis, language and globalization/politics, media/communication studies, and related areas. A video lecture by the author can be accessed via the Routledge website (www.routledge.com/9781138807105) and the Routledge Language and Communication Portal (www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/languageandcommunication).

Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments: Corpora and Digitally-driven Critical Analysis presents a new and practical approach in Critical Discourse Studies. Providing a data-driven and ethically-based method for the examination of arguments in the public sphere, this ground-breaking book: Highlights how the reader can evaluate arguments from points of view other than their own; Demonstrates how digital tools can be used to generate 'ethical subjectivities' from large numbers of dissenting voices on the world-wide-web; Draws on ideas from posthumanist philosophy as well as from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for theorising these subjectivities; Showcases a critical deconstructive approach, using different corpus linguistic programs such as AntConc, WMatrix and Sketchengine. Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments is essential reading for lecturers and researchers with an interest in critical discourse studies, critical thinking, corpus linguistics and digital humanities.

Teaching is often seen as an identity process, with teachers constructing and enacting their identities through daily interactions with students, parents and colleagues. This volume explores how conducting video analysis helps teachers gain valuable perspectives on their own identities and improve classroom practice over time. This form of interactional awareness fosters reflection and action on creating classroom conditions that encourage equitable learning. The volume follows preservice English teachers as they examine video records of their practice during student teaching, and how the evidence impacts their development as literacy teachers of diverse adolescents. By applying an analytic framework to video analysis, the authors demonstrate how novice teachers use positioning theory to transform their own identity performance in the classroom. Education scholars, teachers and professional developers will greatly benefit from this unique perspective on teacher identity work.

This volume brings together scholars in sociolinguistics and the sociology of new media and mobile technologies who are working on different social and communicative aspects of the Latino diaspora. There is new interest in the ways in which migrants negotiate and renegotiate identities through their continued interactions with their own culture back home, in the host country, in similar diaspora elsewhere, and with the various "new" cultures of the receiving country. This collection focuses on two broad political and social contexts: the established Latino communities in urban settings in North America and newer Latin American communities in Europe and the Middle East. It explores the role of migration/diaspora in transforming linguistic practices, ideologies, and identities.

The Semiotics of Movement in Space explores how people move through buildings and interact with objects in space. Focusing on visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, McMurtrie analyses and interprets movement and space relations to highlight new developments and applications of spatial semiotics as he proposes that people's movement options have the potential to transform the meaning of a particular space. He illustrates people's interaction with microcamera footage of people's movement through the museum from a first-person point of view, thereby providing an alternative, complementary perspective on how buildings are actually used. The book offers effective tools for practitioners to analyse people's actual and potential movement patterns to rethink spatial design options from a semiotic perspective. The applicability of the semiotic principles developed in this book is demonstrated by examining movement options in a restaurant and a cafe, with the hope that the principles can be developed and applied to other sites of displays such as shopping centres and transportation hubs. This book should appeal to scholars of visual communication, semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis and visitor studies.

This volume takes a distinctive look at the climate change debate, already widely studied across a number of disciplines, by exploring the myriad linguistic and discursive perspectives and approaches at play in the climate change debate as represented in a variety of genres. The book focuses on key linguistic themes, including linguistic polyphony, lexical choices, metaphors, narration, and framing, and uses examples from diverse forms of media, including scientific documents, policy reports, op-eds, and blogs, to shed light on how information and knowledge on climate change can be represented, disseminated, and interpreted and in turn, how they can inform further discussion and debate. Featuring contributions from a global team of researchers and drawing on a broad array of linguistic approaches, this collection offers an extensive overview of the role of language in the climate change debate for graduate students, researchers, and scholars in applied linguistics, environmental communication, discourse analysis, political science, climatology, and media studies.

This collection brings together for the first time in a single volume many of the major figures in contemporary discourse studies. Each chapter is an original contribution which has been specifically commissioned for this book, and together they document the wide range of concerns and techniques which characterise the discipline at the turn of the century. Discourse and Social Life is concerned with a variety of different types of data - talk, text and interaction - and covers research sites which range from the home setting through the health care setting and the courtroom to the public sphere. The book not only provides a critical, historical overview of different traditions of discourse analysis, but also projects to some extent the possible developments of this field of study, as other allied disciplines (Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Rhetoric and Communication Studies) are taking a discursive turn. Readers are invited to draw parallels between these different approaches to studying discourse in its social context. The contributors are- Sally Candlin, Malcolm Coulthard, Justine Coupland, Nikolas Coupland, Norman Fairclough, Ruqaiya Hasan, Robert Kaplan, Geoff Leech, Yon Maley, Greg Myers, Celia Roberts, Srikant Sarangi, Ron Scollon, Theo van Leeuwen, Henry Widdowson and Ruth Wodak.

This collection brings together innovative research from socially-oriented applied linguists working in sports. Drawing on contemporary approaches to applied linguistics, this book provides readers with in-depth analyses of examples of language-in-use in the context of sport, and interprets them through the lens of larger issues within sport culture and practice. With contributions from an international group of scholars, this an essential reference for scholars and researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, sport communication, sport management, journalism and media studies.

First published in 1986, this book focuses on Anaphoric relations in the English and French languages, a phenomenon that involves a complex interaction between grammar and discourse. Studies of anaphora taking a largely 'textual' approach to the subject have tended to underestimate the effect upon its formation of referential and discourse factors, while studies framed within a psycholinguistic and computational perspective have been inclined to minimise the importance of the purely linguistic features connected with anaphora. This volume places the study of anaphora upon a firmer foundation by examining both its nature and functions in discourse, by pinpointing the range of factors relevant to its operation in the two languages under study, and by attempting to relate the textual and interactional perspectives within a more comprehensive framework.

First published in 1991, this book examines the communicative properties of 'cleft' and 'pseudo-cleft' constructions in contemporary English. The book argues that these properties cannot be ignored in any attempt to provide an adequate grammatical description of the constructions. Furthermore, they provide a source of explanations for the patterns of stylistic variation displayed by clefts and pseudo-clefts. The book reports findings from a corpus-based study of clefts and pseudo-clefts in modern British English.

Genre theory has focused primarily on the analysis of generic constructs, with increasing attention to and emphasis on the contexts in which such genres are produced, interpreted, and used to achieve objectives, often giving the impression as if producing genres is an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. The result of this focus is that there has been very little attention paid to the ultimate outcomes of these genre-based discursive activities, which are more appropriately viewed as academic, institutional, organizational, and professional actions and practices, which are invariably non-discursive, though often achieved through discursive means. It was this objective in mind that the book develops an approach to a more critical and deeper understanding of interdiscursive professional voices and actions. Critical Genre Analysis as a theory of discursive performance is thus an attempt to be as objective as possible, rigorous in analytical endeavour, using a multiperspective and multidimensional methodological framework taking into account interdiscursive aspects of genre construction to make it increasingly explanatory to demystify discursive performance in a range of professional contexts.

This book contributes to the analysis of film from a multimodal and textual perspective by extending formal semantics into the realm of multimodal discourse analysis. It accounts for both the inferential as well as intersemiotic meaning making processes in filmic discourse and therefore addresses one of the main questions that have been asked within film theory and multimodal analysis: How do we understand film and multimodal texts? The book offers an analytical answer to this question by providing a systematic tool for the description of this comprehension process. It aims to advance knowledge of the various resources in filmic texts, the ways the resources work together in constructing meaning and the ways people understand this meaning construction. This new approach to film interpretation is thus able to remodel and improve the classical paradigm of film text analysis.

This volume serves as an in-depth investigation of the diversity of means and practices that constitute (dis)identification and identity construction in social media. Given the increasing prevalence of social media in everyday life and the subsequent growing diversity in the types of participants and forms of participation, the book makes the case for a rigorous analysis of social media discourses and digital literacy practices to demonstrate the range of semiotic resources used in online communication that form the foundation of (dis)identification processes. Divided into two major sections, delineating between the (dis)identification of the self across various social categories and the (dis)identification of the self in relation to the "other", the book employs a discourse-ethnographic approach to highlight the value of this type of theoretical framework in providing nuanced descriptions of identity construction in social media and illuminating their larger, long-term societal and cultural implications. This volume is a key resource for researchers, and students in sociolinguistics, discourse studies, computer-mediated communication, and cultural studies.

Professor Michael Billig is one of the most significant living figures in social psychology. His work spans thirty-five years, and has at times challenged conventional social scientific thinking on a range of key topics. Billig has influenced a wide range of fields including intergroup conflict, social attitudes and ideology, rhetoric, racism, nationalism, humour, psychoanalysis, and popular culture, but most significantly, his writing has not only influenced social psychologists, but is widely recognised by linguistics, sociologists, historians and cultural theorists. This book brings together expert accounts of Billig's ideas on a wide range of issues in a single text. Each of the contributors explains the importance of Billig's work for a specific area detailing its application to a particular social psychological problematic. In doing so, the authors also demonstrate the relevance of Billig's work to emerging concerns in twenty-first century social science, including conspiracy accounting, moral exclusion, discursive psychology and European identity. Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Psychology will be key reading for academics and researchers working in sociology, cultural studies, social psychology, communication and media studies and linguistics.

Drawing on a large corpus of narratives recorded at a church shelter for abused domestic helpers in Hong Kong, this monograph explores how the women discursively construct themselves in sharing sessions with other helpers. They see themselves as 'helpers' who have come to Hong Kong to help their families, to help the people in the city, and to serve God. A wide variety of competing identities are constructed in the narratives: submissive helper, sacrificial mother, daughter and wife, and powerless traumatised victim, but also resourceful indignant migrant women who, through sharing and peer support, become empowered to fight against abusive employers. This book provides a detailed discourse analysis of the women's narratives, but it also explores larger issues such as global migration, exploitation, language and power, abuse and the psychology of evil, intergroup communication, and peer support and empowerment.

Advertising and Multilingual Repertoires explores advertising from the perspective of multilingual audiences. Santello introduces the key linguistic processes involved in advertising discourse, and analyses the relationship between the linguistic repertoires of audiences and language use in advertising. This book: Showcases the most recent advancements in linguistic research as applied to the study of advertising and multilingualism, adopting an approach that focuses on linguistic resources; Examines how advertisements make use of language(s), including Italian and the use of English as a foreign language, in order to attract attention and persuade their audience; Familiarises readers with response mechanisms that bilinguals and multilinguals experience when exposed to advertising in different languages; Demonstrates both qualitative and quantitative approaches to researching the intersections between language and marketing. Advertising and Multilingual Repertoires is key reading for postgraduate students and researchers in the field of language and advertising.

It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the ways that the centrality of new media and technologies - from the global networking of information systems and social media to new possibilities for altering human genetics - seem to make obsolete our traditional ways of thinking about ethics and persuasive communication inherited from earlier humanist paradigms. This book argues that rather than devoting our critical energies towards critiquing humanist touchstones, we should instead examine the ways in which media and technologies have always worked as crucial cultural forces in shaping ethics and rhetoric. Pruchnic combines this historical itinerary with critical interrogations of diverse cultural and technological sites - the logic of video games and artificial intelligence, the ethics of life extension in contemporary medicine, the transition to computer-automated trading in world stock markets, the state of critical theory in the contemporary humanities - along with innovative analyses of the works of such figures as the Greek Sophists, Kenneth Burke, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gilles Deleuze. This book argues that our best strategies for crafting persuasive communication and producing ethical relations between individuals will be those that creatively replicate and appropriate, rather than resist, the logics of dominant forms of media and technology.

The contributors of this text, first published in 1988, provide a dynamic view of the social functioning of texts, taking account of linguistic, literary and cultural elements. They bring together innovative perspectives on literary analysis and theory, on pragmatics and discourse analysis, as well as on text linguistics and reception theory. Various text types are examined, and the editor introduces each chapter in order to draw them all together to make a fascinating and cohesive whole.

Contemporary corpus linguists use a wide variety of methods to study discourse patterns. This volume provides a systematic comparison of various methodological approaches in corpus linguistics through a series of parallel empirical studies that use a single corpus dataset to answer the same overarching research question. Ten contributing experts each use a different method to address the same broadly framed research question: In what ways does language use in online Q+A forum responses differ across four world English varieties (India, Philippines, United Kingdom, and United States)? Contributions will be based on analysis of the same 400,000 word corpus from online Q+A forums, and contributors employ methodologies including corpus-based discourse analysis, audience perceptions, Multi-Dimensional analysis, pragmatic analysis, and keyword analysis. In their introductory and concluding chapters, the volume editors compare and contrast the findings from each method and assess the degree to which 'triangulating' multiple approaches may provide a more nuanced understanding of a research question, with the aim of identifying a set of complementary approaches which could arguably take into account analytical blind spots. Baker and Egbert also consider the importance of issues such as researcher subjectivity, type of annotation, the limitations and affordances of different corpus tools, the relative strengths of qualitative and quantitative approaches, and the value of considering data or information beyond the corpus. Rather than attempting to find the 'best' approach, the focus of the volume is on how different corpus linguistic methodologies may complement one another, and raises suggestions for further methodological studies which use triangulation to enrich corpus-related research.

Understanding how rhetoric, and environmental rhetoric in particular, informs and is informed by local and global ecologies contributes to our conversations about sustainability and resilience - the preservation and conservation of the earth and the future of human society. This book explores some of the complex relationships, collaborations, compromises, and contradictions between human endeavor and situated discourses, identities and landscapes, social justice and natural resources, movement and geographies, unpacking and grappling with the complexities of rhetoric of presence. Making a significant contribution to exploring the complex discursive constructions of environmental rhetorics and place-based rhetorics, this collection considers discourses, actions, and adaptations concerning environmental regulations and development, sustainability, exploitation, and conservation of energy resources. Essays visit arguments on cultural values, social justice, environmental advocacy, and identity as political constructions of rhetorical place and space. Rural and urban case studies contribute to discussions of the ethics and identities of environment, and the rhetorics of environmental cartography and glocalization. Contributors represent a range of specialization across a variety of scholarly research in such fields as communication studies, rhetorical theory, social/cultural geography, technical/professional communication, cartography, anthropology, linguistics, comparative literature/ecocriticism, literacy studies, digital rhetoric/media studies, and discourse analysis. Thus, this book goes beyond the assumption that rhetorics are situated, and challenges us to consider not only how and why they are situated, but what we mean when we theorize notions of situated, place-based rhetorics.