This book explores discourse mainly through corpus linguistics methods. Indeed, Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies has become a widely used approach for the critical (or non-critical) analysis of discourses in recent times. The book focuses on the analysis of different kinds of discourse, but most particularly on those which attempt to unveil social attitudes and values. Although a corpus methodology is deemed crucial in all research found here, it should not be inferred that a single, uniform technique is applied, but a wide variety of them, often shaped by the software which has been used. Also, more than one (qualitative or quantitative) methodology or drawing from various relevant sources is often called for in the critical analysis of discourses.

This book explores the use of discourse markers - lexical items where drawing a distinction between propositional and non-propositional, syntactically-semantically integrated and discourse-pragmatic uses is especially relevant. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, descriptive and critical (CDA) perspectives, and manual annotation and automatized analyses, the author argues that Discourse Markers (DMs) cannot be effectively studied in isolation, but must instead be contextualised with reference to other discourse-pragmatic devices and their language and genre backgrounds. This book will be of interest to students and academics working in the fields of DM research and critical discourse studies, and will also appeal to scholars working in areas such as genre studies, second language acquisition (SLA), literary analysis, contemporary cinematography, Tolkien scholarship, and Bible studies.

In Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars, Rachel E. Dubrofsky explores the idea that popular media implicitly portrays whiteness as credible, trustworthy, familiar, and honest, and that this portrayal is normalized and ubiquitous. Whether on television, film, social media, or in the news, white people are constructed as believable and unrehearsed, from the way they talk to how they look and act. Dubrofsky argues that this way of making white people appear authentic is a strategy of whiteness, requiring attentiveness to the context of white supremacy in which the presentations unfold. The volume details how ideas about what is natural, good, and wholesome are reified in media, showing how these values are implicitly racialized. Additionally, the project details how white women are presented as particularly authentic when they seem to lose agency by expressing affect through emotional and bodily displays. The chapters examine a range of popular media-newspaper articles about Donald J. Trump, a selfie taken at Auschwitz, music videos by Miley Cyrus, the television series UnREAL, the infamous video of Amy Cooper calling the police on an innocent Black man, and the documentary Miss Americana-pinpointing patterns that cut across media to explore the implications for the larger culture in which they exist. At its heart, the book asks: Who gets to be authentic? And what are the implications?

Discourse in English Language Education introduces students to the major concepts and questions in Discourse Studies and their applications to language education. Each chapter draws on key research to examine critically a particular approach in the field, providing a review of important literature, examples to illustrate the principal issues concerned and an outline of the implications for their application to pedagogy. Features include: coverage of a broad range of approaches in the field, including Systemic Functional Linguistics and Register, Speech Acts, the Cooperative Principle and Politeness, Conversation Analysis, Genre Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics analysis of a wide range of discourse examples that include casual conversation, newspapers, fiction, radio, classrooms, blogs and real-life learner texts a selection of illustrations and tables carefully chosen to enhance students' understanding of different concepts and approaches stimulating discussion questions at the end of each chapter, specially designed to foster critical thinking, reflection and engagement with the topics covered. Engaging, accessible and comprehensive, Discourse in English Language Education richly demonstrates how Discourse Studies can inform the teaching of English and other languages, both as a foreign language and in the mother tongue. It will be essential reading for upper undergraduates and postgraduates with interests in Applied Linguistics, TESOL and Language Education.

This volume focuses on the post-observation feedback conference, a common feature of teacher education programs, and highlights the importance of such talk in the development and evaluation of teachers and other professionals. The book adopts a linguistic ethnographic approach, which provides a framework for examining the contextual nature of the talk and how it is embedded within wider social contexts and structures, such as evaluation regimes. Drawing on data from a range of settings, including pre-service teacher education, medical education, and teacher appraisal programs, Copland and Donaghue examine the feedback conference from a range of perspectives, including face, identity and genre, and show how a nuanced understanding of discussions can support teacher trainers, supervisors and observers to provide appropriate and useful feedback. A concluding chapter brings together brief vignettes from researchers active in the field to point to future directions for further study. This book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in discourse analysis, language education, linguistic anthropology, and professional communication, as well as pre- and in-service teachers.

This book explores editorial and advertising discourses related to cosmetic procedures and beauty products and services in UK lifestyle magazines, offering a holistic perspective on the normalisation of cosmetic procedures and the societal context in which particular perceptions have flourished. The volume examines the societal climate that contributed to cultural perceptions of the body as object and project, and constructions of masculinities and femininities as context for developments in lifestyle magazines' content on beauty and cosmetic procedures. Integrating approaches from Critical Discourse Analysis, Thematic Analysis, and Content Analysis, Hermans explores the varying ways in which cosmetic procedures and other beauty products are marketed to different audiences and examines phenomena such as the problem/solution rhetoric, and developments in beauty advertising discourse specifically targeted at men. The book also investigates the continuum view of beauty products and cosmetic procedures, and examines the implications of these blurred boundaries for the regulation of the cosmetic surgery industry. This innovative contribution to research on the representation of cosmetic procedures and beauty products in the media will be of interest to scholars researching at the intersection of language, gender, individualised body projects, and sexuality.

This book provides an overview of a range of quantitative methods, presenting a thorough analytical toolbox which will be of practical use to researchers across the social sciences as they face the challenges raised by new technology-driven language practices. The book is driven by a reflexive mind-set which views quantifying methods as complementary rather than in opposition to qualitative methods, and the chapters analyse a multitude of different intra- and extra-textual context levels essential for the understanding of how meaning is (re-)constructed in society. Uniting contributions from a range of national and disciplinary traditions, the chapters in this volume bring together state-of-the-art research from British, Canadian, French, German and Swiss authors representing the fields of Political Science, Sociology, Linguistics, Computer Science and Statistics. It will be of particular interest to discourse analysts, but also to other scholars working in the digital humanities and with big data of any kind.

Guides the reader through the process of sourcing a relevant oral history archive for linguistic analysis, constructing a representative corpus out of this archive and analysing this using corpus tools Shows how corpus linguistics can illuminate themes worthy of investigation that may otherwise remain hidden Shows what readers can gain from blending linguistic tools and competencies with oral history data

Reported speech is a universal form across human languages. However, previous studies have tended to be limited because they mostly emphasize on the form and authenticity of reported speech, while its discourse and pragmatic functions have largely been ignored. Meanwhile, the studies mainly focus on English, with a comparative perspective with other languages largely missing. Acknowledging these limitations, this book analyzes the textual and pragmatic functions of reported speech in Chinese and English. The authors build a corpus comprising of twelve Chinese and English newspapers, including China Daily and The New York Times. They examine the classification and distribution of reported speech, the form and function in different news genres and contexts, and the socio-pragmatic interpretation of reported speech in news and other issues. This title can enrich comparative linguistic research, verify the feasibility of combining critical linguistics and corpus technology, and help improve the production and understanding of news reports. Students and scholars of critical discourse analysis, comparative linguistics, corpus linguistics, as well as communication studies will find this to be an essential guide.

This book questions gendered readings of violence by analyzing how this paradigm has become normalized in Italy since the feminist term 'femminicidio', or 'femicide', entered the mainstream media during the 2013 general election. It also sheds light on discourses of contestation on the part of family activists, men's rights campaigners and divorced fathers' groups. Two counter-discourses emerge. The first is what the author terms an 'ideology narrative', for which discourses built around the conceptual category of 'gender' normalize simplistic representations of relationships between men and women. The second is a 'female violence discourse', which sheds light on under-represented aggressor-victim relations and modifies dominant representations of femininity and masculinity. The author argues that integrating these two discourses into public debates helps to reappropriate the complexity and biological dimensions of (violent) relationships between men and women, often overshadowed by gender/feminist perspectives. In this way, she concludes, we can address neglected social issues that contribute to violence beyond gender. This thought-provoking book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, critical discourse studies and gender.

This innovative book examines the discourse of reality television, and the elasticity of language in the popular talent show The Voice from a cross-cultural perspective. Analysing how and why elastic language is used in persuasion and comforting, a comparison between Chinese and English is made, and the authors highlight the special role that elastic language plays in effective interactions and strategic communication. Through the lens of the language variance of two of the world's most commonly spoken languages, the insights and resources provided by this book are expected to advance knowledge in the fields of contrastive pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, and inform strategies in bridging different cultures. This study highlights the need to give the elastic use of language the attention it deserves, and reveals how language is non-discrete and strategically stretchable. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students engaged in elastic/vague language studies, cross-cultural pragmatics, media linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs is an insightful account of the rhetorical and psychological habits we exhibit when we must explain the reasons others act. The assumption that we can know what motivates another person is fed by more hope than certainty, and yet it is evidence of a very human impulse. Beginning with a clear template for defining various tiers of motives-talk, this innovative and accessible study moves through a series of chapters exploring the unique demands imposed by different circumstances. These sections cut a wide swath of analysis across a diverse range of human actors including: conspiracy theorists who find the designs of coordinated agents behind random events, theater performers creating "backstories" for their characters, journalists grasping to name the motives of newsmakers, prosecutors who must establish another's intent in order to prove a criminal act, and the devout who grapple with what divine intervention can mean in a cruel world. Readers will recognize themselves in these pages, gaining an appreciation for the rhetorical analysis of human behavior.

Using the socio-political discourse of Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering Pan-Africanist and Ghana's independence leader, Nartey investigates the notion of political myth-making in a context underexplored in the literature. He examines Nkrumah's construction of a myth described in the book as the Unite or Perish myth (i.e., the idea of a 'United States of Africa' being a prerequisite for the survival of Africa in the post-independence period), exploring the rhetorical resources he deployed, categorizing and analyzing key tropes and metaphors, and setting out the myth's basic components. This book focuses on three areas: an investigation of political myth-making as a social and discursive practice in order to identify particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of mythic discourse; the unpacking of the discursive manifestation, representation, features, and functions of political mythic themes; and finally to propose and implement an integrated discourse analytical framework to account for the complexities of mythic discourse and political narratives in general. It analyzes how Nkrumah deployed his discourse to concurrently construct heroes and villains, protagonists and antagonists, as part of an ideological mechanism aimed at galvanizing support for and instigating action on the part of the masses towards his lifelong African dream. Nartey's book steps out from the conventional domain of critical discourse studies to focus on myth as a form of populist performance. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and academics in (critical) discourse studies, rhetorical discourse analysis, African and Diaspora studies, and African history, as well as non-academics such as journalists, political commentators, and people who consider themselves to be Nkrumaists and Pan-Africanists.

E explores, using textual (words) and visual (image) data from the corporate newsletters of two prominent Asian universities, how particular discourses and their associated discursive representations of neoliberal logic and subjectivity occur in higher education. In particular, she looks at the expression of both institutional priorities and state imperatives that lend themselves to a complementarity built upon two contradictory perspectives: individualism and communitarianism. She argues that the ever-increasing demand for, and utility of higher education in neoliberal society means that it no longer functions merely to provide knowledge and skills, but has implications for society, the individual and the state with regard to their ways of thinking, doing and being. Contributing to a growing corpus of literature on how higher education around the world is being shaped by neoliberal policies, E's research is based on work done in the city-state of Singapore, a less-well represented context in current literature. While both higher education institutions possess significantly different institutional identities and backgrounds, the alignment of their varied representations of neoliberal logic and subjectivity with state-sanctioned imperatives that indirectly impose demands and constraints shows how neoliberalism as ideology adapts to the socio-political, socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions that make up the Singapore context. The discursive representations of context-dependent neoliberal logics and subjectivity are discussed in terms of their ideological implications, focusing primarily on the complementarity between seemingly contradictory ideological positions. E's work uses an innovative framework that integrates aspects of Discourse Theory with Critical Discourse Analysis and demonstrates the use of this framework through empirical linguistic and image analysis. Appealing to academics and graduate students in linguistics, especially those with an interest in critical multimodal discourse analysis, audiences from the domains of higher education research, critical geography, sociology and political science will also find this a useful book.

Communicative competence is an essential language skill, the ability to adjust language use according to specific contexts and to employ knowledge and strategies for successful communication. This unique text offers a multidisciplinary, critical, state-of-the-art research overview for this skill in second language learners. Expert contributors from around the world lay out the history of the field, then explore a variety of theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and empirical findings, and authoritatively set the agenda for future work. With a variety of helpful features like discussion questions, recommended further reading, and suggestions for practice, this book will be an invaluable resource to students and researchers of applied linguistics, education, psychology, and beyond.

E-mail is a common medium of communication in academic settings, and its informal nature has given rise to unique discourse strategies that can advantageously combine the norms of oral and written language. Unfortunately, e-mail is also a potential source of misunderstanding. Some teachers, annoyed by the informalities that characterize this discourse context, interpret students' messages as demanding, impolite, or unprofessional. For many students, however, e-mail is outdated, and some use it only in the university context, opting to text, facebook, or tweet their family and friends. This book provides a detailed analysis of 1,403 e-mail messages sent by 338 university students to a professor of Spanish and linguistics.This research has several goals: to analyze features of students' messages that reveal their beliefs about the norms for student-teacher e-mail exchanges; to explore the effective incorporation of the conventions of both oral and written language in this particular discourse context; to identify patterns or rhetorical strategies used by students in e-mail to perform certain pragmatic functions, such as making a request, offering an excuse, expressing gratitude, apologizing and complaining; and, to identify students' choice of language for e-mails to their teacher and the pragmatic functions for which they chose to write in their first or second languages. Each of the chapters specifically addresses several pedagogical implications and identifies areas for additional investigation.

What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms, and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that this book explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation, and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how "modernity" has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading rooms, and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class, or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies.

First published in 1959, this book aims to provide a practical introduction to semantics, relating the critical study of language to real-life situation, with a wealth of anecdotes and numerous illustrations drawn from everyday personal predicaments. This book provides much information and much material for profitable discussion, helping to make accessible what can be a highly academic subject comprehensible only to a minority. This book provides a highly valuable foundation for students of linguistics and will provide preparation for further study.

This concise volume offers an accessible introduction to state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) language models, providing a platform for their use in textual interpretation across the humanities and social sciences. The book outlines the affordances of new technologies for textual analysis, which has historically employed established approaches within the humanities. Neuman, Danesi, and Vilenchik argue that these different forms of analysis are indeed complementary, demonstrating the ways in which AI-based perspectives echo similar theoretical and methodological currents in traditional approaches while also offering new directions for research. The volume showcases examples from a wide range of texts, including novels, television shows, and films to illustrate the ways in which the latest AI technologies can be used for "dialoguing" with textual characters and examining textual meaning coherence. Illuminating the potential of AI language models to both enhance and extend research on the interpretation of texts, this book will appeal to scholars interested in cognitive approaches to the humanities in such fields as literary studies, discourse analysis, media studies, film studies, psychology, and artificial intelligence.

This book examines how foreign language speakers establish and maintain social and transactional relationships in their target language, and how pedagogic intervention can help learners implement practices that will allow them to participate and react in both socially acceptable and individualistically empowering ways. Arguing that 'doing' foreign-language politeness and culture does not simply involve the indiscriminate and uncritical adoption and implementation of target-language patterns and practices, the author advocates instead for active, judicious and even critical social action. As such, the book presents a dynamic and vibrant dimension to target language politeness and cultural practices, demonstrating that raising learners' critical language awareness in identifying productive communicative resources and assets can lead to successful interpersonal and transactional communication. Building on this notion of a 'positive' pedagogy, Halliday's model of ideational, interpersonal and textual is utilised as a framework for exploring how foreign language users can approach target language politeness in terms of prosocial, interpersonal and contested politeness, with reference to a study of Mexican speakers of English as a foreign language. Heightening awareness of foreign language politeness patterns and practices, as well as presenting knowledge and resources for overcoming challenges and accentuating benefits of a nuanced learning scheme for politeness in foreign language, this book will appeal to language educators, researchers and bilingual speakers. It will also benefit those working across pragmatics, sociolinguistics, TESOL, cultural studies.

This book presents unique insights into the development of L2 interactional competence through the lens of complaining, demonstrating how closer study of complaining as a social activity can enhance our understanding of certain aspects of language learning with implications for future L2 research. Employs a multimodal, longitudinal conversation analytic (CA) approach in its analysis of data from video-recorded interactions of several elementary and advanced L2 speakers of French as they build their interactional competence, understood as the ability to accomplish social actions and activities in the L2 in context-dependent and recipient-designed ways Calls attention to three key dimensions of complaining in these conversations-its structural organization; the interactional resources people use when they complain; and how speakers' shared interactional histories and changing social relationships affect complaint practices

The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics is the first comprehensive exploration into the field of ecolinguistics, also known as language ecology. Organized into three sections that treat the different topic areas of ecolinguistics, the Handbook begins with chapters on language diversity, language minorities and language endangerment, with authors providing insight into the link between the loss of languages and the loss of species. It continues with an overview of the role of language and discourse in describing, concealing, and helping to solve environmental problems. With discussions on new orientations and topics for further exploration in the field, chapters in the last section show ecolinguistics as a pacesetter into a new scientific age. This Handbook is an excellent resource for students and researchers interested in language and the environment, language contact, and beyond.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue is the first comprehensive overview of the emerging and rapidly growing sub-discipline in linguistics, Language and Dialogue. Edited by one of the top scholars in the field, Edda Weigand, and comprising contributions written by a variety of likewise influential figures, the handbook aims to describe the history of modern linguistics as reasoned progress leading from de Saussure and the simplicity of artificial terms to the complexity of human action and behaviour, which is based on the integration of human abilities such as speaking, thinking, perceiving, and having emotions. The book is divided into three sections: the first focuses on the history of modern linguistics and related disciplines; the second part focuses on the core issues and open debates in the field of Language and Dialogue and introduces the arguments pro and contra certain positions; and the third section focuses on the three components that fundamentally affect language use: human nature, institutions, and culture. This handbook is the ideal resource for those interested in the relationship between Language and Dialogue, and will be of use to students and researchers in Linguistics and related fields such as Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, and Communication.

This book presents securitization as a communication issue, and addresses security framing as a question of identity, a relevant and timely topic, especially considering the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 This book combines media framing with the theory of securitization to explain how the discourse of security informs media content, and what happens to policy and public understanding when it does It brings together distinct fields within communication studies to reflect on the pressing issue of securitization It will be a key resource for scholars and students working in the fields of mass communication, policy studies, critical linguistics, and international relations, as well as risk and crisis communication

Bringing together trust research, rhetoric, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this book formulates an analytical program for conceptualizing and defining trustworthiness as an empirical research object in social interaction. Revisiting Trustworthiness in Social Interaction examines trustworthiness as a relational and dynamic concept. It reviews sociological and rhetorical approaches to the study of trustworthiness and respecifies it as an interactional phenomenon displayed, tested and negotiated by participants in social interaction. It identifies four participant orientations of trustworthiness that may be foregrounded in peoples' dynamic identity projects, and it defines the phenomena 'character-bound displays' and 'sequential negotiation of character', both indicative of participants' orientation to trustworthiness. In this way, the book turns the theoretical concept of trustworthiness into an empirical object of interaction analysis, pointing to a vast number of interactional indicators, which allow interaction analysts to explore if and how interactants orient to trustworthiness in an encounter. Exemplary cases from both mundane and institutional encounters are analyzed using ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis showing how trustworthiness is done, challenges, achived, negotiated and lost in interaction. The intended audiences are scholars of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, rhetoric and the social sciences, especially communication, organizational and leadership studies, and their students.