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

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.

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.

This book offers insight into the use of empirical diffusionist models for analysis of cross-cultural and cross-national communication, translation and adaptation of the United Nation's (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The book looks at three social analytical instruments of particular utility for the cross-national study of the translation and diffusion of global sustainable development discourses in East Asia (China and Japan). It explains the underlying hypothesis that, in the transmission and adaptation of global SDGs in different national contexts, three large groups of social actors encompassing sources of information, mediating actors and socio-industrial end-users form, shape and contribute to the complex, latent networks of social engagement. It illuminates how the distribution within these networks largely determines the level and breadth of the diffusion of global SDGs and their associated environmentalist norms. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in sustainable growth and development, as well as global environmental politics.

Demonstratives and Grammaticalization offers an in-depth analysis of the demonstrative system in Turkish. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis dealing with both the synchronic variations in Turkish demonstratives and their grammatical changes. It sheds light on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the demonstratives, systematically describes the various usages of these forms, and provides a unified explanation for the various accounts of their distribution. While the focus is on Turkish, this analysis contributes to our understanding of how a demonstrative system operates in a language with a three-way distinction.

This book demonstrates the importance of understanding how political rhetoric, financial reporting and media coverage of austerity in transnational contexts is significant to the communicative, social and economic environments in which we live. It considers how aspects of moral storytelling, language, representation and ideology operate through societies in financial crisis and through governments that impose austerity programmes on public spending. Whilst many of the debates covered here are concerned with UK economic policy and British social contexts, the contributions also consider examples from other countries that reflect similar concerns on the ideological operations of austerity and financial discourse. The multiple discursive contexts of austerity demonstrate the breadth of social concerns and conflicts that have developed in societies and institutions following the global economic crisis of 2008. Through its interdisciplinary focus on this topic, this book provides an important contribution across multiple subject areas, with shared interests in critical and analytical approaches to discourse, power and language in social contexts reflecting the healthy collaborative scope of critical discourse studies as a field of research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.

First published in 1984, Face Value confronts the pervasive power of beauty through art and literature, as well as interviews with men and women with varying perspectives on the subject. The topics covered range widely: the history of beauty from the Greeks to the present; the pathology of beauty: how women have been willing to harm themselves, mentally and physically, to achieve 'beauty'; the language we use to speak of beauty, and its implications; our attitudes towards beauty, as examined by psychologists; beauty and ethnic identity; men and beauty. The authors present in fact a redefinition of beauty, enabling both women and men to enjoy it in themselves and in others, while discarding the sex-role stereotypes that have governed the definition of beauty in the past. With a new preface that explores the gaps created by time in the book's discourse, this book will be of interest to students of linguistics, gender studies, women's studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology.

In this timely study, Ofer Feldman, Sonja Zmerli, and their team of experts shed light on the multiple ways communication affects political behavior and attitudes. Written for students and scholars alike, The Psychology of Political Communicators uses examples from the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to examine the nature, characteristics, content, and reception of communication in three major areas of discourse: The style and nature of language used by political actors in the national and international arenas The discourse used in nationalist populist movements and during negative campaigns The rhetoric of the media as it tries to frame politics, political events, and political actors Collectively, the essays form a solid foundation on which to understand the different roles language plays in the conduct of politics, the way in which these roles are performed in various situations in different societies and cultures, and the political outcomes of verbal behavior. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of political psychology and communication studies.

In this timely study, Ofer Feldman, Sonja Zmerli, and their team of experts shed light on the multiple ways communication affects political behavior and attitudes. Written for students and scholars alike, The Psychology of Political Communicators uses examples from the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to examine the nature, characteristics, content, and reception of communication in three major areas of discourse: The style and nature of language used by political actors in the national and international arenas The discourse used in nationalist populist movements and during negative campaigns The rhetoric of the media as it tries to frame politics, political events, and political actors Collectively, the essays form a solid foundation on which to understand the different roles language plays in the conduct of politics, the way in which these roles are performed in various situations in different societies and cultures, and the political outcomes of verbal behavior. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of political psychology and communication studies.

This book presents a unique perspective into the investigation and analysis of public discourses, such as those of the environment, politics, and social media, springing from issues of key relevance to contemporary society, including the War on Terror, the 'Arab Spring', and the climate-change debate. Employing a qualitative approach, and drawing on data which comprises both written and spoken discourses, including policy documents, political speeches, press conferences, blog entries, informational leaflets, and corporate reports, the book puts forward a unique theoretical framework, that of the Discourse of Illusion. The research draws on discourse analysis, in order to develop and implement a multi-perspective framework that allows a closer look at the intentions of the producer/actor of various discourses, power struggles within social domains, in addition to the socio-political and historical contexts which influence the individual repositories of experience that create multiple, often contesting, arguments on controversial issues, consequently giving rise to discursive illusions. Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse: Theory and practice intensively explores the discourse of illusion within multifarious dimensions of contemporary public discourses, such as: * Political Voices in Terrorism * Activist Voices in New Media * Corporate Voices in Climate Change This book will particularly appeal to researchers working within the field of discourse analysis, and more generally for students of postgraduate research and specialists in the field of language, linguistics, and media. The book can also be used as a guide for non-specialists in better understanding the complexities of public discourses, and how they shape society's perceptions of some key social and political issues.

Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies gathers major works that have contributed to the recent rhetorical reconceptualization of genre. A lively and complex field developed over the past 30 years, Rhetorical Genre Studies is central to many current research and teaching agendas. This collection, which is organized both thematically and chronologically, explores genre research across a range of disciplinary interests but with a specific focus on rhetoric and composition. With introductions by the co-editors to frame and extend each section, this volume helps readers understand and contextualize both the foundations of the field and the central themes and insights that have emerged. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars working on topics related to composition, rhetoric, professional and technical writing, and applied linguistics.

The tie that binds all Americans, regardless of their demographic background, is faith in the American system of government. This faith manifests as a form of civil, or secular, religion with its own core documents, creeds, oaths, ceremonies, and even individuals. In The Rhetoric of American Civil Religion: Symbols, Sinners, and Saints, contributors seek to examine some of those core elements of American faith by exploring the proverbial saints, sinners and dominant symbols of the American system.

This edited book revisits the concept of social 'activities' from an interactional perspective, examining how verbal, vocal, visual-spatial and material resources are deployed by participants for meaning-making in social encounters. The eleven original chapters within this volume analyse activities based on video recordings of naturalistic and naturally occurring social encounters from face-to-face and mediated settings in Chinese, Dutch, English, French, and German. Informed primarily by the methodological approaches of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, the authors study embodiment in space and time in three distinct types of situations: objects in space, complex participation frameworks, and affiliation and alignment. Moreover, the book includes a theoretical and methodological discussion of how activities are constituted and visibly embodied in interaction. It will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology and linguistics in general, and face-to-face and mediated interaction in particular.

Analysing political discourse in the British press during a time of crisis and austerity, this book examines how the concept of the welfare state has been constructed between 2008 and 2015. At a time when the financial crisis and government policies have put the welfare state under increased pressure, a corpus from four British newspapers from across the political spectrum - the Guardian, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, and Daily Telegraph - is brought together to investigate the political debate on its evaluation and the ambiguity about its exact definition. Combining two theoretical approaches, Malgorzata Paprota outlines the figurative models and scenarios relevant to this element of the political system. The discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis is used to establish what the welfare state is, tracing the boundaries of the concept and which elements of political reality are explicitly associated with it. Conceptual metaphor theory is then used to explore the figurative conceptualisations of the welfare state. Together, this book shows the discursive construction, and shifting boundaries and metaphors, of the welfare state by the British press and its use in current political debates.

World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory. The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants. The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.

This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. These markers serve to indicate the organization of the discourse, the speaker's relationship with the interlocutor, and the speaker's stance with regard to the information expressed. Their relevance is in assisting interpretation, despite the fact that they have little or no propositional content. In this book, distinguished scholars from different theoretical backgrounds analyse the different classes of discourse and pragmatic markers found in Latin and the Romance languages and explore both their diachronic development and their synchronic properties. Following an introduction and overview of the development of these markers, the book is divided into two parts: the first part investigates pragmatic markers developed from verbs, such as Latin quaeso, Romanian ma rog, and Spanish o sea; the second looks at adverbs as discourse markers, such as French deja and Italian gia, Romanian atunci and Portuguese alias. Chapters address a variety of theoretical issues such as the cyclic nature of functional developments, the nature of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, semantic change, and the emergence of new pragmatic values. The arguments presented also have consequences for any analysis of the interfaces between grammar, discourse, and interaction.

What do different concepts like true lie, bad luck, honest thief, old news, spacetime, glocalization, symplexity, sustainable development, constant change, soft law, substantive due process, pure law, bureaucratic efficiency and global justice have in common? What connections do they share with innumerable paradoxes, like the ones of happiness, time, globalization, sex, and of free will and fate? Law in the Time of Oxymora provides answers to these conundrums by critically comparing the apparent rise in recent years of the use of rhetorical figures called "essentially oxymoronic concepts" (i.e. oxymoron, enantiosis and paradoxes) in the areas of art, science and law. Albeit to varying degrees, these concepts share the quality of giving expression to apparent contradictions. Through this quality, they also challenge the scientific paradigm rooted in the dualistic thinking and binary logic that is traditionally used in the West, as opposed to the East, where a paradoxical mode of thinking and fuzzy logic is said to have been cultivated. Following a review of oxymora and paradoxes in art and various scientific writings, hundreds of "hard cases" featuring oxymora and a comprehensive review of the legal literature are discussed, revealing evidence suggesting that the present scientific paradigm of dualism alone will no longer be able to tackle the challenges arising from increasing diversity and complexity coupled with an apparent acceleration of change. Law in the Time of Oxymora reaches the surprising conclusion that essentially oxymoronic concepts may inaugurate a new era of cognition, involving the ways the senses interact and how we reason, think and make decisions in law and in life.

The essays in this book examine the arguments and rhetoric used by the United States and the USSR following two catastrophes that impacted both countries, as blame is cast and consequences are debated. In this environment, it was perhaps inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise, especially about the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan. Those theories are examined, resulting in at least one method for addressing conspiracy arguments. In the case of Chernobyl, the disaster ruptured the "social compact" between the Soviet government and the people; efforts to overcome the resulting disillusionment quickly became the focus of state efforts.

First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts, from Puttenham to Colemanballs, and a number of language-sensitive topics such as post-modernism, irony, newspaper representations, gender and narrative.

Grammar, Meaning, and Concepts: A Discourse-Based Approach to English Grammar is a book for language teachers and learners that focuses on the meanings of grammatical constructions within discourse, rather than on language as structure governed by rigid rules. This text emphasizes the ways in which users of language construct meaning, express viewpoints, and depict imageries using the conceptual, meaning-filled categories that underlie all of grammar. Written by a team of authors with years of experience teaching grammar to future teachers of English, this book puts grammar in the context of real language and illustrates grammar in use through an abundance of authentic data examples. Each chapter also provides a variety of activities that focus on grammar, genre, discourse, and meaning, which can be used as they are or can be adapted for classroom practice. The activities are also designed to raise awareness about discourse, grammar, and meaning in all facets of everyday life, and can be used as springboards for upper high school, undergraduate, and graduate level research projects and inquiry-based grammatical analysis. Grammar, Meaning, and Concepts is an ideal textbook for those in the areas of teacher education, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, second language teaching, ESL, EFL, and communications who are looking to teach and learn grammar from a dynamic perspective.

This book explores multiple facets of femininity for marriage in India. Using language as an entry point, it looks at how and why media representations of gender identities are constructed the way they are. It works with a unique synthesis of second-wave feminist discourse and empirical linguistic research to look at how the social institution of marriage becomes the site of interaction between language, ideology, psyche and culture. This volume also brings together the personal histories and views of women who discuss how media, modernity and social norms shape their ideas about marriage and selfhood. Deconstructing perceptions of femininity in contemporary India, the book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, gender studies, linguistics, media and cultural studies and psychoanalysis.

This book is about moral talk in contemporary British political discourse, drawing on speeches, debates and radio phone-ins. Using a critical sociolinguistic approach, Spencer-Bennett explores the language people use to communicate moral judgement and highlights the relations between the things that people say, the contexts in which they are said and the circulating ideologies about meaning and morality. This is key reading for students and scholars studying language, politics and critical discourse analysis, within linguistics and anthropology.

First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists' failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine's arguments by proposing universal 'semantic primitives' or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word meaning and the theory of categorisation is explored, and an alternative to Rosch's 'family resemblance' account of the 'prototype' effect in both nouns and verbs is provided. The author argues that identification of certain implicit categories like 'action' and 'event' can be related to principles of individuation, and builds on the work of Kripke and Putnam on proper names and natural kind terms. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics and the philosophy of language.

First published in 1994, this book is concerned with certain kinds of wh-clauses, whose interpretations are easily and, the author argues, plausibly rendered by a logicosemantic analysis on which wh-phrases translate as open sentences, that is, as expressions of the semantically interpreted representation which contain free variables. After a review of influential contemporary analyses of the semantics of questions, concentrating on issues related to the truthconditional interpretation of these constructions, the author goes on to analyse logicosemantic similarities between wh-phrases and indefinite NPs. This analysis is extended in chapter V to account for asymmetries between wh-phrases and indefinites, but is preceded by the engagement and refutation of some of the challenges to it. The appendices discuss some peripheral points relating to the central points made by the author which are in need of further study.

First published in 1990, this dissertation presents an event-based model-theoretic semantics for plural expressions in English. The author defends against counterarguments the hypothesis that distributive predicates are predicates of groups, and not just individuals. By defining the collective/distributive distinction in terms of event structure, he solves formal problems with previous group-level analyses. The author notes that certain adverbials have a systematic ambiguity between a reading indicating collective action, and readings indicating spatial or temporal proximity; the event-based definition of collective action makes possible a parallel treatment of these readings. This book presents a formal proposal on the algebraic structure of groups and events, and a semantically based analysis of number agreement.