This volume offers a comprehensive examination of mitigation in speech in English and Spanish, exploring how it is defined and theorized and the various linguistic features employed to soften or downgrade the impact of a particular message across a range of settings. Building on the body of work done on mitigation in English, the book begins by discussing how it has been conceptualized in the literature, drawing on politeness theory among other perspectives from pragmatics, and highlighting increasing research on these topics in native and bilingual Spanish speakers and learners of Spanish. The volume explores examples from a variety of discursive contexts, including institutions, courts, and classrooms, to unpack mitigation as it occurs in spontaneous speech through different lenses, looking both at the actual units of discourse but also taking a broader view by examining differences across dialects as well. The book also looks at the ways in which conclusions drawn from this research might be applied pedagogically in language learning classrooms. This volume will serve as a jumping-off point for broader discussion in the field of mitigation and will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis, in addition to learners and pre-service teachers of Spanish.

This book focuses on the uses of scientific evidence within three types of environmental discourses: popular nonfiction books about the environment; traditional and social media texts created by a grassroots environmental group; and a set of data displays that make arguments about global warming in a variety of media and contexts. It traces the operations of eight commonplaces about science and shows how they recur throughout these contexts, starting with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and ending with contemporary blogs and social media. The commonplaces are shown to embed ideological assumptions and simultaneously challenge those assumptions. In addition, the book addresses the potential dangers involved in relying too heavily on aspects of these commonplaces, and how they can undermine the goals of some of the writers who use them.

Contemporary democratic discourses are frequently, though not exclusively, characterized by an attitude of 'pro and con' where the aim is to persuade others, a jury or an audience, of what is right and what is wrong. Challenging such procedures, this book teases out an alternative model of public discourse that is based in collaboration and deliberation. The African philosophy of ubuntu offers valuable insights in this regard as it implies relational notions of power that contrast and complement individualist facets. It provides the space to think and speak in ways that support harmonious and cohesive societal structures and practices. The book's model of communication rests on the premise that the various interests of individuals and groups, while richly diverse, can be conceived of as profoundly bound-up rather than incompatible. In this way communication enables broader lines of action and a wider scope for achieving diversity and common ground.

This volume--along with its companion "Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City's Neighborhoods"--fills an important gap in research on Chicago and, more generally, on language use in globalized metropolitan areas. Often cited as a quintessential American city, Chicago is, and always has been, a city of immigrants. It is one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the United States and home to one of the largest and most diverse Latino communities. Although language is unquestionably central to social identity, and Chicago has been well studied by scholars interested in ethnicity, until now no one has focused--as do the contributors to these volumes--on the related issues of language and ethnicity.
"""Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago" includes:
*ethnographic studies based in home settings that focus on ways of speaking and literacy practices;
*studies that explore oral language use and literacy practices in school contexts; and
*studies based in community spaces in various neighborhoods.
It offers a rich set of portraits emphasizing language use as centrally related to ethnic, class, or gender identities. As such, it is relevant for anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, historians, educators and educational researchers, and others whose concerns require an understanding of "ground-level" phenomena relevant to contemporary social issues, and as a text for courses in these areas.

This volume--along with its companion "Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City's Neighborhoods"--fills an important gap in research on Chicago and, more generally, on language use in globalized metropolitan areas. Often cited as a quintessential American city, Chicago is, and always has been, a city of immigrants. It is one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the United States and home to one of the largest and most diverse Latino communities. Although language is unquestionably central to social identity, and Chicago has been well studied by scholars interested in ethnicity, until now no one has focused--as do the contributors to these volumes--on the related issues of language and ethnicity.
"""Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago" includes:
*ethnographic studies based in home settings that focus on ways of speaking and literacy practices;
*studies that explore oral language use and literacy practices in school contexts; and
*studies based in community spaces in various neighborhoods.
It offers a rich set of portraits emphasizing language use as centrally related to ethnic, class, or gender identities. As such, it is relevant for anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, historians, educators and educational researchers, and others whose concerns require an understanding of "ground-level" phenomena relevant to contemporary social issues, and as a text for courses in these areas.

This book offers a critical reflection on interpersonal positioning across both large- and small-scale contexts and highlights the multi-faceted nature of intercultural communication in today's global world. The volume establishes positioning primarily as the negotiation of interpersonal relationships, and draws on concepts from across disciplines by way of reappraisal before applying them to two specific domains: MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) and private ELF couple interaction. While acknowledging and showcasing the unique features of positioning in these two contexts, Kloetzl and Swoboda point to their commonalities by looking at how language and specifically English is used as a communicative resource in lingua franca situations. The book also identifies new directions for future methodological innovations in that it demonstrates how the same interaction can be looked at in methodologically-different ways and how the authors' own positions projected on to such interaction create an integrated tri-partite perspective on the two domains. Shedding light on interpersonal positioning in different contexts and in turn on global communication more generally, this book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in discourse analysis, pragmatics, computer-mediated communication, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.

In this interdisciplinary study, Monika Fodor explores how intergenerational memory narratives embedded in the speaker's own stories impact ethnic subjectivity construction. Working with thematically selected life experiences from interviews conducted with second- and late-generation European Americans, Fodor demonstrates how the storytellers position themselves in a range of social, cultural, and political discourses to claim or disclaim ethnicity as part of their subjectivity. Tying narrative content, structural, and performance analysis to the sociological and sociolinguistic concepts of "symbolic capital" and "investment," Fodor unpacks the changing levels of identifying with one's ancestral ethnic heritage and its potential to carry meaning for late-generation descendants. In doing so, she reveals the shared features of identification among individuals through narrative meaning-making, which may be the basis of real or imagined, heterolocal discourse community formation and sustained ethnic subjectivity. The narrative analysis demonstrates how the cohesive force among members of the community is the shared knowledge of story frames and the personalized retelling of these. Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives draws on inherited, often moving, personal experiences that offers new insights into the so far largely unexplored terrain of the narrative structure of intergenerationally transferred memory retellings, that will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic studies, migration and identity studies.

Australian English is perhaps best known for its colourful slang, but the variety is much richer than slang alone. This collection provides a detailed account of Australian English by bringing together leading scholars of this English variety. These scholars provide a comprehensive overview of Australian English's distinctive features and outline cutting-edge research into the variation and change of English in Australia. Organised thematically, this volume explores the ways in which Australian English differs from other varieties of English, as well as examining regional, social and stylistic variation within the variety. The volume first explores particular structural features where Australian English differentiates itself from other English varieties. There are chapters on phonetics and phonology, socio-phonetics, lexicon and discourse-pragmatics as these elements are core to understanding any variety of English, especially within the World Englishes paradigm. It then considers what are arguably the most salient aspects of variation within Australian English and finally focuses on historical, attitudinal and planning aspects of Australian English. This volume provides a thorough account of Australian English and its users as complex, diverse and worthy of study. Perhaps more importantly, this volume's scholars provide a reimagining of Australian English and the paradigm through which future scholars may proceed.

Language, Identity, and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media is an empirical contemporary Arabic sociolinguistic investigation informed by theories and notions developed in the fields of Arabic linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Building on the Bakhtinian concept of linguistic hybridity, this book conducts a longitudinal analysis of Syrian dissidents' social media practices between 2009 and 2017. It shows how dissidents have used social media to emerge in the discourse about the Syrian conflict and how language has been used symbolically as a tool of social and political engagement in an increasingly complex sociopolitical context. This monograph is ideal for students, sociolinguists and researchers interested in Arabic language and identity.

Systemic Functional Political Discourse Analysis: A Text-based Study is the first book which takes a comprehensive systemic functional perspective on political discourse to provide a complete, integrated, exhaustive, systemic and functional description and analysis. Based on the political discourses of the Umbrella Movement - the largest public protest in the history of Hong Kong, which occupies a unique political situation in the world: a post-colonial society like many other Asian societies and yet unlike the others, it is a Special Administrative Region of China. Though it enjoys a high degree of autonomy under the principle of 'One Country, Two Systems', it is still confined to being part of the 'One Country'. The book demonstrates how a systemic functional approach can provide a comprehensive, thorough, and insightful analysis of the political discourse from four co-related and complementary approaches: contextual, discourse semantic, lexicogrammatical and historical. Apart from a thorough discussion of various systemic functional conceptions, it provides examples of various analyses from a SF perspective, including contextual parameters, registerial analysis, semantic discourse analysis, appraisal analysis, and discusses important issues in political discourse, including negotiation of self-identity, association of language, power and institutional role, and expression of 'evidentiality' and 'subjectivity'. It is written not only for those who are interested in Hong Kong politics in general and political discourse in Hong Kong in particular, but also for those who work on political discourse analysis, and those who apply SFL to various other discourses such as mass media discourse, medical discourse, teaching discourse, etc. Last but not least, this book is also intended to provide a theoretical framework in discourse analysis from the systemic functional perspective for those who work in Cantonese and in other languages.

When we look back from the vantage point of the 21st century and ask ourselves what the previous century was all about, what do we see? Our first inclination is to focus on historical events: the 20th century was the age of two devastating world wars, of totalitarian regimes and terrible atrocities like the Holocaust - "the age of extremes," to use Hobsbawm's famous phrase. But in this new book, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that we will never understand the 20th century if we focus on events and ideologies. Rather, in his view, the predominant motif of the 20th century is what Badiou called a passion for the real, which manifests itself as the will to actualize the truth directly in the here and now. Drawing on his Spheres trilogy, Sloterdijk interprets the actualization of the real in the 20th century as a passion for economic and technological "antigravitation". The rise of consumerism and the easing of the burdens of human life by the constant deployment of new technologies have killed off the kind of radicalism that was rooted in the belief that power would rise from a material base of production. If the 20th century can still inspire us today, it is because the fundamental shift that it brought about opened the way for a critique of extremist reason, a post-Marxist theory of enrichment and a general economy of energy resources based on excess and dissipation. While developing his highly original interpretation of the 20th century, Sloterdijk also addresses a series of related topics including the meaning of the Anthropocene, the domestication of humans and the significance of the sea. The volume also includes major new pieces on Derrida and on Heidegger's politics. This work, by one of the most original thinkers today will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in philosophy and critical theory.

This book provides a detailed model of both the discourse and knowledge of physics and offers insights toward developing pedagogy that improves how physics is taught and learned. Building on a rich history of applying a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to scientific discourse, the book uses an SFL framework, here extended to encompass the more recently developed Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach, to explore the field's multimodal nature and offer detailed descriptions of three of its key semiotic resources - language, image, and mathematics. To complement the book's SFL underpinnings, Doran draws on the sociological framework of Legitimation Code Theory, which offers tools for understanding the principles of how knowledge is developed and valued, to explore the manifestation of knowledge in physics specifically and its relationship with discourse. Through its detailed descriptions of the key semiotic resources and its analysis of the knowledge structure of physics, this book is an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers in multimodality, discourse analysis, educational linguistics, and science education.

This volume presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of major developments in the study of how phraseology is used in a wide range of different legal and institutional contexts. This recent interest has been mainly sparked by the development of corpus linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the centrality of phraseological patterns in language and provided researchers with new and powerful analytical tools. However, there have been relatively few empirical studies of word combinations in the domain of law and in the many different contexts where legal discourse is used. This book seeks to address this gap by presenting some of the latest developments in the study of this linguistic phenomenon from corpus-based and interdisciplinary perspectives. The volume draws on current research in legal phraseology from a variety of perspectives: translation, comparative/contrastive studies, terminology, lexicography, discourse analysis and forensic linguistics. It contains contributions from leading experts in the field, focusing on a wide range of issues amply illustrated through in-depth corpus-informed analyses and case studies. Most contributions to this book are multilingual, featuring different legal systems and legal languages. The volume will be a valuable resource for linguists interested in phraseology as well as lawyers and legal scholars, translators, lexicographers, terminologists and students who wish to pursue research in the area.

The relationship between the individual and the community is at the core of sociolinguistic theorizing. To date, most longitudinal research has been conducted on the basis of trend studies, such as replications of cross-sectional studies, or comparisons between present-day cross-sectional data and 'legacy' data. While the past few years have seen an increasing interest in panel research, much of this work has been published in a variety of formats and languages and is thus not easily accessible. This edited volume brings together the major researchers in the field of panel research, highlighting connections and convergences across and between chapters, methods and findings with the aim of initiating a dialogue about best practices and ways forward in sociolinguistic panel studies. By providing, for the first time, a platform for key research on panel data in one coherent edition, this volume aims to shape the agenda in this increasingly vibrant field of research.

This book undertakes a systematic analysis of the workings of ideology in discourse, using an interdisciplinary approach that links language, cognition and society. Through examination of two corpora - a collection of British newspaper articles and a set of political speeches - the author examines Britain's involvement in the Iraq War (2003), and critically assesses the language practices which constructed a pro-war ideology under Tony Blair's premiership. Drawing on a constellation of concepts from van Dijk's socio-cognitive model, this book carries out both qualitative and quantitative analyses and conceptualises discourse as a nonlinear, highly discursive and socio-cognitive phenomenon. This innovative work will appeal to students and scholars of Cognitive Linguistics, Quantitative Linguistics, Social Constructivism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Political Sciences and Communication Studies.

The Discourse of Online Reviews is the first book to provide an account of the discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical features of this rapidly growing form of technologically-mediated communication. Examining a corpus of over 1,000 consumer reviews, Camilla Vasquez explores many of the discourse features that are characteristic of this new, user-generated, computer-mediated and primarily text-based genre. She investigates the language used by reviewers as they forge connections with their audiences to draw them into their stories, as they construct their expertise and authority on various subjects and as they evaluate and assess their consumer experiences. She also demonstrates how reviewers display their awareness about emerging conventions of the very genre in which they are participating. This book adopts an eclectic approach to the analysis of discourse, and explores topics such as evaluation, identity and intertextuality as they occur in online reviews of hotels, restaurants, recipes, films and other consumer products.

This book addresses big data as a socio-technical construct with huge potential for innovation in key sectors such as healthcare, government and business. Big data and its increasingly widespread use in such influential spheres can generate ethically controversial decisions, including questions surrounding privacy, consent and accountability. This book attempts to unpack the epistemological implications of the term 'big data', as well as the opportunities and responsibilities which come with it. The author analyses the linguistic texture of the big data narrative in the news media, in healthcare and in EU law on data protection, in order to contribute to its understanding from the critical perspective of language studies. The result is a study which will be of interest to students and scholars working in the digital humanities, corpus linguistics, and discourse studies.

This book provides a research-led guide to public speaking in English, using the foundations of applied linguistics research to analyse elements of spoken presentation, including content, form, persona and audience interaction. The author also introduces and analyses case studies of what she calls 'the New Oratory', examining such modern speaking formats as the three-minute-thesis presentation, the investor pitch and TED talks, making this book a cutting-edge exploration of how public speaking is conducted in an increasingly digitalised world. It provides essential advice for non-native English speakers and speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL) whose work or study requires them to present in English, but will also be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics and business communication.

In this book David Block draws on analytical techniques from Critical Discourse Studies to critically investigate truth, truths, the propagation of ignorance and post-truth. Focusing on corrupt discourses and agnotology, he explores the role of anti-intellectualism, emotion and social media in the cultural creation, legitimisation and dissemination of ignorance. While encompassing analysis of discourses on Donald Trump, Brexit, climate change and the Alt-Right, Block furthers our understanding of this global phenomena by providing a revealing analysis of political communications relating to corruption scandals involving the Spanish conservative party. Through an innovative theoretical framework that combines critical discourse and discourse historical approaches with nuanced political analysis, he uncovers the rhetorical means by which esoteric truths and misleading narratives about corruption are created and demonstrates how they become, in their turn, corrupt discourses. This original work offers fresh insights for scholars of Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Politics, Cultural and Communication Studies, and will also appeal to general readers with an interest in political communication and Spanish politics.

News Framing Through English-Chinese Translation provides a useful tool to depict how Chinese news translation can be examined in the era of globalization. The author has integrated framing theory in journalism studies with translation studies and developed a new theoretical model/framework named Transframing. This interdisciplinary model is pioneering and will make theoretical and conceptual contributions to translation studies. This book aims to reveal ideological, sociocultural and linguistic factors creating media discourse by examining Chinese media discourse, in comparison to its counterpart in English. Through the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative methods, it is concluded that the transframing model can be applied to interpreting, describing, explaining as well as predicting the practice of news translation.

Human beings rely equally on narrative (or storytelling) and metaphor (or analogy) for making sense of the world. Narrative and Metaphor in Education integrates the two perspectives of narrative and metaphor in educational theory and practice at every level from pre-school to lifelong civic education. Bringing together outstanding educational researchers, the book interweaves for the first time the rich strand of current research about how narrative may be used productively in education with more fragmentary research on the role of metaphor in education and invites readers to 'look both ways.' The book consists of research by 40 academics from many countries and disciplines, describing and analysing the intricate connections between narrative and metaphor as they manifest themselves in many fields of education, including: concepts of education, teacher identity and reflective practice, teaching across cultures, teaching science and history, using digital and visual media in teaching, fostering reconciliation in a postcolonial context, special needs education, civic and social education and educational policy-making. It is unique in combining study of the narrative perspective and the metaphor perspective, and in exploring such a comprehensive range of topics in education. Narrative and Metaphor in Education will be of great interest to academics and researchers in the fields of education and educational policy, as well as teacher educators, practising and future teachers. It will also appeal to psychologists, sociologists, applied linguists and communications specialists.

This book seeks to extend research on framing beyond linguistic and cognitive perspectives by examining framing in visual and multimodal texts and their impact on moral cognition and attitudes. Drawing on perspectives from frame semantics, blending theory, relevance theory, and pragmatics, the volume establishes a model of "pictorial framing", arguing that subtle alterations in the visual presentation of issues around judgment and choice in such texts impact perception, and applies this framework to a range of case studies from Egyptian, British, and American cartoons and illustrations. The book demonstrates the affordances of applying this framework in enhancing our understanding of both the nature of word-image relations and issues of representation in the op-ed genre, but also in other forms of media more generally. The volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, social psychology, and communication studies.

This book explores the discourse in and of translation within and across cultures and languages. From the macro aspects of translation as an inter- cultural project to actual analysis of textual ingredients that contribute to translation and interpreting as discourse, the ten chapters represent different explorations of 'global' theories of discourse and translation. Offering interrogations of theories and practices within different sociocultural environments and traditions (Eastern and Western), Discourse in Translation considers a plethora of domains, including historiography, ethics, technical and legal discourse, subtitling, and the politics of media translation as representation. This is key reading for all those working on translation and discourse within translation studies and linguistics.

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which digital communication facilitate and inform discourses of legitimization and delegitimization in contemporary participatory cultures. The book draws on multiple theoretical traditions from critical discourse analysis to allow for a greater critical engagement of the ways in which values are either justified or criticized on social media platforms across a variety of social milieus, including the personal, political, religious, corporate, and commercial. The volume highlights data from across ten national contexts and a range of online platforms to demonstrate how these discursive practices manifest themselves differently across a range of settings. Taken together, the seventeen chapters in this book offer a more informed understanding of how these discursive spaces help us to interpret the manner in which digital communication can be used to legitimize or delegitimize, making this book an ideal resource for students and scholars in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, new media, and media production.

Contemporary legal reasoning has more in common with fictional discourse than we tend to realize. Through an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court's written output during a recent landmark term, this book exposes many of the parallels between these two special kinds of language use. Focusing on linguistic and rhetorical patterns in the dozens of reasoned opinions issued by the Court between October 2014 and June 2015, the book takes nonlawyer readers on a lively tour of contemporary American legal reasoning and acquaints legal readers with some surprising features of their own thinking and writing habits. It analyzes cases addressing a huge variety of issues, ranging from the rights of drivers stopped by the police to the decision-making processes of the Environmental Protection Agency-as well as the term's best-known case, which recognized a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex as well as different-sex couples. Fiction and the Languages of Law reframes a number of long-running legal debates, identifies other related paradoxes within legal discourse, and traces them all to common sources: judges' and lawyers' habit of alternating unselfconsciously between two different attitudes toward the language they use, and a set of professional biases that tends to prevent scrutiny of that habit.