Bridal magazines have become increasingly popular in Western society, proliferating the idea of a 'princess bride' on her 'big day'. Yet little has been written on how the ever-expanding wedding media and the popular wedding culture constructs gender and affects the ways women live and experience their weddings. Offering a critique of contemporary wedding discourse, this book marries together analyses of media texts and their reception to propose a new approach to media discourse. The analysis richly illustrates how women are invited to embrace not only the stereotypical idea of bridal femininity but also a consumptive way of experiencing it. Through examination of brides' accounts of their 'big days', the book observes the imprints of the popular gender imagery on their self-portraits and self-narratives, and describes the women's diverse approaches to them. Based on insights from gender and critical discourse studies, sociology and audience research, this exploration illuminates the ongoing debate on 'media and gender' and its methodological approaches.

Placed within the context of reception studies, this book investigates how advertisements that rely on re-contextualising shared cultural knowledge are understood by their viewers, and examines their persuasive potential.

This unique, historical study explores how states have articulated statements about terrorism since the 1930s and what effect these discourses have had on global politics. Ditrych's analysis challenges established understandings of terrorism, providing a new conceptualization of how terrorism discourse emerged historically.

Jonathan Wheeldon offers a rare and unusually reflective insider account of the transformational challenges of the music industry, and the cultural industries in general, over the past 15 years. He also makes a potentially valuable contribution to loosening the industrial-political deadlock in the debate over copyright reform.

By analysing the folk stories and personal narratives of a cross-section of Palestinians, Sirhan offers a detailed study of how content and sociolinguistic variables affect a narrator's language use and linguistic behaviour. This book will be of interest to anyone engaged with narrative discourse, gender discourse, Arabic studies and linguistics.

Chinese Discourse Studies presents an innovative and systematic approach to discourse and communication in contemporary China. Incorporating Chinese philosophy and theory, it offers not only a distinct cultural paradigm in the field, but also a culturally sensitive and effective tool for studying Chinese discourses.

This is the first book to examine the discourse of reality television. Chapters provide rigorous case studies of the discourse practices that characterise a wide range of generic and linguistic/cultural contexts, including dating shows in China and Spain, docudramas in Argentina and New Zealand, and talent shows in the UK and USA.

Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action is the first book to examine the discourse of reality television. It provides state-of-the-art contextualization chapters on relevant concepts and methods, followed by rigorous case studies of the discourse practices that characterise a wide range of generic and linguistic / cultural contexts, including dating shows in China and Spain, docudramas in Argentina and New Zealand, and talent shows in the UK and the USA. These are structured in relation to two key themes: identity and aggression. This book will be essential reading for upper-level undergraduates and graduates in linguistics, discourse analysis and media studies, as well as for practitioners in these fields.

This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve controversies in philosophical dialogue or public debate settings, this orientation has tended to preempt questions about where controversy is located and how it is shaped. This project contributes to descriptive, ethnographic research about controversy, using discourse analysis to address a problem in argumentation.

Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is an introduction to the emerging field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis. It includes key papers that lay the foundations for this research, and worked examples from analysts working with a range of different texts. The editors Ian Parker and David Pavon-Cuellar begin with an introduction which reviews the key themes in discourse analysis and the problems faced by researchers in that field of work including an overview of the development of discourse analysis in different disciplines (psychology, sociology, cultural studies and political and social theory). They also set out the conceptual and methodological principles of Lacan's work insofar as it applies to the field of discourse. Ian Parker and David Pavon-Cuellar have divided the book into three main sections. The first section comprises previously published papers, some not yet available in English, which set out the foundations for 'Lacanian Discourse Analysis'. The chapters establish the first lines of research, and illustrate how Lacanian psychoanalysis is transformed into a distinctive approach to interpreting text when it is taken out of the clinical domain. The second and third parts of the book comprise commissioned papers in which leading researchers from across the social sciences, from the English-speaking world and from continental Europe and Latin America, show how Lacanian Discourse Analysis works in practice. Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is intended to be a definitive volume bringing together writing from the leaders in the field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis working in the English-speaking world and in countries where Lacanian psychoanalysis is part of mainstream clinical practice and social theory. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts of different traditions, to post-graduate and undergraduate researchers in psycho-social studies, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology.

Introducing the Language of the News is a comprehensive introduction to the language of news reporting. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, the book provides an accessible analysis of the processes that produce news language, and discusses how different linguistic choices promote different interpretations of news texts. Key features include: comprehensive coverage of both print and online news, including news design and layout, story structure, the role of headlines and leads, style, grammar and vocabulary a range of contemporary examples in the international press, from the 2012 Olympics, to political events in China and the Iraq War. chapter summaries, activities, sample analyses and commentaries, enabling students to undertake their own analyses of news texts a companion website with extra activities, further readings and web links. Written by an experienced researcher and teacher, this book is essential reading for students studying English language and linguistics, media and communication studies, and journalism.

Uniquely bringing together discourse analysis, critical literacy, and teacher research, this book invites teacher educators, literacy researchers, and discourse analysts to consider how discourse analysis can be used to foster critical literacy education. It is both a guide for conducting critical discourse analysis and a look at how the authors, alongside their teacher education students, used the tools of discourse analysis to inquire into, critique, and design critical literacy practices. Through an intimate look at the workings of a university teacher education course and the discourse analysis tools that teacher-researchers use to understand their classrooms, the book provides examples of both pre-service teachers and teacher educators becoming critically literate. The context-rich examples highlight the ways in which discourse analysis aids teachers' decision making in the moment and reflections on their practice over time. Readers learn to conduct discourse analysis as they read about critical literacy practices at the university level. Designed to be interactive, each chapter features step-by-step procedures for conducting each kind of discourse analysis (narrative, critically oriented, multimodal), sample analyses, and additional readings and resources. By attending to the micro-interactions as well as processes that unfold across time, the book illustrates the power and potential of discourse analysis as a pedagogical and research tool.

Uniquely bringing together discourse analysis, critical literacy, and teacher research, this book invites teacher educators, literacy researchers, and discourse analysts to consider how discourse analysis can be used to foster critical literacy education. It is both a guide for conducting critical discourse analysis and a look at how the authors, alongside their teacher education students, used the tools of discourse analysis to inquire into, critique, and design critical literacy practices. Through an intimate look at the workings of a university teacher education course and the discourse analysis tools that teacher-researchers use to understand their classrooms, the book provides examples of both pre-service teachers and teacher educators becoming critically literate. The context-rich examples highlight the ways in which discourse analysis aids teachers' decision making in the moment and reflections on their practice over time. Readers learn to conduct discourse analysis as they read about critical literacy practices at the university level. Designed to be interactive, each chapter features step-by-step procedures for conducting each kind of discourse analysis (narrative, critically oriented, multimodal), sample analyses, and additional readings and resources. By attending to the micro-interactions as well as processes that unfold across time, the book illustrates the power and potential of discourse analysis as a pedagogical and research tool.

What are discourses? Are discourses 'real', and what is real outside language? In this book, originally published in 1992, Ian Parker provides one of the clearest and most systematic introductions to discourse research and the essential theoretical debates in the area. At the time it was one of the few texts to defend a realist position, discuss accounts of postmodernity and set out criteria for the identification of discourses. Discourse Dynamics is essential reading to anyone interested in project research and an understanding of the theoretical issues involved in discourse analysis. The book will also be of use to students other than those studying psychology. It addresses the concerns of all those looking at qualitative textual research in the human sciences and is still very much relevant today.

Anglophone postcolonial studies has been characterized by its secular nature. Yet as the first generation of scholars grapples with mortality, a yearning for spiritual meaning is emerging in many texts. This study synthesizes the sacred language used in these texts with critical theory in order to create a holistic frame for interpretive analysis.

This book considers how we reveal ourselves in the language we employ and the action in which we engage. Maria-Ionela Neagu argues that our conceptualization of the world via metaphor should no longer be taken for granted. On the contrary, it must be critically challenged and evaluated, steering argument towards a particular line of action. This book places political discourse at the crossroads of cognitive linguistics and transpersonal psychology to highlight the role of conceptual metaphors in and as arguments. Exploring the interface between argumentation theories and cognitive semantics, Neagu integrates the analysis of conceptual metaphors into the framework of practical reasoning, arguing that political discourse bridges the mental void engendered by people's needs and frustrations. This empirical investigation is centred on the corpus of the American Presidential debates in 2008, as well as Barack Obama's 'State of the Nation' (2009), and 'State of the Union Address' (2010, 2011).

In challenging the widely held belief in the ubiquity of the personification of the political state, this book strives to de-politicize research and to de-mystify conceptual metaphor. Opposed to mainstream cognitive assumptions, it provides detailed data-driven research and one realistic solution to many of the dilemmas.

This book considers the sequential deployment of the receiver's response to the caller's request in telephone service encounters between native speakers in the U.K, Germany and Italy analysing the different response formats and their grammatical configuration.

How do I structure a journal article?; "Can I use 'I' in a research article?"; "Should I use an active or passive voice?" - Many such questions will be answered in this book, which documents the linguistic devices that authors use to show how they align or distance themselves from arguments and ideas, while maintaining conventions of objectivity.

Fathers, Fatherhood and Mental Illness provides the first book-length study of fathers' experiences of mental illness, arguing that a discourse analytic focus upon the experience of mental illness is relevant both to social scientists and mental health scholars and practitioners.

This book explores the role of photographs in newspapers and online news, analyzing how meanings are made in images and exploring text-image relations, illustrated with authentic news stories from both print and online news outlets.

In this important book, Surma combines threads from ethical, political, communications, sociological, feminist and discourse theories to explore the impact of writing in a range of contexts and illustrate the ways in which it can strengthen social connections.

The authors explore some of the ways in which standardization, ideology and linguistics are interrelated. Through a number of case studies they show how concepts such as grammaticality and structural change covertly rely on a false conceptualization of language, one that derives ultimately from standardization.

Trust is foundational to people's lives in contemporary societies, a fact sharply highlighted by recent practices associated with the financial markets, international security, science and technology, marketing and public relations, and even more pervasively and ever-presently in the delivery, for example, of health and welfare services, in educational policy and practice, in legal processes, and in the public and private arenas of political and religious institutions. Discourses of Trust presents invited chapters from leading practitioners and researchers exploring how Trust and misTrust are discursively constructed across key social and professional domains. The thesis of this volume is that Trust-related and Trust-bearing issues are central to our understanding of how the conduct of professional practices impacts on human relationships in social life.

In this book, Surma develops a critical cosmopolitan orientation to public and professional writing. Combining threads from ethical, political, communication, sociological, feminist, rhetorical and discourse theories, she examines the influences and impacts of writing in a range of contexts - government, corporate, organizational and community. Case-study examples illustrate the ways in which writing may be mobilized to strengthen our connections with others, and to reflect on how writing practices might entrench or transform our positions as both citizens of the world and members of situated communities.