Rooted in multimodal conversation analysis and based on video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions, this book presents a novel analytical perspective for the study of touch. The authors focus on how different forms of touch are interactionally organized in everyday, institutional, and professional practices, showing how touch is multimodally achieved in social interaction, how it acquires its significance, how it is embedded in the current activity and in its social context, and how it is systematically intertwined with talk, facial expressions, and body posture. Including work by a wide range of renowned researchers, this volume provides rich visual illustrations of situations featuring touch as a social and intersubjective practice. The studies make a compelling contribution to the field by clearly examining and demonstrating the social meaning of touch for the participants in social interaction in a broad range of contexts. Presenting a new methodology for the study of touch, this is key reading for all researchers and scholars working in conversation analysis, multimodality, and related areas.

This book merges recent trends in game studies and multimodal studies to explore the relationship between the interaction between videogames' different modes and the ways in which they inform meaning for both players and designers. The volume begins by laying the foundation for integrating the two disciplines, drawing upon social semiotic and discourse analytic traditions to examine their relationship with meaning in videogames. The book uses a wide range of games as examples to demonstrate the medium's various forms of expression at work, including audio, visual, textual, haptic, and procedural modes, with a particular focus on the procedural form, which emphasizes processes and causal relationships, to better showcase its link with meaning-making. The second half of the book engages in a discussion of different multimodal configurations and user generated content to show how they contribute to the negotiation of meaning in the player experience, including their role in constructing and perpetuating persuasive messages and in driving interesting and unique player decisions in gameplay. Making the case for the benefits of multimodal approaches to game studies, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in multimodal studies, game studies, rhetoric, semiotics, and discourse analysis.

This book studies communication in institutional eldercare. It is based on audio-recorded interactions between residents and staff in a Japanese care facility. The focus is on the morning care routines, which include getting the residents out of bed and ready for the day. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis explores the characteristics of care communication as they become manifest in the interactional small print. Topics include the use of terms of address and formal speech, the basic organisation of openings and closings, the difficulties of talking while working-and, at times, working while talking-and tempo differences between residents and staff as they move along between bed and breakfast. The research findings are contextualised with results from previous studies, tracing significant features and explanation for deviant cases. The author is a trained linguist and certified nursing assistant with first-hand working experience in institutional eldercare.

Digital India and The Poor examines how the poor are evoked in contemporary Indian political discourse. It studies the ways in which the disadvantaged are accounted for in the increasingly digitised political economy, commercial and public policy, media, and academic research. This book: Interrogates the category of the poor in India and how they have come to be classified in economic and policy documents over the past few decades Explores the influential digital education technology 'experiments' conducted in Indian slums from the late 1990s, now popularly known as the 'hole-in-the-wall experiments' Discusses financial inclusion initiatives, predominantly as they converged between 2014 and 2017, such as the Jan Dhan Yojana, the Aadhaar Project, and the banknote demonetisation Presents an in-depth study of the bearing of technology on domestic employment in India The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, politics, political science and sociology, technology studies, linguistics, and development studies.

In this ethnographic study, the author takes an agnostic stance towards the truth value of conspiracy theories and delves into the everyday lives of people active in the conspiracy milieu to understand better what the contemporary appeal of conspiracy theories is. Conspiracy theories have become popular cultural products, endorsed and shared by significant segments of Western societies. Yet our understanding of who these people are and why they are attracted by these alternative explanations of reality is hampered by their implicit and explicit pathologization. Drawing on a wide variety of empirical sources, this book shows in rich detail what conspiracy theories are about, which people are involved, how they see themselves, and what they practically do with these ideas in their everyday lives. The author inductively develops from these concrete descriptions more general theorizations of how to understand this burgeoning subculture. He concludes by situating conspiracy culture in an age of epistemic instability where societal conflicts over knowledge abound, and the Truth is no longer assured, but "out there" for us to grapple with. This book will be an important source for students and scholars from a range of disciplines interested in the depth and complexity of conspiracy culture, including Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Ethnology, Folklore Studies, History, Media Studies, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. More broadly, this study speaks to contemporary (public) debates about truth and knowledge in a supposedly post-truth era, including widespread popular distrusts towards elites, mainstream institutions and their knowledge.

How To Analyse Texts is the essential introductory textbook and toolkit for language analysis.

This book shows the reader how to undertake detailed, language-focussed, contextually sensitive analyses of a wide range of texts – spoken, written and multimodal. The book constitutes a flexible resource which can be used in different ways across a range of courses and at different levels.

This textbook includes:

• three parts covering research and study skills, language structure and use, and how texts operate in sociocultural contexts
• a wide range of international real-life texts, including items from South China Morning Post, art’otel Berlin and Metro Sweden, which cover digital and print media, advertising, recipes and much more
• objectives and skill review for each section, activities, commentaries, suggestions for independent assignments, and an analysis checklist for students to follow
• a combined glossary and index and a comprehensive further reading section
• a companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/goddard with further links and exercises for students

Written by two experienced teachers of English Language, How To Analyse Texts is key reading for all students of English language and linguistics.

This volume considers linguistic, cultural, and literary trends that fed into the creation of Roman satire in second-century BC Rome. Combining approaches drawn from linguistics, Roman history, and Latin literature, the chapters share a common purpose of attempting to assess how Lucilius' satires functioned in the social environment in which they were created and originally read. Particular areas of focus include audiences for satire, the mixing of varieties of Latin in the satires, and relationships with other second-century genres, including comedy, epic, and oratory. Lucilius' satires emerged at a time when Rome's new status as an imperial power and its absorption of influences from the Greek world were shaping Roman identity. With this in mind the book provides new perspectives on the foundational identification of satire with what it means to be Roman and satire's unique status as 'wholly ours' tota nostra among Latin literary genres.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of discourse, conceptualizing how discursive practices shape social, political, and even material realities today. Discourses in Action presents a wide range of essays that explore fundamental concerns for the social consequences of text, talk, and discursively informed actions and possibilities of discursive engagement. It opens new perspectives on what language does and the differences that scholarly and practical contributions can make. Chapters cover diverse topics, ranging from political struggles, climate change, social revolutions, ethnicity, violence and other often unexpected patterns of discursive consequences. Its essays also explore the cultural contingencies that underlie discourse practices which are usually ignored when analysed from within a taken-for-granted culture. Providing a useful examination of current discourse studies, this interdisciplinary volume is ideal for students and researchers within media, communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Any reader engaging the work of Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge must confront the role biography has played in the canonization of each. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge's case, of promise wasted in indolence. One confronts reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world, as well as still stranger materials-death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart-initially preserved by circles and then circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus. Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still trigger associations with biographical detail in ways that spark pathos or produce intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even for readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination-the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject-is thus "posthumous" in Keats's evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. Lives of the Dead Poets takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the prematurely arrested figures of three romantic poets. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry's allotted period, biographical fascination personalizes the precariousness of poetry, binding poetry, the poet-function, and readers to an irrecuperable singularity. Reading romantic poets together with the modernity of Benjamin and Baudelaire, Swann shows how poets' afterlives offer an opening for poetry's survival, from its first nineteenth-century death sentences into our present.

The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation. The introduction of theory into English studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of investments at the same time that institutional conflicts between them became more intense than ever before. Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures who shaped and were shaped by this new landscape-including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour-the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than is usually understood from the perspective of either literature or composition alone. Possessing a clear view of the entire discipline is essential today as the contemporary corporate university pushes English studies to abandon its liberal arts tradition and embrace a more vocational curriculum. This book provides important conceptual tools for responding to and resisting in this environment.

Written by an internationally recognised expert in the field, The Politics of the Earth provides an authoritative and engaging introduction to environmental politics through a unique, discourse-centred approach. With his lively and accessible writing style, John S. Dryzek analyses how we construct and interpret the environment through language, guiding the reader through the discourses that dominate this arena, including ecological limits, sustainability and green radicalism. The fourth edition has been thoroughly updated to take in key developments in environmental affairs, including an examination of the implications of the Anthropocene concept and need for ecological reflexivity, with updated coverage of the Paris Agreement on climate change and Sustainable Development Goals, weaving in throughout a wealth of contemporary examples to illuminate the discussion. It also contains a ground-breaking new chapter on 'Gray Radicalism', in which the author provides an innovative overview and analysis of this contemporary radical anti-environmental discourse. Students are further supported with added further reading sections and new end-of-chapter discussion questions, which are designed to encourage critical thinking and prompt a deeper engagement with the issues at hand.

This volume brings together key players in discourse variation research to offer original analyses of a wide range of discourse-pragmatic variables, such as 'like', 'innit', 'you get me', and 'at the end of the day'. The authors introduce a range of new methods specifically tailored to the study of discourse-pragmatic variation and change in synchronic and longitudinal dialect data, and provide new empirical and theoretical insights into discourse-pragmatic variation and change in contemporary varieties of English. The volume thus enhances our understanding of the complexities of discourse-pragmatic variation and change, and encourages new ways of thinking about variability in discourse-pragmatics. With its dual focus on presenting innovative methods as well as new results, the volume will provide an important resource for both newcomers and veterans alike in the field of discourse variation analysis, and spark discussions that will set new directions for future work in the field.

This book merges recent trends in game studies and multimodal studies to explore the relationship between the interaction between videogames' different modes and the ways in which they inform meaning for both players and designers. The volume begins by laying the foundation for integrating the two disciplines, drawing upon social semiotic and discourse analytic traditions to examine their relationship with meaning in videogames. The book uses a wide range of games as examples to demonstrate the medium's various forms of expression at work, including audio, visual, textual, haptic, and procedural modes, with a particular focus on the procedural form, which emphasizes processes and causal relationships, to better showcase its link with meaning-making. The second half of the book engages in a discussion of different multimodal configurations and user generated content to show how they contribute to the negotiation of meaning in the player experience, including their role in constructing and perpetuating persuasive messages and in driving interesting and unique player decisions in gameplay. Making the case for the benefits of multimodal approaches to game studies, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in multimodal studies, game studies, rhetoric, semiotics, and discourse analysis.

Researchers in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have often pointed to grammar as a locus of ideology in discourse. This book illustrates the role that grammars as models of language (and image) can play in revealing ideological properties of texts and discourse in social and political contexts. The book takes the reader through three distinct grammatical frameworks - functional grammar, multimodal grammar and cognitive grammar. Using examples taken from a range of discourses relating to globalisation, including discourses of immigration, war, corporate practice and political protests, the book demonstrates the individual utility and the interconnectedness of these models inside CDA. A key argument advanced is that the cognitive processes necessarily involved in making sense of language are based in visual experience. This position offers new ways of understanding the ideological effects of grammatical choices in texts and suggests a reassessment of the relationship between linguistic and multimodal grammars in CDA. The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in CDA and the relationship between discourse, cognition and social action.

In recent decades, there has been a substantial turn towards narrative and life history study. The embrace of narrative and life history work has accompanied the move to postmodernism and post-structuralism across a wide range of disciplines: sociological studies, gender studies, cultural studies, social history; literary theory; and, most recently, psychology. Written by leading international scholars from the main contributing perspectives and disciplines, The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History seeks to capture the range and scope as well as the considerable complexity of the field of narrative study and life history work by situating these fields of study within the historical and contemporary context. Topics covered include: * The historical emergences of life history and narrative study * Techniques for conducting life history and narrative study * Identity and politics * Generational history * Social and psycho-social approaches to narrative history With chapters from expert contributors, this volume will prove a comprehensive and authoritative resource to students, researchers and educators interested in narrative theory, analysis and interpretation.

This edited book presents contemporary empirical research investigating the use of language in professional settings, drawing on the contributions of a set of internationally-renowned authors. The book takes a critical approach to understanding professional communication in a range of fields and global contexts. Split into three parts, covering Business and Organisations, Healthcare, and Politics and Institutions, the contributors explore how and why academics engage in workplace research which takes the form of 'consultancy', 'advocacy' and 'activism'. In light of an ever-changing, ever-demanding global landscape, this volume offers new theoretical and methodological ways of conducting professional communication research with real-world impact. It will be of interest to linguistics and communication researchers and practitioners, particularly those working in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, business communication, health communication, political communication, language and the law and organisational studies.

Poetry, defined as language divided into lines, is found in most known human cultures. This masterful survey of poetry and its constituent components demonstrates the functions performed by metre, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism, arguing that each line of a poem fits as a whole unit into the limited capacity of human working memory. Using examples from around the world, Fabb surveys the wide varieties of poetry and the ways they are performed, including those in songs and signed literatures. Focusing on language, form and memory, he helps us understand why poetry is a particularly valued way of using language. A fresh exploration of poetry, the book will be welcomed by students and researchers of literature, linguistics and psychology, as well as anyone interested in poetry.

Service encounters are ubiquitous in social interaction. We buy food and everyday items in supermarkets, convenience stores, or markets; we purchase merchandise in department stores; or we request information at a visitor information center. This book offers a comprehensive account of service encounters in commercial and non-commercial settings. Grounded in naturally occurring face-to-face interactions and drawing on a pragmatic-discursive approach, J. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer sets out a framework for the analysis of transactional and relational talk in various contexts in the United States and Mexico. This book investigates cross-cultural and intra-lingual pragmatic variation during the negotiation of service. The author provides a broad review of research on service encounters to date, and analyzes characteristics of sales transactions, such as participants' roles, pragmatic and discourse functions of relational talk and address forms, the realization of politeness, and changes in alignment from transactional to relational talk.

This book analyzes how the English as a Second Language (ESL) pedagogic genre has been re-contextualized in the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press National College English Teaching Contest (SFLEP) for presentation to the contest judges and audience. Departing from prior research on contest discourse, it focuses on the role of teaching contests in re-contextualizing educational practices. Moreover, it addresses the processes of genre blurring and solidification at work in new discourse events. The results presented here serve to frame teaching contest discourse in a fuller contextual configuration and will help contest sponsors, participants, and audience members better understand this popular social event and its relations to real-world teaching practices, while simultaneously helping teachers to understand the relevance of such contest practice. Moreover, the research methods will benefit those linguists who are interested in researching other types of event discourses.

Offering a unique, reflexive framework for Critical Discourse Analysis focused on discourses of hope, transformation, and liberation, this book showcases a variety of powerful literacies in action. Drawing from original research in a range of public, educational spaces across the lifespan-from Kindergartners studying social justice movements, to sixth graders designing a social justice museum exhibit focused on the environment and sustainability, to teacher education students practicing racial literacy in response to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri-Rogers makes the case that critical social theories often associated with Critical Discourse Analysis have not kept pace with a recent shift toward the positive, referred to as Positive Discourse Analysis. Encouraging readers to reconsider their understanding of concepts such as power, action, context, critique, and reflexivity, this book illustrates the potential of theorizing discourse analysis from a positive orientation.

This edited volume makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning research field of English as a lingua franca. In a pioneering step, the collection is exclusively devoted to the English email discourse of Chinese speakers. The studies address innovative topics related to various contexts and relationships, using several different approaches and theories, which taken together shed light on how English serves as a lingua franca in multiple types of global written communication. The research topics presented are organized into four thematic sections, including emails from students to professors, emails from students to the international academic community, emails from peer to peer, and emails at the workplace. This collection of empirical research invites readers to consider the special features of apologies, requests, terms of address, politeness, and discourse organization, and how cultural differences may affect the use or interpretation of each. Throughout the book, readers will also discover how Chinese speakers use special features and strategies to construct their identity, establish relationships, and achieve successful communication in English. This highly informative, thought-provoking book also provides insights on methods for teaching email discourse using English as a lingua franca and suggests directions for future research.

Researching Language, Gender and Sexuality leads students through the process of undertaking research in order to explore how gender and sexuality are represented and constructed through language. Drawing on international research, Sauntson incorporates a fluid understanding of genders and sexualities and includes research on a diverse range of identities. This accessible guidebook offers an outline of the practical steps and ethical guidelines involved when gathering linguistic data for the purpose of investigating gender and sexuality. Each chapter contains up-to-date information and empirical case studies that relate to a range of topics within the field of language, gender and sexuality, as well as suggestions for how students could practically research the areas covered. Student-friendly, this is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English language, linguistics and gender studies.

People do bad things. They misspeak, mislead, and misbehave. They lie, cheat, steal, and kill. Often, afterward, they apologize. But what makes a successful apology? Why does Joe Biden's 2007 apology for referring to Barack Obama as "articulate and bright" succeed, whereas Mel Gibson's 2006 apology for his anti-Semitic tirade fails? Naturally, the effectiveness of an apology depends on the language used, as well as the conditions under which we offer our regrets. In Sorry About That, linguist Edwin Battistella analyzes the public apologies of presidents, politicians, entertainers, and businessmen, situating the apology within American popular culture. Battistella offers the fascinating stories behind these apologies alongside his own analysis of the language used in each. He uses these examples to demonstrate the ways in which language creates sincere or insincere apologies, why we choose to apologize or don't, and how our efforts to say we are sorry succeed or fail. Each chapter expands on a central concept or distinction that explains part of the apology process. Battistella covers over fifty memorable apologies from McDonald's, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Bill Clinton, and many more. Moving back and forth between examples and concepts, Battistella connects actual apologies with the broader social, ethical, and linguistic principles behind them. Readers will come away from the book better consumers of apologies - and better apologizers as well.

Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics provides a practical and comprehensive introduction to the growing field of corpus pragmatics. Taking a hands-on approach to showcase the applications of corpora in the exploration of core topics within pragmatics, this book: * covers six key areas of corpus-pragmatic research including speech acts, deixis, pragmatic markers, evaluation, conversational structure, and multimodality; * demonstrates the use of freely-available corpora, corpus interfaces and corpus analysis tools to conduct original pragmatic analyses; * is accompanied by an e-resource which hosts multimodal data sets for additional exercises. Featuring case studies and practical tasks within each chapter, Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics is an essential guide for students and researchers studying or conducting their own corpus-based research in pragmatics.

Storytelling is a fundamental mode of everyday interaction. This book is based upon the Narrative Corpus (NC), a specialized corpus of naturally occurring narratives, and provides new paths for its study. Christoph Ruhlemann uses the NC's narrative-specific annotation and XPath and XQuery, query languages that allow the retrieval of complex data structures, to facilitate large-scale quantitative investigations into how narrators and recipients collaborate in storytelling. Empirical analyses are validated using R, a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. Using this unique data and methodological base, Ruhlemann reveals new insights, including the discovery of turntaking patterns specific to narrative, the first investigation of textual colligation in spoken data, the unearthing of how speech reports, as discourse units, form striking patterns at utterance level, and the identification of the story climax as the sequential context in which recipient dialogue is preferentially positioned.