This book builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature and film to explore the emotional aspects of humorous narrative comprehension. It investigates how the linguistic features of comic novels and short stories (by, for example, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller and Nick Hornby) can shape readers' experience of comedy, considering the ways in which moods, characters and the plot is used to trigger blends of positive and negative emotion. The book offers an approach to such features of comedy as dark humour, cringe humour and comic suspense, emphasising the relationship between humorous language and mental states which are typically considered serious. Agnes Marszalek's focus on the non-humorous side of experiencing comedy offers a key contribution to the study of humorous narratives. By investigating humour as part of a narrative world, this book moves towards addressing the complexity of the experience of humour in narrative texts, providing implications not only for the linguistics of humour, but also for those approaches to discourse comprehension which explore the affective side of engaging with texts.

Discourse studies, the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts, is a fast-moving and increasingly diverse field. With contributions from leading and upcoming scholars from across the world, and covering cutting-edge research, this Handbook offers an up-to-date survey of Discourse Studies. It is organized according to perspectives and areas of engagement, with each chapter providing an overview of the historical development of its topic, the main current issues, debates and synergies, and future directions. The Handbook presents new perspectives on well-established themes such as narrative, conversation-analytic and cognitive approaches to discourse, while also embracing a range of up-to-the-minute topics from post-humanism to digital surveillance, recent methodological orientations such as linguistic landscapes and multimodal discourse analysis, and new fields of engagement such as discourses on race, religion and money.

This book addresses different forms of discourse by analysing the emergence of power dynamics in communication and their importance in shaping the production and reception of messages. The chapters focus on specific cognitive aspects, such as the verbal expression of reasoning or emotions, as well as on linguistic and discursive processes. The interaction between reasoning, feelings, and emotions is described in relation to several fields of discourse where power dynamics may emerge and includes, among others, political, media, and academic discourse. This volume aims to include representative instances of this heterogeneity and is deeply rooted, both theoretically and methodologically, in the acknowledgment that the investigation of the complex interaction between reason and emotion in discursive productions cannot be exempt from the adoption of a multi-disciplinary perspective. By providing a critical reflection of their methodological decisions, and describing the implications of their research projects, the contributors offer insights which are relevant for students, researchers, and practitioners operating in the broad field of discourse studies.

This book explores how language ideologies have emerged for gangtaiqiang through a combination of indexical and ideological processes in televised media. Gangtaiqiang (Hong Kong-Taiwan accent), a socially recognizable form of mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin, has become a stereotype for many Chinese mainlanders who have little real-life interaction with Taiwanese people. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the author examines how Chinese millennials perceive gangtaiqiang by focusing on the following questions: 1) the role of televised media in the formation of language attitudes, and 2) how shifting gender ideologies are performed and embodied such attitudes. This book presents empirical evidence to argue that gangtaiqiang should, in fact, be conceptualized as a mediatized variety of Mandarin, rather than the actual speech of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The analyses in this book point to an emerging realignment among the Chinese towards gangtaiqiang, a variety traditionally associated with chic, urban television celebrities and young cosmopolitan types. In contrast to Beijing Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin is now perceived to be pretentious, babyish, and emasculated, mirroring the power dynamics between Taiwan and China.

This book explores discursive psychological empirical research in the context of political communication. Drawing together a well-established field of study and a variety of discursive psychology approaches the authors confront the theoretical and practical challenges that discursive psychology and political communication studies face today. Using a diverse range of approaches, including the analysis of TV shows, cartoons, social media groups and blogs, face-to-face verbal interaction, political rhetoric and mainstream news reports, the authors explain the ways in which discursive psychology can offer insight into the nature of contemporary political communications. The book offers timely and international reflections on the context of online political communication, Brexit rhetoric, prejudice discourse and political persuasion, showcasing the analytical acumen and empirical insight that can be gleaned from discursive psychology methods. Political Communication: Discursive Perspectives highlights the value of contributions from outside English speaking academia and is essential reading for academics, researchers and students interested in political communication or discursive psychology.

Facebook and Conversation Analysis investigates the structure and organization of comments on a major social media platform, Facebook, using applied conversation analysis methods. Providing previously undocumented insights into the structure of comment threads, this book demonstrates that they have a meaningful organization, rather than casually following one another. Although normally used to explore the structure of spoken conversations, in recent years conversation analysis approaches have been successfully applied to examine online interactions on Twitter, discussion forums and email exchanges. By turning this approach towards Facebook comments, Matteo Farina provides clear and important insights into the organization of this type of social interaction. Supported by a large sample of data, with findings based on a corpus of 213 comment threads, with over 1,200 comments exchanged by 266 contributors, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the way people communicate on Facebook.

This edited book engages with the richly interdisciplinary field of business and professional communication, aiming to reconcile the prescriptive ambitions of the US-centred business communication tradition with the more descriptive approach favoured in discourse studies and applied linguistics. A follow-up to the award-winning book The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), this volume brings together scholars and their recent work from wide-ranging business and professional settings to engage with the question of what counts as good data. The authors focus on four key themes - authenticity, triangulation, background and relevance - to shine a light on business and professional discourse as essential contextual and intertextual. This book will be of interest to scholars working in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and business communication, but also other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in workplace settings.

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation. In addition to theoretical and methodological reflections by leading scholars in their fields, the book contains studies of the relationship between language and argumentation from two different viewpoints. While some chapters take a specific argumentative move as their point of departure and investigate the ways in which it is linguistically manifested in discourse, other chapters start off from a linguistic construction, trying to determine its argumentative function and rhetorical potential. The Language of Argumentation documents the currently prominent research on stylistic aspects of argumentation and illustrates how the study of argumentation benefits from insights from linguistic models, ranging from theoretical pragmatics, politeness theory and metaphor studies to models of discourse coherence and construction grammar.

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 book is the first to explore the constitution of language learner agency by drawing on performativity theory, an approach that remains on the periphery of second language research. Though many scholars have drawn on poststructuralism to theorize learner identity in non-essentialist terms, most have treated agency as an essential feature that belongs to or inheres in individuals. By contrast, this work promotes a view of learner agency as inherently social and as performatively constituted in discursive practice. In developing a performativity approach to learner agency, it builds on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin along with research on 'agency of spaces' and language ideologies. Through the study of discourses produced in interviews, this work explores how immigrant small business owners co-construct their theories of agency, in relation to language learning and use. The analysis focuses on three discursive constructs produced in the interview talk-subject-predicate constructs, evaluative stance, and reported speech-and investigates their discursive effects in mobilizing ideologically normative, performatively realized agentive selves.

This book employs a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) framework to examine cycling mobility, marking a new turn in ecolinguistic discourse analysis. The author focuses specifically on environment-related arguments concerning the promotion of higher levels of cycling, mainly as a means of transport, and investigates the "US vs. "THEM" narratives present in many discourses about road users. Analysing newspaper articles, institutional documents and spoken interviews, the author searches for a positive new discourse that would inspire and encourage cycling as a habitual means of transport, rather than simply exposing ecologically destructive discourse. The book will be of interest to scholars of discourse and ecolinguistics, as well as contributing to the lively debate about how to increase cycling in fields such as sustainability, sociology, transport planning and management.

This book shows how rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry. Intervening in recent debates over formalism, historicism, and poetics, the authors show how rhythm is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. Distinct from the related terms to which it's often assimilated-scansion, prosody, meter-rhythm makes legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory. Rhythm has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice and even identity. Through exploration of rhythm's genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form offering ready-made resources for interpretation. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks' isolated descriptions of technique or inductive declarations of what rhythm "is," the essays ask what it means to think rhythm. Rhythm, the contributors show, happens relative to the body, on the one hand, and to language, on the other-two categories that are distinct from the literary, the mode through which poetics has tended to be analyzed. Beyond articulating what rhythm does to poetry, the contributors undertake a genealogical and theoretical analysis of how rhythm as a human experience has come to be articulated through poetry and poetics. The resulting work helps us better understand poetry both on its own terms and in its continuities with other experiences and other arts. Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins, Haun Saussy

David Bohm is considered one of the best physicists of all time. He also had a deep interest in human communication and creativity. Influential in both management and communication theory in what is known 'Bohm Dialogue', On Dialogue is both inspiring and pioneering. Bohm considers the origin and very meaning of dialogue, reflecting on what gets in the way of "true dialogue". He argues that dialogue, as a radical form of exploration that allows different views to be presented, leads us beyond the impasse of conflict and argument to the forming of new views. With a new foreword by Dean Rickles.

This book offers unique insight into the role that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) discourse plays in shaping the ideological terrain of contemporary Israel/Palestine through constructing the subjectivities of those who plan, teach, and learn it. While the EFL curriculum is uniform across Hebrew and Arabic-speaking educational contexts, this book traces how its cultural content reproduces dominant hegemonic ideologies, and perpetuates the social misrepresentations of the Other that underlie inequality. The language of English teaching textbooks, the way that students understand their content, and the official policy documents that guide both EFL materials and teaching practices, are all thoroughly examined through Critical Discourse Analysis. The theoretical and methodological foundation for further cross-cultural studies of Anglo-centric and other forms of hegemonic EFL discourses within local/global contexts, and for contesting their ideological effects, are also laid down. Through promoting a transformative EFL cultural discourse which hopes to position EFL teaching as a possible arena for effecting social change, this book offers a unique context for students, scholars, and educators interested in linguistics, CDA, cultural discourse studies, English in local/global contexts, and EFL education.

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.

Academic discourse is the gateway not only to educational success but to worlds of imagination, discovery and accumulated wisdom. Understanding the nature of academic discourse and developing ways of helping everyone access, shape and change this knowledge is critical to supporting social justice. Yet education research often ignores the forms taken by knowledge and the language through which they are expressed. This volume comprises cutting-edge work that is bringing together sociological and linguistic approaches to access academic discourse. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a long-established and widely known approach to understanding language. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a younger and rapidly growing approach to exploring and shaping knowledge practices. Now evermore research and practice are using these approaches together. This volume presents new advances from this inter-disciplinary dialogue, focusing on state-of-the-art work in SFL provoked by its productive dialogue with LCT. It showcases work by the leading lights of both approaches, including the foremost scholar of SFL and the creator of LCT. Chapters introduce key ideas from LCT, new conceptual developments in SFL, studies using both approaches, and guidelines for shaping curriculum and pedagogy to support access to academic discourse in classrooms. The book is essential reading for all appliable and educational linguists, as well as scholars and practitioners of education and sociology.

This book offers a transdisciplinary perspective on the question of how political legitimacy is constructed in the increasingly contested postnational setting of the European Union. Drawing on the example of the controversy about the EU constitution and the use of 'EU constitution speak' in commentaries published by Polish and French broadsheets, it reveals the transformation that constructions of political authority and association undergo when they are being transposed from the discourse field of multilateral negotiation to that of national news media. Through an original combination of the linguistic theory of discourse developed in Critical Discourse Analysis, Bourdieu's field theory and notion of symbolic power, and political thought on polity-building, it develops a framework for the discourse study of legitimation and Europeanisation, and proposes applications beyond the case studies in the book.To students of European integration, it demonstrates the potential these concepts have for unravelling the implicit practices of postnational polity building. Discourse researchers, on the other hand, will discover how detailed text analyses gain significance in debates related to the macro level of political organisation when guided by sociological and political theory.

Language Ideologies and Canadian Media explores how French and English Canadian media discuss languages and language issues, which language ideologies predominate in English and French, and whether language ideologies in traditional news media are transferred to new and social media. Using corpus linguistics and discourse analysis and a variety of different datasets ranging from print newspapers to online news, commentary and Twitter, the author argues that language ideologies in Canadian media have a bearing not only on the extent to which Canadian language policies are adopted, but also on the very way that Canadians understand themselves and their place in the nation.

A guide that offers a step-by-step process to data-driven qualitative multimodal discourse analysis Systematically Working with Multimodal Data is a hands-on guide that is theoretically grounded and offers a step-by-step process to clearly show how to do a data-driven qualitative Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). This full-color introductory textbook is filled with helpful definitions, notes, discussion points and tasks. With illustrative research examples from YouTube, an Experimental and a Video Ethnographic Study, the text offers many examples of how to deal with small to large amounts of data, including information on how to transcribe video data multimodally, including online videos, and how to analyze the data. This textbook contains ample theory, directions for literature, and a teaching guide to help with a clear understanding of how to work with multimodal data. Contains new research data, exceptional illustrations and diagrams Offers step-by-step processes of working through examples, transcriptions and online videos Goes into great depth so that students can use the book as hands-on material to engage with their own data analysis Designed to be easy-to-use with color-coded definitions, tasks, discussion points and notes Written for advanced undergraduate, graduate and PhD level students, as well as participants in research workshops, Systematically Working with Multimodal Data is an authoritative guide to understanding data-driven qualitative Multimodal Discourse Analysis.

**Shortlisted for the 2021 BAAL Book Prize for an outstanding book in the field of Applied Linguistics** Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication, Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health provides insights into the linguistic practices of members of three online support communities as they describe their experiences of living with and managing different mental health problems, including anorexia nervosa, depression and diabulimia. In examining contemporary health communication data, the book combines quantitative corpus linguistic methods with qualitative discourse analysis that draws upon recent theoretical insights from critical health sociology. Using this mixed-methods approach, the analysis identifies patterns and consistencies in the language used by people experiencing psychological distress and their role in realising varying representations of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment. Far from being neutral accounts of suffering and treating illness, corpus analysis illustrates that these interactions are suffused with moral and ideological tensions sufferers seek to collectively negotiate responsibility for the onset and treatment of recalcitrant mental health problems. Integrating corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and health sociology, this book showcases the capacity of linguistic analysis for understanding mental health discourse as well as critically exploring the potential of corpus linguistics to offer an evidence-based approach to health communication research.

This book examines the ways in which political discourses of crisis and 'newness' are (re)produced, circulated, naturalised, received and contested in Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. Going beyond the ordinariness of conventional political, human and social science methods, the book offers new and engaging multi-disciplinary approaches that treat discourse and language as important sites to encounter the politics of contested representations of the Zimbabwean crisis in the wake of the 2017 coup. The book centres discourse on new approaches to contestations around the discursive framing of various aspects of the socio-economic and political crisis related to significant political changes in Zimbabwe post-2017. Contributors in this volume, most of whom experienced the complex transition first-hand, examine some of the ways in which language functions as a socio-cultural and political mechanism for creating imaginaries, circulating, defending and contesting conceptions, visions, perceptions and knowledges of the post-Mugabe turn in the Zimbabwean crisis and its management by the "New Dispensation". This book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, language/discourse studies, African politics and culture.

This book explores the reasons behind the unexpected rise to power of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian with no political background, and offers an in-depth analysis of the populist messages he delivered to the Ukrainian people via his TV show. Taking a discourse analysis approach, the author draws on two main arguments of critical scholarship: the "populist explosion" of the recent decade came as a reaction to the inequalities and injustices of the global neoliberal order, and the success of neoliberalism can be explained by its ability to mask itself under attractive progressive covers. Developing these lines of argument, the book demonstrates not only how the "populist explosion" can lead to further neoliberalization, but also that the euphemizing effect can be achieved by mixing the virtual and the real, as in the case of Zelensky. This first of its kind study will resonate with any scholar or upper-level student working on populism, neoliberalism, political communication, media studies, political science, European studies, Ukrainian studies, and discourse analysis.

This book focuses on linguistic practices of identity construction in a popular culture media context, the Eurovision Song Contest. Subscribing to a normativity-based approach to critical discourse analysis, it studies Europeanisation as it surfaces at the discursive interface of European, national and sexual identities in Eurovision lyrics and performances. Research in critical discourse analysis that deals with Europeanisation, or the discursive work involved in European identity formation, has so far mainly studied data from EU political contexts that illustrate a top-down approach to what Europeanness means. The present book complements this earlier research in several ways, focusing on the linguistic construction of identities, and its interrelation with non-linguistic modes of signification in the Eurovision Song Contest. Discursive mechanisms that prove to be central for the normative shifts of Europeanisation in the given context are de-essentialisation, inclusion, camp, crossing and languaging.

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

Exploring the ways in which language and conflict are intertwined and interrelated, this volume examines the patterns of public discourse in Ukraine and Russia since the beginning of the Ukrainian Crisis in 2014. It investigates the trends in language aggression, evaluation, persuasion and other elements of conflict communication related to the situation. Through the analysis of the linguistic features of salient discourses and prevalent narratives constructed by different social groups, Language of Conflict reflects competing worldviews of various stakeholders in this conflict and presents multiple, often contradictory, visions of the circumstances. Contributors from Ukraine, Russia and beyond investigate discursive representations of the most important aspects of the crisis: its causes and goals, participants and the values and ideologies of the opposing factions. They focus on categorization, stance, framing, (de)legitimation, manipulation and coping strategies while analysing the ways in which the stress produced by social discord, economic hardship, and violence shapes public discourse. Primarily focusing on informal communication and material gathered from online sources, the collection provides insight into the ways people directly affected by the crisis think about and respond to it. The volume acknowledges the communicators' active role in constructing the (often incompatible) discursive images of the conflict and concentrates on the conscious and strategic use of linguistic resources in negative and aggressive communication.