This monograph proposes a new (dialogical) way of studying the different forms of correlational inference, known in the Islamic jurisprudence as qiyas. According to the authors' view, qiyas represents an innovative and sophisticated form of dialectical reasoning that not only provides new epistemological insights into legal argumentation in general (including legal reasoning in Common and Civil Law) but also furnishes a fine-grained pattern for parallel reasoning which can be deployed in a wide range of problem-solving contexts and does not seem to reduce to the standard forms of analogical reasoning studied in contemporary philosophy of science and argumentation theory. After an overview of the emergence of qiyas and of the work of al-Shirazi penned by Soufi Youcef, the authors discuss al-Shirazi's classification of correlational inferences of the occasioning factor (qiyas al-'illa). The second part of the volume deliberates on the system of correlational inferences by indication and resemblance (qiyas al-dalala, qiyas al-shabah). The third part develops the main theoretical background of the authors' work, namely, the dialogical approach to Martin-Loef's Constructive Type Theory. The authors present this in a general form and independently of adaptations deployed in parts I and II. Part III also includes an appendix on the relevant notions of Constructive Type Theory, which has been extracted from an overview written by Ansten Klev. The book concludes with some brief remarks on contemporary approaches to analogy in Common and Civil Law and also to parallel reasoning in general.

This book focuses on the multifarious aspects of 'fuzzy boundaries' in the field of discourse studies, a field that is marked by complex boundary work and a great degree of fuzziness regarding theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and the use of linguistic categories. Discourse studies is characterised by a variety of theoretical frameworks and disciplinary fields, research methodologies, and lexico-grammatical categories. The contributions in this book explore some of the nuances and implications of the fuzzy boundaries in these areas, resulting in a wide-reaching volume which will be of interest to students and scholars of discourse studies in fields including sociology, linguistics, international relations, philosophy, literary criticism and anthropology.

This book places Li Ji (the Book of Rites) back in the overall context of "books," "rites" and its research history, drawing on the interrelations between myth, ritual and "materialized" symbols to do so. Further, it employs the double perspectives of "books" and "rites" to explore the sources and symbols of the capping ceremony (rites of passage), decode the prototypes of Miao and Ming Tang, and restore the discourse patterns of "people of five directions." The book subsequently investigates the formation and function of the Yue Ling calendar and disaster ritual, so as to reveal the human cognitive encoding and metalanguage of ritual behavior involved. In the process, it demonstrates that Li Ji, its textual memories, archaeological remains and "traditional ceremony" narratives are all subject to the latent myth coding mechanism in China's cultural system, while the "compilation" and "materialized" remains are merely forms of ritual refactoring, interpretation and exhibition, used when authority seeks the aid of ritual civilization to strengthen its legitimacy and maintain the social order.

Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt eine theoretische und methodische Auseinandersetzung mit der Diskurslinguistik sowie eine empirische Umsetzung dar. Diskurslinguistik im Anschluss an Foucault befasst sich mit textubergreifenden, sprachlichen Wirklichkeitskonstitutionsprozessen, die zugleich als kulturell und weltanschaulich bedingtes Wissen aufzufassen sind. Diskurslinguistik wird handlungstheoretisch fundiert und darauf aufbauend ein Mehrebenendiskursanalysemodell als methodisches Verfahren entwickelt, das sprachstrukturelle, semantische, funktionale sowie situativ-kontextuelle Analysedimensionen umfasst. Am Beispiel des oeffentlich-politischen Bioethikdiskurses um Stammzellforschung wird gezeigt, wie Schlusselwoerter, Metaphern und Argumentationstopoi in den je eigenen weltanschaulichen Argumentationskontext gestellt und semantisch fixiert werden, was zu einer perspektivierten Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit fuhrt. Kulturelle und weltanschauliche Voraussetzungen manifestieren sich dementsprechend immer schon in diskurstypischen Sprachgebrauchen, die als semantische Grundfiguren das diskursrelevante Hintergrundwissen bilden.

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.

This book presents reflections on the relationship between narratives and argumentative discourse. It focuses on their functional and structural similarities or dissimilarities, and offers diverse perspectives and conceptual tools for analyzing the narratives' potential power for justification, explanation and persuasion. Divided into two sections, the first Part, under the title "Narratives as Sources of Knowledge and Argument", includes five chapters addressing rather general, theoretical and characteristically philosophical issues related to the argumentative analysis and understanding of narratives. We may perceive here how scholars in Argumentation Theory have recently approached certain topics that have a close connection with mainstream discussions in epistemology and the cognitive sciences about the justificatory potential of narratives. The second Part, entitled "Argumentative Narratives in Context", brings us six more chapters that concentrate on either particular functions played by argumentatively-oriented narratives or particular practices that may benefit from the use of special kinds of narratives. Here the focus is either on the detailed analysis of contextualized examples of narratives with argumentative qualities or on the careful understanding of the particular demands of certain well-defined situated activities, as diverse as scientific theorizing or war policing, that may be satisfied by certain uses of narrative discourse.

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.

This book analyses the Youth Justice Conferencing Program in New South Wales, Australia. Exploring this form of diversionary justice from the perspectives of functional linguistics and performance studies, the authors combine close textual analysis with ethnographic research methodologies. They examine how participants use the discourse semantic resources available to them to achieve such outcomes as reparation for the victim, reintegration of the offender into the community, and reconciliation between the various parties. This uniquely-researched work is sure to be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Veiled women in the West appear menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is beneath the veil more than a woman? This book investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in a 'natural' body, in the index of flesh. The impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. What lies at the heart of the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman is the West's desire to save itself. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women's bodies, but inversely, insists on the corporeal boundaries of the West's mode of knowing and truth-making. The book contends that the imagination of unveiling restores the West's sense of its own power and enables it to intrude where it is 'other' - thus making it the centre and the agent by promising universal freedom, all the while stifling the question of what freedom is.

This book brings together contributions from a range of social welfare settings, including child welfare, unemployment, mental health and substance abuse treatment, to examine how interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are realised or challenged in multi-agency meetings. It provides empirically grounded analyses of specific aspects of multi-agency work and offers a distinctive conceptual framework for understanding and analysing interaction during meetings in various social welfare settings. Based on audio and video recordings, the authors provide clear examples of actual practices of social welfare professionals and demonstrate how the realisation of collaborative and integrated welfare policy is contingent on effective interactional practices between professionals and service users.

Discourses of Southeast Asia presents the latest Southeast Asian research in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL provides a sophisticated social semiotic architecture for exploring meaning in languages and texts in the context of Southeast Asia. This edited volume examines the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions in the domains of education, media, translation and language typology. It applies SFL in text analysis so as to be relevant to theory, research and professional practice. This book brings together 12 original chapters by both seasoned and emerging scholars. Their chapters study the 'native' languages of Southeast Asia: Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese, and relatively newer languages in Southeast Asia: English and Mandarin. The chapters analyze a variety of texts, namely advertisements, classroom interactions, corporate reports, dramas, interviews, media reports, narratives, novels, textbooks and video clips. This volume captures the exciting and productive state of the art of SFL in Southeast Asia. It will be of particular interest to scholars trying to understand the application of SFL in this region.

This book analyses the discourse on Pakistan by exploring the knowledge production processes through which the International Relations community, Asian and South Asian area study centres, and think-tanks construct Pakistan's identity. This book does not attempt to trace how Pakistan has been historically defined, explained, or understood by the International Relations interpretive communities or to supplant these understandings with the author's version of what Pakistan is. Instead, this study focuses on investigating how the identity of Pakistan is fixed or stabilized via practices of the interpretive communities. In other words, this book attempts to address the following questions: How is the knowledge on Pakistan produced discursively? How is this knowledge represented in the writings on Pakistan? What are the conditions under which it is possible to make authoritative claims about Pakistan?

This volume comprises a selection of contributions to the theorizing about argumentation that have been presented at the 9th conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), held in Amsterdam in July 2018. The chapters included provide a general theoretical perspective on central topics in argumentation theory, such as argument schemes and the fallacies. Some contributions concentrate on the treatment of the concept of conductive argument. Other contributions are dedicated to specific issues such as the justification of questions, the occurrence of mining relations, the role of exclamatives, argumentative abduction, eudaimonistic argumentation and a typology of logical ways to counter an argument. In a number of cases the theoretical problems addressed are related to a specific type of context, such as the burden of proof in philosophical argumentation, the charge of committing a genetic fallacy in strategic manoeuvring in philosophy, the necessity of community argument, and connection adequacy for arguments with institutional warrants. The volume offers a great deal of diversity in its breadth of coverage of argumentation theory and wide geographic representation from North and South America to Europe and China.

This book is the second in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. It focuses on meaning and culture, with sections on "Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning" and "Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context". Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This book is the third in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. This third volume explores the potential of Minimal English, a recent offshoot of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, with special reference to its use in Language Teaching and Intercultural Communication. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This innovative book examines the discourse of reality television, and the elasticity of language in the popular talent show The Voice from a cross-cultural perspective. Analysing how and why elastic language is used in persuasion and comforting, a comparison between Chinese and English is made, and the authors highlight the special role that elastic language plays in effective interactions and strategic communication. Through the lens of the language variance of two of the world's most commonly spoken languages, the insights and resources provided by this book are expected to advance knowledge in the fields of contrastive pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, and inform strategies in bridging different cultures. This study highlights the need to give the elastic use of language the attention it deserves, and reveals how language is non-discrete and strategically stretchable. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students engaged in elastic/vague language studies, cross-cultural pragmatics, media linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

This book explores how news media construct social issues and events and thereby convey certain perceptions within the scope of framing theory. By operationalizing media framing as a process of interpretation through defining problem, diagnosing causes, making moral judgments and suggesting solutions, the book proposes a systematic and transparent approach to images in news discourse. Based on a frame analysis, it examines how German news media framed a list of China-related issues and events, and thereby conveyed particular beliefs and opinions on this country. Moreover, it investigates whether there were dominant patterns of interpretation and the extent to which diverse views were evident by comparing two major daily newspapers with opposite political orientations - the FAZ and the taz. Motivated by the relationship between image and reality, the book explores image formation and persistence from media construction of meaning and human cognitive complexity in perceiving others. Media select certain issues and events and then interpret them from particular perspectives. A variety of professional and non-professional factors behind news making may result in biased representations. In addition, from a social psychological perspective, inaccurate perceptions of foreign cultures may arise from categorical thinking, biased processing of stimulus information, intergroup conflicts of interest and in-group favoritism. Accordingly, whether media coverage deviates from reality is not the main concern of this book; instead, it emphasizes the underlying logics upon which the conclusions and judgments were drawn. It therefore contributes to a rational understanding of Western discourse and holds practical implications for both Chinese public diplomacy and a more constructive role of news media in promoting the understanding of others.

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.

This book introduces multimodality and technology as key concepts for understanding learning in the 21st century. The author investigates how a nationwide socio-educational policy in Uruguay becomes recontextualised across time/space scales, impacting interaction and learning in an English as a Foreign Language classroom. The book introduces scalar analysis to better understand the situated and fractal nature of education policy as meaning-making, subsequently defining learning from a multimodal socio-semiotic approach. The analytical integration of different policy scales shows what policy means to various stakeholders, and what learning means for students and teachers. This depends both on how they position themselves and how they engage with the policy educational media. This innovative book will appeal to students and scholars of technology and learning, as well as multimodality.

This book offers a concise but comprehensive entry-level guide to the study of meaning in context. There can be a big difference between what a speaker says and what they mean - i.e. between literal meaning and intended meaning. A speaker who says I need coffee can mean anything from 'Please buy more coffee' to 'I'm really sleepy'. How is a hearer to know? In this book, Betty Birner explores how we get from what is said to what is meant, from the perspective of both the speaker and the hearer, dealing with a range of context-dependent issues in language along the way: literal and non-literal meaning, implicature, speech acts, reference, definiteness, presupposition, and information structure. She reveals how language users can infer each other's meanings using not just what is being said but also the context and an assumption of rationality and cooperation. This slim guide summarizes the most important and foundational theories in the field of linguistic pragmatics, illustrated with plenty of real-life examples, and including a helpful glossary of key terms. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book will appeal to a wide range of readers, from undergraduate and graduate students of pragmatics to general readers interested in how we successfully communicate with one another.

Looking at discretion broadly as the exercise of controlled freedom, this edited volume introduces insights from a range of social sciences perspectives. Traditionally, discussions of discretion have drawn on legal notions of the appropriate exercise of legitimate authority specified by legislators. However, empirical and theoretical studies in the social sciences have extended our understanding of discretion, moving us beyond a narrow legal view. Contributors from a range of disciplines explore the idea of discretion and related notions of freedom and control across social and political practices and in different contexts. As this complex and important topic is discussed and examined, both total control and unconstrained freedom appear to be illusions.

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.

This book takes an innovative view of language and politics, charting the terrain of political identities and discourses in New Zealand through detailed linguistic analysis of interactions with its voters. The author first sets out the geographical and sociopolitical context, examining how the constraints of a small and isolated country interact with widespread social values such as egalitarianism. He then delves into the multiple nature of identities and explores how Kiwis form their political selves through informal talk with others and in engagement with their physical and discursive surroundings. In doing so, the author provides an in-depth exploration of New Zealand political culture, identity and discourse, and sheds light on how we use language to become political people. This book will be of interest to linguists, political scientists and sociologists working with discourse analysis.

This book revisits discourse analytic practice, analyzing the idea that the field has access to, provides, or even constitutes a 'toolbox' of methods. The precise characteristics of this toolbox have remained largely un-theorized, and the author discusses the different sets of tools and their combinations, particularly those that cut across traditional divides, such as those between disciplines or between quantitative and qualitative methods. The author emphasizes the potential value of integrating methods in terms of triangulation and its specific benefits, arguing that current trends in Open Science require Discourse Studies to re-examine its methodological scope and choices, and move beyond token acknowledgements of 'eclecticism'. In-depth case studies supplement the methodological discussion and demonstrate the challenges and benefits of triangulation. This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in Discourse Studies, particularly those with an interest in combining methods and working across disciplines.