Against a background of the ongoing crisis of global capitalism and the fracturing of the neoliberal project, this book provides a detailed account of the ways in which language is profoundly imbricated in the neoliberalising of the fabric of social life. With chapters from a cast list of international scholars covering topics such as the commodification of education and language, unemployment, and the governmentality of the self, and discussion chapters from Monica Heller and Jackie Urla bringing the various strands together, the book ultimately helps us to understand how language is part of political economy and the everyday making and remaking of society and individuals. It provides both a theoretical framework and a significant methodological "tool-box" to critically detect, understand, and resist the impact of neoliberalism on everyday social spheres, particularly in relation to language. Presenting richly empirical studies that expand our understanding of how neoliberalism as a regime of truth and as a practice of governance performs within the terrain of language, this book is an essential resource for researchers and graduate students in English language, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related areas.

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 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.

The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace provides a comprehensive survey of linguistic research on language in the workplace written by top scholars in the field from around the world. The Handbook covers theoretical and methodological approaches, explores research in different types of workplace settings, and examines some key areas of workplace talk that have been investigated by workplace researchers. Issues of identity have become a major focus in recent workplace research and the Handbook highlights some core issues of relevance in this area, such as gender, leadership, and intercultural communication. As the field has developed, applications of workplace research for both native and non-native speakers have emerged. Insights can inform and improve input from practitioners training workers in a range of fields and across a variety of contexts, and the Handbook foregrounds some of the ways workplace research can do this. This is an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate students interested in learning more about workplace discourse.

This book conducts a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study of 'women's language' as it pertains to feminine beauty. It examines the ideological constructs of beauty and femininity in the cultures of Japan and Russia, as embodied through televised beauty ads, and relates them to the real-world language practices of Japanese and Russian women. The author traces the reciprocal connection between women's real and imagined language in the construction of ideals of beauty and femininity, revealing the complex ways women respond to ideological expectations regarding language use: assimilating, transforming, and subverting ideologized language and the assumptions implicit in it. She also demonstrates ways in which women alter the texture of language by appropriating 'masculine' language for their own purposes, shifting the meaning and correlates of linguistic items and structures. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, language and gender, cultural and media studies, and Russian and Japanese culture.

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 takes the form of a dialogue. It presents two authors, specialized in the phenomenolog , posing questions to each other and offering complex answers for critical discussion. The book includes both presentation of different communication schools and philosophizing on the issues of communication. The authors debate numerous topics by providing the definition and etymology of communication, examining the limits of communication, and using a poli-logical base of communication. The issue which pervades all domains is that of mediation: how things, such as identities, styles, and bodies are mediated by culture, history, and tradition, and what the limits are of such mediation. This question leads to more complex issues of "mediated mediations" such that an explication of one medium is framed by another medium, leading to a question of meta-language as a fundamental, unmediated medium. This involves some fine points of mediation: perspectivity, discursivity, ethics of communication, ideology, private and public. Throughout the mutual, interrogative dialogue, the authors touch upon, but avoid the daunting commitment to, a theory of metacommunication, as well as the "transcendental" problematic of accessing the numerous theoretical, thematic, and historical aspects of communication.

This book explores the ways in which handheld networked devices can be used to enhance and augment interpersonal communication. The author examines in depth how the addition of visual and multimodal input, access to online search engines and the inclusion of participants from distant geographical locations (either synchronously or asynchronously) affects our face to face interactions. Presenting research data from several years of autoethnographic observation, this balanced work reveals the consequences, both positive and negative, of technology-dependent forms of discourse. In doing so, this sociolinguistic perspective fills a gap in the current literature and indicates possible future directions for the study of augmented communication. It will appeal in particular to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and digital humanities.

This book is an in-depth qualitative linguistic study of loneliness disclosures in interviews with undergraduate students in the UK. While much loneliness research has been undertaken in the areas of psychology, social policy and education, such studies have prioritised the social factors behind mental distress without paying explicit attention to the medium in which such distress is communicated and embodied (i.e. language). This monograph supplements this growing body of work by arguing for a stronger focus on the insights which linguistic analysis can provide for investigating how and why loneliness is disclosed by Higher Education students. This book is the first study to address discourses of loneliness in Higher Education specifically from a linguistic perspective, and will be of interest to education and healthcare professionals, counselling and welfare providers, and students and scholars of discourse analysis and linguistics.

Food Discourse explores a fascinating, yet virtually unexplored research area: the language of food used on television cooking shows. It shows how the discourse of television cooking shows on the American television channel Food Network conveys a pseudo-relationship between the celebrity chef host and viewers. Excerpts are drawn from a variety of cooking show genres (how-to, travel, reality, talk, competition), providing the data for this qualitative investigation. Richly interdisciplinary, the study draws upon discourse analysis, narrative, social semiotics, and media communication in order to analyze four key linguistic features - recipe telling, storytelling, evaluations, and humor - in connection with the themes of performance, authenticity, and expertise, essential components in the making of celebrity chefs. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to scholars of linguistics, media communication, and American popular culture. Further, in light of the international reach and influence of American television and celebrity chefs, it has a global appeal.

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.

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?

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 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 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.

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 presents the original concept of the 'dispositif of age', combining post-Foucauldian analytics of the dispositif, discourse and governmentality with the historical semantics of Reinhart Koselleck to explore the functions of the notion of youth in the regulation of social life. Making use of examples from sources including scientific and media statements, youth policy programmes, and strategies at international (European) and local (Polish) levels, the author shows how this concept of youth supports processes of social regulation and contributes to the implementation of political goals as specific responses to issues such as radicalization and violence, unemployment, and economic crisis. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of discourse and youth studies, but also to all post-Foucauldian researchers with an interest in going beyond simple 'applicationism'.

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 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.

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 provides a detailed examination of argumentative interactions in families with young children during mealtimes. It explores both the restrictions and the opportunities family mealtimes present and the types of issues addressed through argumentative discussions. Antonio Bova puts forward an in depth analysis of how both parents and children contribute to the inception and development of an argumentative discussion, and the categories of argument adopted most often by the two groups. Drawing upon a wealth of qualitative data from the recorded mealtime conversations of Italian and Swiss-Italian middle-class families, the author examines the crucial importance of argumentative interactions between parents and children during mealtimes. This book builds on recent advances in the study of the psychology of social interaction and sheds new light on the importance of argumentation at all stages of life.

This book investigates the ways in which context shapes how cognitive challenges and strengths are navigated and how these actions impact the self-esteem of individuals with dementia and their conversational partners. The author examines both the language used and face maintenance in everyday social interaction through the lens of epistemic discourse analysis. In doing so, this work reveals how changes in cognition may impact the faces of these individuals, leading some to feel ashamed, anxious, or angry, others to feel patronized, infantilized, or overly dependent, and still others to feel threatened in both ways. It further examines how discursive choices made by healthy interactional partners can minimize or exacerbate these feelings. This path-breaking work will provide important insights for students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, medical anthropology, and health communication.

"This book provides a significant contribution to the discursive analysis of service encounters. It demonstrates, in a very elegant way and based on a solid empirical investigation, how mediated discourse analysis may be enacted to describe and understand the social and cultural practices associated with space, time, ethnicity and identity construction. A must-read for researchers and practitioners interested in language use in professional contexts." -- Laurent Filliettaz, University of Geneva, Switzerland "This book contains one of the most thorough and productive applications of the theoretical and analytical apparatus of mediated discourse analysis I have come across, demonstrating how the moment-by-moment ways that people appropriate discourse to perform mundane daily activities such as shopping contribute to the broader maintenance of social identities and communities. The analysis is meticulously undertaken and communicated in clear, elegant prose. This book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of discourse studies." -- Rodney Jones, University of Reading, UK This book investigates the social practices of service encounters in the context of a typical Persian shop in Sydney. Although by nature goal-oriented speech events, the book posits that service encounters are not simply limited to achieving business transactions, but that they incorporate a range of social and discursive practices. Analysing ethnographic data using the frameworks of Mediated and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the author explores how people use everyday activities to enact social and cultural identities, construct linguistic authenticity, and maintain strong economic ties to the community. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the sociolinguistics of ethnic/ minority sites and urban spaces. Dariush Izadi holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics and teaches Language and Linguistics Research Methods, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis and TESOL Units at Western Sydney University, Australia. In his work, he applies mediated discourse and nexus analysis to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplish their actions in social settings.