The concept of narrative has exerted a strong influence on a wide range of fields, from the humanities such as literature (and art and entertainment) to social studies, psychiatry, and psychology. The framework that allows access to narratives across a wide range of areas, from science to the humanities, has the potential to be improved as a fusion of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Toward an Integrated Approach to Narrative Generation: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly book that focuses on the significance of narratives and narrative generation in various aspects of human society. Featuring an array of topics such as philosophy, narratology, and advertising, this book is ideal for software developers, academicians, philosophy professionals, researchers, and students in the fields of cognitive studies, literary studies, and digital content design and development.

The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets studies the discursive and pragmatic features of customer service interactions, making use of a corpus of over 1.5 million tweets from more than thirty different companies. With Twitter being used as a professional service channel by many transport operators, this book features an empirical analysis of British and Irish train companies and airlines that provide updates and travel assistance on the platform, often on a 24/7 basis. From managing crises in the midst of strike action to ensuring passengers feel comfortable on board, Twitter allows transport operators to communicate with their customers in real time. Analysing patterns of language use as well as platform specific features for their communicative functions, Ursula Lutzky enhances our understanding of customers' linguistic expectations on Twitter and of what makes for successful or unsuccessful interaction. Of interest to anyone researching discourse analysis, business communication and social media, this book's findings pave the way for practical applications in customer service.

Religious language is all around us, embedded in advertising, politics and news media. This book introduces readers to the field of theolinguistics, the study of religious language. Investigating the ways in which people talk to and about God, about the sacred and about religion itself, it considers why people make certain linguistic choices and what they accomplish. Introducing the key methods required for examining religious language, Valerie Hobbs acquaints readers with the most common and important theolinguistic features and their functions. Using critical corpus-assisted discourse analysis with a focus on archaic and other lexical features, metaphor, agency and intertextuality, she examines religious language in context. Highlighting its use in both expected locations, such as modern-day prayer and politics, and unexpected locations including advertising, sport, healthcare and news media, Hobbs analyses the shifting and porous linguistic boundaries between the religious and the secular. With discussion questions and further readings for each chapter, as well as a companion website featuring suggested answers to the reflection tasks, this is the ideal introduction to the study of religious language.

Theories of Rhetoric: An Anthology offers students a critical/cultural lens through which to view the history and definition of rhetoric and how it functions in society. The scholarly readings included in this volume illuminate the effects of gender, race, and power on the understandings of rhetoric throughout various historical periods. Students are introduced to theories that have been obscured or ignored through history but are critical for understanding the historicity of rhetoric and its relationship to power. The anthology is divided into five units. Unit I introduces students to the critical/cultural approach to theories of rhetoric, emphasizing the roles of politics and power on rhetoric. Units II through IV proceed chronologically. They provide readers with background on life during the respective time period and compelling readings that speak to the lost voices of the Classical Era, the gendered history of public speaking, the influence of Christianity on rhetoric during medieval times, visionary writing, the problematic belief systems of the Enlightenment, and more. The final unit challenges students to rethink and revise rhetorical theories according to the economic, political, and cultural influences of contemporary times. Aptly demonstrating how rhetoric has evolved over time in accordance with society and its beliefs, Theories of Rhetoric is an ideal text for courses in rhetoric and rhetorical theory.

Winner of the 2021 New Voices Book Award by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Exploring the ways in which the development of linguistic practices helped expand national politics in remote, rural areas of Venezuela, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta situates language as a mediating force in the creation of the 'magical state'. Focusing on the Waraos speakers of the Orinoco Delta, this book explores center–periphery dynamics in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic anthropological lens. Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduction' and 'translation', this book combines ethnographic and historical evidence to analyze the ideological mediation and linguistic practices involved in managing a multi-ethnic citizenry in Venezuela. Juan Luis Rodriguez shows how indigenous populations participate in the formation and contestation of state power through daily practices and the use of different speech genres, emphasising the performative and semiotic work required to produce revolutionary subjects. Establishing the centrality of language and semiosis in the constitution of authority and political power, this book moves away from seeing revolution in solely economic or ideological terms. Through the collision between Warao and Spanish, it highlights how language ideologies can exclude or integrate indigenous populations in the public sphere and how they were transformed by Hugo Chavez' revolutionary government to promote loyalty to the regime.

In Presented Discourse in Popular Science, Olga A. Pilkington explores the forms and functions of the voices of scientists in books written for non-professionals. This study confirms the importance of considering presentation of discourse outside of literary fiction: popular science uses presented discourse in ways uncommon for fiction yet not conventional for non-fiction either. This analysis is an acknowledgement of the social consequences of popularization. Discourse presentation of scientists reconstructs the world of the scientific community as a human space but also projects back into it an image of the scientist the public wants to see. At the same time, Pilkington's findings strengthen the view of popularization that rejects the notion of a strict divide between professional and popular science.

Conversation is one of the most widespread uses of human language, but what is actually happening when we interact this way? How is conversation structured? How does it function? Answering these questions and more, An Introduction to Conversation Analysis is an essential overview of this topic for students in a wide range of disciplines including sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and sociology. This is the only book you need to learn how to do conversation analysis. Beginning by positioning conversation analysis amongst other methodologies, this book explains the advantages before guiding you step-by-step through how to do conversation analysis and what it reveals about the ways language works in communication. Chapters introduce every aspect of conversation analysis logically and clearly, covering topics such as transcription, turn-taking, sequence organisation, repair, and storytelling. Now fully revised and expanded to take account of recent developments, this third edition includes: - 3 new chapters, covering action formation and epistemics, multimodality and spoken interaction, and written conversation - New topics including online and mobile technology, cross-cultural conversation and medical discourse - A glossary of key terms, brand new exercises and updated lists of further reading - A fully updated companion website, featuring tutorials, audio and video files, and a range of different exercises covering turn taking, organisation and repair

This book addresses the topics of autobiography, self-representation and status as a writer in Mahatma Gandhi's autobiographical work The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927, 1929). Gandhi remains an elusive figure, despite the volumes of literature written on him in the seven decades since his assassination. Scholars and biographers alike agree that “no work on his life has portrayed him in totality� (Desai, 2009), and, although “arguably the most popular figure of the first half of the twentieth century� and “one of the most eminent luminaries of our time,� Gandhi the individual remains “as much an enigma as a person of endless fascination� (Murrell, 2008). Yet there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with Gandhi’s autobiography, and published output has largely been concerned with mining the text for its biographical details, with little concern for how Gandhi represents himself. The author addresses this gap in the literature, while also considering Gandhi as a writer. This book provides a close reading of the linguistic structure of the text with particular focus upon Gandhi’s self-representation, drawing on a cognitive stylistic framework for analysing linguistic representations of selfhood (Emmott 2002). It will be of interest to stylisticians, cognitive linguists, discourse analysts, and scholars in related fields such as Indian literature and postcolonial studies.  

The volume explores the body part 'eye' as a source domain in conceptualization and a vehicle of embodied cognition. It includes in-depth case studies of languages situated in different cultural contexts in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. It also provides insights into cross-linguistic comparison of conceptualization patterns and semantic extension of the term 'eye' on various target domains. The contributions in the volume present a range of cultural models associated with the visual organ which take into account socio-cultural factors and language usage practices. The book offers new material and novel analyses within the subject of polysemy of body part terms. It also adds to studies on metaphor, metonymy and cultural conceptualizations within a cognitive linguistic paradigm.

The use of cognitive science in creating stories, languages, visuals, and characters is known as narrative generation, and it has become a trending area of study. Applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to story development has caught the attention of professionals and researchers; however, few studies have inherited techniques used in previous literary methods and related research in social sciences. Implementing previous narratology theories to current narrative generation systems is a research area that remains unexplored. Bridging the Gap Between AI, Cognitive Science, and Narratology With Narrative Generation is a collection of innovative research on the analysis of current practices in narrative generation systems by combining previous theories in narratology and literature with current methods of AI. The book bridges the gap between AI, cognitive science, and narratology with narrative generation in a broad sense, including other content generation, such as a novels, poems, movies, computer games, and advertisements. The book emphasizes that an important method for bridging the gap is based on designing and implementing computer programs using knowledge and methods of narratology and literary theories. In order to present an organic, systematic, and integrated combination of both the fields to develop a new research area, namely post-narratology, this book has an important place in the creation of a new research area and has an impact on both narrative generation studies, including AI and cognitive science, and narrative studies, including narratology and literary theories. It is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and students, as well as enterprise practitioners, engineers, and creators of diverse content generation fields such as advertising production, computer game creation, comic and manga writing, and movie production.

The main purpose of the book is to explore whether native speakerism has an influence on Polish language schools, using the explanatory mixed-methods design. The findings show that the ideology is present in Poland, but it is manifested in complex and subtle ways. Most prominent findings indicate a wage gap between teachers considered native speakers and their Polish counterparts, and the discrepancy between the levels of education required of the two groups, with native speakers often being employed without necessary qualifications. Finally, the findings suggest that Polish teacher education programmes should expose budding teachers to relevant literature regarding native speakerism and other issues related to native and non-native speaker status so that they can critically examine them.

This unique volume focuses on religion and spirituality, along with rituals, practices and symbols, discussed and analysed from a semiotic perspective. It covers both cognitive and social dimensions of religious practices and beliefs, various aspects of spirituality, multiple forms of representation, as well as spheres of religious beliefs and practices. The volume is an outcome of the Signum-Idea-Verbum-Opus project initiated by Umberto Eco’s keynote address during his visit at the University of �ódź in 2015. More theoretical insights and further explorations into contemporary semiosphere can be found in Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Signs, Signification and Communication and Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Texts, Genres and Representations, published by Peter Lang.