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.

A Multimodal Analysis of Picture Books for Children goes beyond the relation between the representation of reality and language alone; instead, it aims to analyze the intersemiosis between verbal and visual elements in a sample of nine picture books. The chapters included in this book take the most relevant systemic-functional and visual social semiotic theories a step further from previous studies and apply them to the genre of children's tales. Within the frameworks of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Social Semiotics, the aim is to identify the verbal and visual strategies available to the writer and illustrator (i) to convey representational meanings, (ii) to set up interpersonal relationships within the tale itself, as well as external relationships between writer and reader and, finally, (iii) to create coherent tales. This is achieved by analyzing and identifying the ideational, interpersonal and textual choices available to the writer to make meaning in picture books, and comparing them with the corresponding representational, interactive and compositional choices made by the illustrator. The analysis reveals how the verbal and visual modalities contribute to each other's meaning and makes the potential of combining verbal and non-verbal language in picture books evident.

Democracy has long been fetishized. Consequently, how we speak about democracy and what we expect from democratic governance are at odds with practice. With unflinching resolve, this book probes the theory of democracy and how the left and right are fascinated by it. In this innovative multidisciplinary study, Ralph Cintron provides sustained analysis of our political discourse. He shows not only how the rhetoric of democracy produces strong desires for social order, global wealth, and justice but also how these desires cannot be satisfied. Throughout his discussion, Cintron includes ethnographic research from fieldwork conducted over the course of twenty years in the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago, where he observes both citizens and the undocumented looking to democracy to fulfill their highest aspirations. Politicians hand out favors to the elite, developers strong-arm aldermen, and the disenfranchised have little redress. The problem, Cintron argues, is that the conditions required to put democracy into practice-territory, a bordered nation-state, citizens, property-are constituted by inequality and violence, because there is no inclusivity that does not also exclude. Drawing on ethnography, economics, political theory, and rhetorical analysis, Cintron makes his case with tremendous analytic rigor. This challenge to reassess the discourses on democracy and to consider democratic politics as always compromised by oligarchy will be of particular interest to political and rhetorical theorists.

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.

A Multimodal Analysis of Picture Books for Children goes beyond the relation between the representation of reality and language alone; instead, it aims to analyze the intersemiosis between verbal and visual elements in a sample of nine picture books. The chapters included in this book take the most relevant systemic-functional and visual social semiotic theories a step further from previous studies and apply them to the genre of children's tales. Within the frameworks of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Social Semiotics, the aim is to identify the verbal and visual strategies available to the writer and illustrator (i) to convey representational meanings, (ii) to set up interpersonal relationships within the tale itself, as well as external relationships between writer and reader and, finally, (iii) to create coherent tales. This is achieved by analyzing and identifying the ideational, interpersonal and textual choices available to the writer to make meaning in picture books, and comparing them with the corresponding representational, interactive and compositional choices made by the illustrator. The analysis reveals how the verbal and visual modalities contribute to each other's meaning and makes the potential of combining verbal and non-verbal language in picture books evident.

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

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.

Contemporary children's picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children's earliest literature. The book uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and The book uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and the discourse organization of visual meanings through choices in framing and composition (compositional meaning). The descriptions throughout are illustrated with examples from highly regarded children's picture books. This book extends previous social-semiotic accounts of the 'grammar' of the image, by focussing attention on discourse level meanings and on semantic relationships created by sequences of images. At the same time, it extends current understandings of how picture books work through its explicit and systematic account of the visual meanings and their integration with verbal aspects of the texts. It will be of interest to researchers in (multimodal) discourse analysis, systemic-functional theory and children's literature and literacy.

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.

Modern Irish is a VSO language, in common with the other Celtic languages, and the order of elements in the structure of transitive sentences is verb-subject-object. This book provides a characterisation of the nominal, verb, clause and information structure of the Irish language from a functional perspective based on Role and Reference Grammar. We include in this analysis the layered structure of the noun phrase of Irish and the various NP operators, the layered structure of the clause and the verbal system at the syntax-semantic interface along with a number of verb valence behaviours as mediated by event and argument structure. Additionally, we survey previous treatments of Irish within a functionalist approach. The verbal noun has a special place within the Irish language and its deployment is particularly productive. We examine the derivation of the verbal noun and the contexts in which it is used. We also provide an account of light verbs and complex predicates as they occur within Irish and link this to a characterisation of the information structure of Irish. We will, in addition, provide an analysis of certain linguistically interesting phenomena that are particular to Irish (and the other Celtic languages) including the two verbs of 'to be'. Within the verbal system our concern is with the relationship between the semantic representation of a verbal predicate in the context of a clause and its syntactic expression through the argument structure of the verb. We will suggest that lexical specification is via a logical representation that reflects the aspectual decomposition of the verbal predicate and that this determines, with an actor-undergoer hierarchy, the operation of the mapping into syntax via the linking system. This book will be of interest to all linguists operating within the broad functional paradigm, along with scholars, researchers and postgraduate students interested in Irish, in particular, and the Celtic languages in general.

In this book, Monika Bednarek addresses the need for a systemic analysis of television discourse and characterization within linguistics and media studies. She presents both corpus stylistics and manual analysis of linguistic and multimodal features of fictional television. The first part focuses on communicative context, multimodality, genre, audience and scripted television dialogue while the second part focuses on televisual characterization, introducing and illustrating the novel concept of expressive character identity. Aside from the study of television dialogue, which informs it throughout, this book is a contribution to studying characterization, to narrative analysis and to corpus stylistics. With its combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the book represents a wealth of exploratory, innovative and challenging perspectives, and is a key contribution to the analysis of television dialogue and character identity. The volume will be of interest to researchers and students in linguistics, stylistics and media/television studies, as well as to corpus linguists and communication theorists. The book will be a useful resource for lecturers teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in media discourse and related areas.

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.