Based on data from beauty vlogs published by well-known YouTubers, Bhatia explores how they discursively negotiate multiple identities in a creative and participatory space, giving rise to complexities in the definition of categories such as expert, layperson, learner, and teacher in fluid and dynamic digital contexts. In this insightful book, Bhatia sets out to investigate the interdiscursive construction of identity on YouTube. Taking a multi-methodological approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, Bhatia examines beauty vlogs at the levels of socio-cognition, language, and genre to provide a better understanding of some of the measures of success and effect as well as new practices of expertise in online communication. The book contributes to a better understanding of how young people work online, often collaboratively, to conform to or resist mainstream notions of expertise, authenticity, race, and beauty; as well as the linguistic and semiotic tools they use to perform their identity, in order to become digital entrepreneurs and cultural influencers. Students and scholars in the field of discourse analysis, situated within the contexts of popular culture and social media, will find this book a valuable read. This volume also enhances the everyday person’s understanding of the complexities of new media communication and a new generation of cultural intermediaries.

This book explores how young children's language development is intricately connected to the context in which it takes place. The term 'context' not only specifies a geographical location, but also encompasses notions of culture, community and activity. 'Context' also refers to discourse features and functions, and to the relationships between the speakers. Every context thus embodies specific practices, intentions and values which privilege particular words, phrases, meanings and communication conventions. Each chapter highlights the dynamic, fluid and multifaceted interplays between language and context to illustrate how context, in every sense, is inextricably intertwined with young children's language and literacy learning opportunities. The chapters interrogate the topic of 'Young Children's Language in Context' by collectively exploring the multiple ways that context, broadly and variously conceptualised, intersects with language and literacy experiences. Authors examine how contexts shape language and literacy learning opportunities, how children's language shapes their social-interactive and relationship contexts, and how their language and literacy experiences are, themselves contexts which create socially and culturally endorsed ways to represent ideas, intentions and expectations. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of early childhood education and language development. It was originally published as a special issue in the International Journal of Early Years Education.

This book examines linguistic expressions of emotion in intensional contexts and offers a formally elegant account of the relationship between language and emotion. The author presents a compelling case for the view that there exist, contrary to popular belief, logical universals at the intersection of language and emotive content. This book shows that emotive structures in the mind that are widely assumed to be not only subjectively or socio-culturally variable but also irrelevant to a general theory of cognition offer an unusually suitable ground for a formal theory of emotive representations, allowing for surprising logical and cognitive consequences for a theory of cognition. Challenging mainstream assumptions in cognitive science and in linguistics, this book will appeal to linguists, philosophers of the mind, linguistic anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists of all persuasions.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was brutally killed at the hands of the police. Amplified by Donald Trump's handling of the incident, Floyd's death caused what some would term as a "racial reckoning"-a reckoning that pervaded different parts of American and even international life. As Floyd was killed during an arrest, the matter of public safety did not escape this reckoning, prompting some to call for the defunding of law enforcement and to question what is truly meant by safety in society. In Safe Space Rhetoric and Race in the Academy: A Reckoning, James Noel contends that national discussions about safety should not be excluded from conversations about safety in academia. Noel examines the presence of safe space rhetoric in academia and illustrates the ways that designating safe spaces can be a panacea for chronic institutional problems groups on campus may face. The book unflinchingly interrogates what it means to safe in academia in the hope to find a starting place for radical possibility.

This book examines the complexity of Chineseness in China and the Chinese diaspora. Using critical sociolinguistic and discourse analytical approaches, the chapters reveal the power dynamics and ideologies underlying the varied ways Chineseness is performed, represented and contested. Together they highlight four perspectives on Chineseness: the multiplicity of Chineseness, aspirational Chineseness, chronotopes of Chineseness and the cultural politics of Chineseness. It is argued that Chineseness is best understood as an ideologically-constructed variable, the articulation of which is deeply embedded within the dynamics of neoliberal globalization, rising nationalism, persistent Western hegemony, and shifting global geopolitics.

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.

The Diagnosis of Writing in a Second or Foreign Language is a comprehensive survey of diagnostic assessment of second/foreign language (SFL) writing. In this innovative book, a compelling case is made for SFL writing as an individual, contextual, and multidimensional ability, combining several theoretically informed approaches upon which to base diagnosis. Using the diagnostic cycle as the overarching framework, the book starts with the planning phase, cover design, development, and delivery of diagnostic assessment, ending with feedback and feed-forward aspects to feed diagnostic information into the teaching and learning process. It covers means to diagnose both the writing processes and products, including the design and development of diagnostic tasks and rating scales, as well as automated approaches to assessment. Also included is a range of existing instruments and approaches to diagnosing SFL writing. Addressing large-scale as well as classroom contexts, this volume is useful for researchers, teachers, and educational policy-makers in language learning.

Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World argues that our most cherished ideas about freedom-being left alone to do as we please, or uncovering the truth-have failed us. They promote the polarized thinking that blights our world. Rooted in literature, political theory and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of language, this book introduces a new concept: dialogic freedom. This concept combats polarization by inspiring us to feel freer the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others. To say that freedom is dialogic is to apply to it an idea about language. If you and I are talking, I anticipate from you a response that could be friendly, hostile, or indifferent, and this awareness helps determine what I say. If you look bored or give me a blank stare, I might not say anything at all. In this sense language is dialogic. The same can be said of freedom. Our decisions take into account the voices of others to which we feel answerable, and these voices coauthor our choices. In today's polarized world, prevailing concepts of freedom as autonomy and enlightenment have encouraged us to take refuge in echo chambers among the like-minded. Whether the subject is abortion, terrorism, or gun control, these concepts encourage us to shut out the voices of those who dare to disagree. We need a new way to think about freedom. Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World presents riveting moments of choice from Homer's Iliad, Dante's Inferno, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Milton's Paradise Lost, Melville's "Benito Cereno," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," and Morrison's Beloved, in order to advocate reading for and with dialogic freedom. It ends with a practical application to the debate about abortion and an invitation to rethink other polarizing issues. For more information, please visit: http://dialogicfreedom.weebly.com/.

This book examines the unique characteristics of teaching foreign languages to senior learners. It discusses the potential age-related barriers and learning difficulties which may be encountered in senior foreign language education as well as solutions to overcome these challenges. The author describes the processes of human aging from different perspectives and introduces the concept of lifelong learning. The book proposes classroom practices, activities and materials that may be adopted when working with senior learners which will prove useful to teachers and teacher trainers, as well as to educational policymakers and planners. Furthermore, it describes potential modifications to educational programmes that may be introduced in order to eliminate affective barriers, making the learning material relevant and motivating, and encouraging the use of adult learning strategies.

Increasingly, children grow up hearing two languages from birth. This introductory textbook shows how children learn to understand and speak those languages against the backdrop of their language learning environments. A narrative around the bilingual development of four young children with different language profiles helps to explain the latest research findings in a lively and accessible manner. The narrative describes how bilingually raised children learn to understand and use sounds, words and sentences in two languages, and how they are able to use each of their languages in socially appropriate ways. Positive attitudes towards bilingual development from the people in bilingual children's environments and their recognition that child bilingualism is not monolingualism-times-two are the main ingredients ensuring that children grow up to be happy and expert speakers of two languages.

This book offers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.

This book is all about the captivating ability that the human language has to express intricately logical (mathematical) meanings using tiny (microsemantic) morphemes as utilities. Languages mark meanings with identical inferences using identical particles and these particles thus creep up in a wide array of expressions. Because of their multi-tasking capacity to express seemingly disparate meanings, they are dubbed Superparticles. These particles are perfect windows into the interlock of several grammatical modules and the nature of the interaction of these modules through time. With a firm footing in the module where grammatical bones are built and assembled (narrow morpho-syntax), superparticles acquire varied interpretation (in the conceptual-intentional module - semantics) depending on the structure they fea- ture in. What is more, some of the interpretations these particles trigger are inferential and belong, under the standard account, to the realm of pragmatics. How can such tiny particles, rarely exceeding a syllable of sound, have such powerful and over-arching effects across the inter-modular grammatical space? This is the Platonic background against which this book is set.

Various contributors address central questions in the foundations of phonology and locate them within their larger linguistic and philosophical context. Phonology is a discipline grounded in observable facts, but like any discipline it rests on conceptual assumptions. This study investigates the nature, status and acquisition of phonological knowledge: it enquires into the conceptual and empirical foundations of phonology, considering the relation of phonology to the theory of language and other capacities of mind The authors address a wide range of interrelated questions, the most central of which is this: is phonological knowledge different from linguistic knowledge in general? They offer responses to this question from a variety of perspectives, each of which has consequences for how phonology and language are conceived. Each also involves a host of further questions concerning the modularity of mind and of language; whether phonology should be included in the language faculty; the nature-convention debate; the content of phonological elements and its relation to phonetic substance; the implications of sign languages for phonology; whether functional and variationist considerat

This collection calls greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds. The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social affordances evoke placemaking as a collaborative endeavour which allows users to create and maintain a sense of community around place as shareable or collective experience. Taken together, chapters argue for a greater emphasis on the ways in which users employ discourse to manage this physical-virtual interface in digital interactions and in turn, produce "remixed" cultural practices that draw on diverse digital semiotic resources and reflect their everyday experiences of place and location. The book explores a wide range of topics and contexts which embody these dynamics, including livestreaming platforms, mourning in the digital age, e-service encounters, and Internet forums. While the overlay of physical and virtual information on location-based media is not a new phenomenon, this volume argues that, in the face of its increasing pervasiveness, we can better understand its unfolding and future directions for research by accounting for the significance of place in today's interactions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, digital communication, pragmatics, and media studies.

This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.

David Charles presents a study of Aristotle's views on meaning, essence, necessity, and related topics. These interconnected views are central to Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. They are also highly relevant to current debates in philosophy of language. Charles aims, on the basis of a careful reading of Aristotle's texts and many subsequent works, to reach a clear understanding of his claims and arguments, and to assess their truth and their importance to philosophy ancient and modern.

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 offers a novel framework for describing and understanding student identity via the central concept of "genre practices", developed through an empirical focus on multimodality within the genre of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) undergraduate presentations. The author draws on interviews with undergraduate psychology students and recordings of their presentations to argue that by engaging in the multimodal practices of classroom presentations, presenters (re)produce both the genre and their identities as students. The resulting theory of student identity is widely applicable to tertiary settings, and the methodology described is applicable to the study of practices and identity in a range of other classroom genres. The book will therefore be of interest not only to researchers in EMI and TESOL settings, but also any tertiary-level educational practitioners whose courses include presentations.

How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour, such as systemic functional linguistics, speech acts, politeness and relevance theory, emphasising not only conceptual but also interpersonal and textual meanings. Exploiting recent corpus-based research, it suggests that much humour can be accounted for by the overriding of lexical priming. Each chapter's discussion topics and suggestions for further reading encourage a critical approach to semantic and pragmatic theory. Written by an experienced lecturer on the linguistics of the English language, this is an entertaining and user-friendly textbook for advanced students of semantics, pragmatics and humour studies.

Danilo Marcondes argues that, contrary to a traditional view maintaining that language is not given any central role in early modern philosophy, there was what could be considered an "early linguistic turn" in the seventeenth century, opening a place for the philosophy of language as part of the philosophical system under construction at that period. Skepticism and Language in Early Modern Philosophy: The Early Linguistic Turn also claims that the revival of ancient skepticism at the modern age contributed decisively towards this "linguistic turn" in so far as it attacked the "powers of the intellect" in representing reality and making knowledge possible. Marcondes argues that the concept of language itself becomes crucial to this investigation since during this period it was understood in different ways by different thinkers leading to the central role which will be given to the philosophy of language in contemporary philosophy.

This edited volume investigates the nature and possible applications of an expanded and reconceptualized theoretical construct of speaking as a dynamic socially-constructed endeavour. It addresses both theoretical perspectives and methodological procedures to define and circumscribe the assessment of contextualized speaking. The chapters focus on the complexity brought about by actual interactional competence in speaking tasks and discuss how testing and assessment models and practices can incorporate recent research findings on the inherently dynamic and situated nature of language use. The volume presents research on language assessment in a variety of languages other than English, including French, Chinese and Japanese. It also examines the role that embodied action (gaze, gesture, orientation to materials and texts in the environment) plays in assessment practices, an area that has heretofore remained under-explored. Chapter 6 is free to download as an open access publication. You can access it here: https://zenodo.org/record/5163340#.YQvJ0IhKjcs

This edited volume investigates the nature and possible applications of an expanded and reconceptualized theoretical construct of speaking as a dynamic socially-constructed endeavour. It addresses both theoretical perspectives and methodological procedures to define and circumscribe the assessment of contextualized speaking. The chapters focus on the complexity brought about by actual interactional competence in speaking tasks and discuss how testing and assessment models and practices can incorporate recent research findings on the inherently dynamic and situated nature of language use. The volume presents research on language assessment in a variety of languages other than English, including French, Chinese and Japanese. It also examines the role that embodied action (gaze, gesture, orientation to materials and texts in the environment) plays in assessment practices, an area that has heretofore remained under-explored. Chapter 6 is free to download as an open access publication. You can access it here: https://zenodo.org/record/5163340#.YQvJ0IhKjcs

Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective shows how language influences mechanisms of cognition, perception and belief, and by extension its power to manipulate thoughts and beliefs. This exciting and original work is the first to apply cognitive linguistics to the analysis of political lies and conspiracy theories, both of which have flourished in the internet age and which many argue are threatening democracy. It unravels the verbal mechanisms that make these "different truths" so effective and proliferative, dissecting the verbal structures (metaphor, irony, connotative implications etc) of the words of a variety of real-life cases in the form of politicians, conspiracy theorists and influencers. Marcel Danesi goes on to demonstrate how these linguistic structures "switch on" or "switch off" alternative mind worlds. This book is essential reading for students of cognitive linguistics and will enrich the studies of any student or researcher in language and linguistics more broadly, as well as discourse analysis, rhetoric or political science.

By providing a contemporary understanding of theories on classroom dialogue through a sociocultural lens, Sybing offers innovative ways to observe and foster more engaged interaction between teacher and student particularly in language learning contexts. How teachers interact with students has a profound impact on learning outcomes and learner development, yet remains a topic that requires more attention in language education. As research and practice in all education domains shift toward more dialogic approaches to the co-construction of knowledge, language education can also benefit from a more comprehensive approach to classroom dialogue that is relevant to interaction with language learners. This book provides a foundational understanding of theories of classroom dialogue relevant to language classroom contexts, which will guide an analysis of teacher-student interactions taken from observations of a language classroom in order to propose a framework for language classroom dialogue for theory and practice. Researchers and practitioners in language education will benefit from a comprehensive overview of discussion of and contemporary research in classroom interaction, sociocultural theory, and intercultural communication. This book offers useful guidance to scholars where such discussions are especially useful for addressing issues of native-speakerism and language ownership.