Introducing the key questions and challenges faced by the researcher of digital discourse, this book provides an overview of the different methodological dimensions associated with this type of research. Bringing together a team of experts, chapters guide students and novice researchers through how to conduct rigorous, accurate, and ethical research with data from a wide range of online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and online dating apps. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis focuses on the key issues that any digital discourse analyst must consider, before tackling more specific topics and approaches, including how to work with multilingual or multimodal data. Emphasizing concrete, practical advice and illustrated with plentiful examples from research studies, each chapter introduces a new research dimension for consideration, briefly exploring how other discourse analysts have approached the topic before using an in-depth case study to highlight the main challenges and provide guidance on methodological decision-making. Supported by a range of pedagogical tools, including discussion questions and annotated further-reading lists, this book is an essential resource for students and any researcher new to analyzing digital discourse.

Synthesising diverse research avenues for politics, discourse, and political discourse, this cutting-edge Handbook examines the formative traditions, current theoretical and methodological landscape, and genres and domains over which political discourse extends. Drawing on rich and dynamic models in critical cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, metaphor analysis, context, and multimodality studies, leading scholars provide tools to analyse a broad range of traditional and modern genres of political communication. Taking a historical dive into formative traditions in political discourse, including rhetoric and social and poststructuralist theories, this Handbook revises these classical models of political communication against new empirical contexts, to offer the most fruitful, objective and universal methodologies to date. Examining propaganda, advertising, political speeches and election campaigns, this Handbook pays particular attention to newly arising genres and discourses which reflect the momentous changes in the public domain, fuelled by recent and developing events including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. Drawing diverse insights from a wide array of disciplines, this Handbook will prove invaluable to students and scholars of political theory, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies who are looking for innovative methodologies with which to analyse political discourse.

As we move into the 21st century, broader approaches in governments, industries, and universities are necessary. Governments are increasingly forced to collaborate with other governments to address problems beyond the control of individual nations. Industries increasingly find it difficult to survive without pursuing global markets. Also, universities are moving from departmental to interdisciplinary approaches to curriculums. These changes call for greater scope in goals, social structures, and methodologies. Technical communication is an example of a field deeply involved in all of these institutions and prompted toward greater scope in the engagement of problems. Rhetorical Scope and Performance examines the history of the narrowness of goals, social structures, and methodologies associated with the field of technical communication in the second half of the 20th century. Whitburn traces some of the roots of this narrowness back to a philosophical tradition stemming from Plato, Aristotle, the religious philosophers, and the apologists for science. As an alternative to the narrowness of the philosophical tradition, this work traces a rhetorical tradition stemming from Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, and the Renaissance that promotes greater scope in the engagement of problems. This alternative also provides a theoretical construct more appropriate for many of today's needs than the philosophical tradition. Using the history of technical communication as an example, this book shows how an Isocratean rhetoric can broaden and therefore improve our approaches to decision making in the 21st century.

Changing practices and perceptions of parenthood and family life have long been the subject of intense public, political and academic attention. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role digital media and technologies can play in these shifts, yet this topic has been under-explored from a discourse analytical perspective. In response, this book's investigation of everyday parenting, family practices and digital media offers a new and innovative exploration of the relationship between parenting, family practices, and digitally mediated connection. This investigation is based on extensive digital and interview data from research with nine UK-based single and/or lesbian, gay or bisexual parents who brought children into their lives in non-traditional ways, for example through donor conception, surrogacy or adoption. Through a novel approach that combines constructivist grounded theory with mediated discourse analysis, this book examines connected family lives and practices in a way that transcends the limiting social, biological and legal structures that still dominate concepts of family in contemporary society.

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.

It has long been an assumption in the field of English as a foreign language that those who speak the language as natives pronounce the way it should be taught. Most influential figures in the field have been outsiders, and the subject has accordingly not been really defined as the teaching of English as a foreign language, but as the teaching of English to foreigners: quite a different thing. This book discusses the designing of programs for learning which will take the different kinds of foreign-ness into account.

The volume offers an up-to-date overview of the influence of English on Italian, bringing together the linguistic and the cultural dimensions. The history of language contact between Italy and Anglo-American societies is the basis for understanding lexical borrowing and for identifying the domains of vocabulary more intensely affected in time. Drawing on previous research and on existing lexicographic evidence, this book presents a typology of borrowings based on a new, usage-based word list of Italian Anglicisms which is part of a larger multilingual project (GLAD - Global Anglicism Database). The topics covered are the number of Anglicisms in Italian, their frequency in specialist fields and registers, the blurred area between borrowing and the circulation of international vocabulary, luxury loans and casuals. The book rounds up with the cultural debate on English-only education, which has recently stirred purist concerns, marking an attitudinal shift of Italian from an 'open' to a 'protectionist' language towards exogenous influences. This book is addressed primarily to scholars and university students, but also to a lay audience of non-experts, interested in the linguistic and cultural contacts between English and Italian.

What occurs within coma? What does the coma patient experience? How does the patient perceive the world outside of coma, if at all? The simple answer to these questions is that we don't know. Yet the sheer volume of literary and media texts would have us believe that we do. Examining representations of coma and brain injury across a variety of texts, this book investigates common tropes and linguistic devices used to portray the medical condition of coma, giving rise to universal mythologies and misconceptions in the public domain. Matthew Colbeck looks at how these texts represent, or fail to represent, long-term brain injury, drawing on narratives of coma survivors that have been produced and curated through writing groups he has run over the last 10 years. Discussing a diverse range of cultural works, including novels by Irvine Welsh, Stephen King, Tom McCarthy and Douglas Coupland, as well as film and media texts such as The Sopranos, Kill Bill, Coma and The Walking Dead, Colbeck provides an explanation for our fascination with coma. With a proliferation of misleading stories of survival in the media and in literature, this book explores the potential impact these have upon our own understanding of coma and its victims.

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.

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.

Although US history is marred by institutionalized racism and sexism, postracial and postfeminist attitudes drive our polarized politics. Violence against people of color, transgendered and gay people, and women soar upon the backdrop of Donald Trump, Tea Party affiliates, alt-right members like Richard Spencer, and right-wing political commentators like Milo Yiannopoulos who defend their racist and sexist commentary through legalistic claims of freedom of speech. While more institutions recognize the volatility of these white men's speech, few notice or have thoughtfully considered the role of white nationalist, alt-right, and conservative white women's messages that organizationally preserve white supremacy. In Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet, author Wendy K. Z. Anderson details how white nationalist and alt-right women refine racist rhetoric and web design as a means of protection and simultaneous instantiation of white supremacy, which conservative political actors including Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ivanka Trump have amplified through transnational politics. By validating racial fears and political divisiveness through coded white identity politics, postfeminist and motherhood discourse functions as a colorblind, gilded cage. Rebirthing a Nation reveals how white nationalist women utilize colorblind racism within digital space, exposing how a postfeminist framework becomes fodder for conservative white women's political speech to preserve institutional white supremacy.

The use of literary texts in language classrooms is firmly established, but new questions arise with the transfer to remote teaching and learning. How do we teach literature online? How do learners react to being taught literature online? Will new genres emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic? Is the literary canon changing? This volume celebrates the vitality of literary and pedagogic responses to the pandemic and presents research into the phenomena observed in this evolving field. One strand of the book discusses literary outputs stimulated by the pandemic as well as past pandemics. Another strand looks at the pedagogy of engaging learners with literature online, examining learners of different ages and of different proficiency levels and different educational backgrounds, including teacher education. Finally, a third strand looks at the affordances of various technologies for teaching online and the way they interact with literature and with language learning. The contributions in this volume take literature teaching online away from static lecturing strategies, present numerous options for online teaching, and provide research-based grounding for the implementation of these pedagogies.

In Present-Day English, the only flexible sentence constituent in unmarked declarative sentences is the adverbial, which can often be placed in initial, medial, or end position. This book presents the first empirical and corpus-based study on the usage patterns and functions of medially-placed linking adverbials in conceptually-written academic English. By combining quantitative with detailed qualitative analyses of selected corpus examples, the present study explores whether the placement of linking adverbials in medial position can be regarded as a focusing strategy, similar to focusing adverbs and cleft sentences. Moreover, it investigates whether different medial positions are associated with distinct discourse functions, such as the marking of contrastive topics or different focus meanings.

Marking the 50th anniversary of one among this philosopher’s most distinguished pieces, Blumenberg’s Rhetoric proffers a decidedly diversified interaction with the essai polyvalently entitled ‘Anthropological Approach to the Topicality (or Currency, Relevance, even actualitas) of Rhetoric’ ("Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik"), first published in 1971. Following Blumenberg’s lead, the contributors consider and tackle their topics rhetorically—treating (inter alia) the variegated discourses of Phenomenology and Truthcraft, of Intellectual History and Anthropology, as well as the interplay of methods, from a plurality of viewpoints. The diachronically extensive, disciplinarily diverse essays of this publication—notably in the current lingua franca—will facilitate, and are to conduce to, further scholarship with respect to Blumenberg and the art of rhetoric. With contributions by Sonja Feger, Simon Godart, Joachim Küpper, DS Mayfield, Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, Daniel Rudy Hiller, Katrin Trüstedt, Alexander Waszynski, Friedrich Weber-Steinhaus, Nicola Zambon.

This book is a pragma-stylistic study of Ian McEwan's fiction, providing a qualitative analysis of his selected novels using (im)politeness theory. (Im)politeness is investigated on two levels of analysis: the level of the plot and the story world (intradiegetic level) and the level of the communication between the implied author and implied reader in fiction (extradiegetic level). The pragmatic theory of (im)politeness serves the aim of internal characterisation and helps readers to better understand and explain the characters' motivations and actions, based on the stylistic analysis of their speech and thoughts and point of view. More importantly, the book introduces the notion of "the impoliteness of the literary fiction" - a state of affairs where the implied author (or narrator) expresses their impolite beliefs to the reader through the text, which has face-threatening consequences for the audience, e.g. moral shock or disgust, dissociation from the protagonist, feeling hurt or 'put out'. Extradiegetic impoliteness, one of the key characteristics of McEwan's fiction, offers an alternative to the literary concept of "a secret communion of the author and reader" (Booth 1961), describing an ideal connection, or good rapport, between these two participants of fictional communication. This book aims to unite literary scholars and linguists in the debate on the benefits of combining pragmatics and stylistics in literary analysis, and it will be of interest to a wide audience in both fields.

This monograph presents a contrastive-corpus analysis of the semantic category of gratification. It takes as a case study the verb reward and its various forms in Polish and in English, as prototypical of the semantics of gratification. The study, set predominantly in the framework of semantic syntax, and drawing from the theory of valence and frame semantics, adopts a corpus-driven and usage-based approach to language analysis. By exploring the syntactic realization and distribution of arguments opened by the predicates of gratification in the two languages, the book offers new insights into language representation in English and Polish, and addresses the combinatoricity of human thought and cognitive mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of the situation of rewarding.