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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.  

This book explores the linguistic patterns of conflict, crisis and threat generation in Polish political rhetoric that have been at the heart of state-level policies since the Law and Justice (PiS) Party came to power in October 2015. Analysing a vast corpus of speeches, statements and remarks by prominent Law and Justice Party politicians, this book sheds light on internal parliamentary and presidential discourse against opponents of the government, before widening its lens to Poland's strained relations with the EU regarding refugee distribution and immigration. Drawing on theories from contemporary critical discourse studies and critical-cognitive pragmatics, the book shows how the crisis, conflict and threat elements in these discourses produce public coercion and strengthen the Party's leadership. Piotr Cap extends his argument further to examine discursive examples from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy and the UK, highlighting the correlation between the Law and Justice Party and broader socio-political and rhetorical trends in contemporary Europe. The result is an authoritative panorama of the mutual dependencies and shared discursive strategies of European right-wing groups.

This book presents the essential approaches that you need to know when you start doing discourse analysis for the first time. Over 11 chapters, Discourse Analysis: An Introduction outlines the core methodological and theoretical premises, tracing their development and discussing the most recent trends. Providing you with an essential discourse analytic toolkit, each chapter explores a different approach from a wide variety of global perspectives, looking at discourse and society, discourse and pragmatics, discourse and genre, discourse and conversation, discourse grammar, corpus approaches, multimodal discourse and critical discourse analysis. Now fully revised to take account of recent developments, this third edition includes: - A new chapter on discourse and digital media - New topics, including English as a lingua franca, linguistic landscapes and translanguaging - Updated examples drawn from a variety of global perspectives and contexts, ranging from North America to East Asia - Updated discussion questions throughout With each chapter supplemented with exercises, discussion questions and lists of further reading, along with a comprehensive companion website featuring lecture slides, extended readings and enhanced bibliographies, this is the only book you need for discourse analysis.

Dolf Rami contributes to contemporary debates about the meaning and reference of proper names by providing an overview of the main challenges and developing a new contextualist account of names. Questions about the use and semantic features of proper names are at the centre of philosophy of language. How does a single proper name refer to the same thing in different contexts of use? What makes a thing a bearer of a proper name? What is their meaning? Guided by these questions, Rami discusses Saul Kripke's main contributions to the debate and introduces two new ways to capture the rigidity of names, proposing a pluralist version of the causal chain picture. Covering popular contextualist accounts of names, both indexical and variabilist, he presents a use-sensitive alternative based on a semantic comparison between names, pronouns and demonstratives. Extending and applying his approach to a wide variety of uses, including names in fiction, this is a comprehensive explanation of why we should interpret proper names as use-sensitive expressions.

In December 2018, the United States Senate unanimously passed the nation's first antilynching act, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. For the first time in US history, legislators, representing the American people, classified lynching as a federal hate crime. While lynching histories and memories have received attention among communication scholars and some interdisciplinary studies of traditional civil rights memorials exist, contemporary studies often fail to examine the politicized nature of the spaces. This volume represents the first investigation of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, both of which strategically make clear the various links between America's history of racial terror and contemporary mass incarceration conditions, the mistreatment of juveniles, and capital punishment. Racial Terrorism: A Rhetorical Investigation of Lynching focuses on several key social agents and organizations that played vital roles in the public and legal consciousness raising that finally led to the passage of the act. Marouf A. Hasian Jr. and Nicholas S. Paliewicz argue that the advocacy of attorney Bryan Stevenson, the work of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and the efforts of curators at Montgomery's new Legacy Museum all contributed to the formation of a rhetorical culture that set the stage at last for this hallmark lynching legislation. The authors examine how the EJI uses spaces of remembrance to confront audiences with race-conscious messages and measure to what extent those messages are successful.

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.

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.

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.

In recent years the traditional approach to common ground as a body of information shared between participants of a communicative process has been challenged. Taking into account not only L1 but also intercultural interactions and attempting to bring together the traditional view with the egocentrism-based view of cognitive psychologists, it has been argued that construction of common ground is a dynamic, emergent process. It is the convergence of the mental representation of shared knowledge that we activate, assumed mutual knowledge that we seek, and rapport as well as knowledge that we co-construct in the communicative process. This dynamic understanding of common ground has been applied in many research projects addressing both L1 and intercultural interactions in recent years. As a result several new elements, aspects and interpretations of common ground have been identified. Some researchers came to view common ground as one component in a complex contextual information structure. Others, analyzing intercultural interactions, pointed out the dynamism of the interplay of core common ground and emergent common ground. The book brings together researchers from different angles of pragmatics and communication to examine (i) what adjustments to the notion of common ground based on L1 communication should be made in the light of research in intercultural communication; (ii) what the relationship is between context, situation and common ground, and (iii) how relevant knowledge and content get selected for inclusion into core and emergent common ground.

Investigating the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK, The Language of Brexit explores the ways in which 'Brexit' campaigners utilised language more persuasively than their 'Remain' counterparts. Drawing parallels with effective political discourse used worldwide, this book highlights the linguistic features of an increasingly popular style of political campaigning. Concentrating on the highly successful and emotive linguistic strategies employed by the Brexit campaigners against the comparatively lacklustre Remain camp, Buckledee makes a case for the contribution of language towards the narrow 52-48% Brexit victory. Using primary examples, what emerges is how urging people to have the courage to make a bid for freedom naturally invokes more grandiloquent language, powerful metaphors and rousing partisan tone than a campaign which, on balance, argues that it's best to simply stick with the status quo. Examining the huge amount of discourse generated before, during and since the June 2016 EU Referendum, The Language of Brexit looks into the role language played in the democratic process and the influence and impact it had on electors, leading to an unexpected result and uncertain future.