This volume is a collection of empirical studies investigating the ways and means through which culturally-shaped identities are manifested in and through discourse in documents and texts from multiple spheres of social action. It also looks at possible ways in which understanding and acceptance of diverse cultural identities can be moulded and developed through appropriate education. Language being one of the most evident and powerful 'markers' of cultural identity, discourse and text are sites where cultures are both constructed and displayed and where identities are negotiated. The approaches to the analysis of culture and identity adopted here to account for the multifaceted realisations of cultural identities in the texts and documents taken into consideration span from multimodality, to discourse and genre analysis, to corpus linguistics and text analysis. The volume then offers a varied picture of approaches to the scientific enquiry into the multifaceted manifestations of identity in and across national, professional, and disciplinary cultures.

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as interpersonality. This construct offers ample terrain for new research, since it can be viewed using a range of diverse theoretical frameworks, employing a variety of analytical tools and social perspectives. Studies on the relationship between writer/reader and speaker/audience in the legal field are still scarce, dispersed, and limited to a narrow range of genres and a restricted notion of interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. This volume is meant to help bridge this gap. Its chapters show the realisation and distribution of interpersonal features in specific legal genres. The aim is to achieve an expansion of the concept of interpersonality, which besides modality, Grice's maxims and other traditionally interpersonal features, might comprise or relate to ideational and textual issues like narrative disclosure, typography, rhetorical variation, or Plain English, among others.

Este volumen recoge varios estudios que reflejan las ultimas tendencias en la investigacion linguistica teorica y aplicada desde diversas perspectivas enmarcadas en las distintas subdisciplinas linguisticas, a saber: Analisis del discurso, Sintaxis, Semantica, Linguistica de corpus o Pragmatica, entre otras. Ofrece, por tanto, un panorama de la investigacion linguistica actual y pone de manifiesto la heterogeneidad dentro de este ambito del saber. Esta obra contiene trabajos en ingles y en espanol que analizan diversos fenomenos de estas lenguas, asi como del chino, aleman, frances, italiano, arameo o croata. Con este compendio de articulos se abren nuevas vias de investigacion para la comunidad cientifica.

The Internet's explosive growth over the past decade is nowhere more visible than in Asia. Fueled by an expanding middle class, thousands of people connect to the Internet for the first time each day to explore and discuss issues that are relevant to them and their lives. This book provides an in-depth look at the impact of social media on political engagement among young citizens in this rapidly changing region of the world. Leading media scholars from nine Asian nations focus on three main questions: How frequently do Asians use social media to access and discuss political information? Does the use of social media increase political participation? What political, social and cultural factors influence the impact of social media on political engagement in each nation? To answer these questions, contributors first analyze the current state of social media in their nations and then present the findings of a cross-national survey on social media use that was conducted with over 3,500 Asian respondents. By employing a comparative approach, they analyze how social media function and interact with the cultural and political systems in each country - and how they might affect political engagement among individual citizens.

The book brings together a rich variety of perspectives on abstracts as an academic genre. Drawing on genre analysis and corpus linguistics, the studies collected here combine attention to generic structure with emphasis on language variation and change, thus offering a multi-perspective view on a genre that is becoming one of the most important in present-day research communication. The chapters are organized into three sections, each one offering distinct but sometimes combined perspectives on the exploration of this academic genre. The first section looks at variation across cultures through studies comparing English with Spanish, Italian and German, while also including considerations on variation across genders or the native/non-native divide. The second section centres on variation across disciplines and includes a wide range of studies exploring disciplinary identities and communities, as well as different degrees of centrality in the disciplinary community. The third and final section explores language and genre change by looking at how authorial voice and metadiscourse have changed over the past few decades under the influence of different media and different stakeholders.

Within community-based digital literacies work, a fundamental question remains unanswered: Where are the stories and reflections of the researchers, scholars, and community workers themselves? We have learned much about contexts, discourses, and the multimodal nature of meaning making in literacy and digital media experiences. However, we have learned very little about those who initiate, facilitate, and direct these community-based multiliteracies and digital media projects. In Community-Based Multiliteracies & Digital Media Projects: Questioning Assumptions and Exploring Realities, contributors discuss exemplary work in the field of community-based digital literacies, while providing an insightful and critical perspective on how we begin to write ourselves into the stories of our work. In doing so, the book makes a powerful contribution to digital literacies praxis and pedagogy - within and outside of community-based contexts.

With drug information rapidly migrating to the Web, the chronically poor standards of drug information available to consumers in the developed and the developing world are being further compromised. This book offers insight into the uncharted waters of prescription drug information and promotion on the internet and suggests how it might be transformed into an unprecedented agent for good. It traces the social and political history of prescription drug information and marketing to Western consumers, offers a social and communicative profile of prescription drug Web sites, and evaluates the most widely used sources of prescription drug information, from government organizations and information companies and TV-related sites, to health service provider sites, manufacturers' brand sites, and social media, including YouTube and Wikipedia. The focus throughout is on practical outcomes: How can information for consumer decision making be optimized and how can consumers use it responsibly?

This revised and updated edition of "Modern German Pronunciation" offers the most complete guide to the correct pronunciation of German for native speakers of English. It begins with an introduction to the problems of pronunciation and the basic concepts of phonetics. The following chapters take each aspect of pronunciation in turn: consonants, vowels, stress and intonation, and the conversational pronunciation of German with its many reduced or "weak" forms. The text is comprehensively illustrated with clear pronunciation and intonation diagrams and the emphasis is on the problems that speakers of English are known to encounter when learning to speak German. This second edition has been revised and updated, taking into account comments and suggestions from readers and adapting the German texts to the new official spelling. A significant new feature is the discussion of English-speaking learners of German has been extended to include American learners, reflecting the use world-wide of the first edition of this volume.

'Electrifying ... A user manual for our polarized world' Adam Grant, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Think Again By a two-time debating world champion, a dazzling look at how arguing better can transform your life - and the world - for the better Everyone debates, in some form, most days. Sometimes we do it to persuade; other times to learn, discover a truth, or simply to express something about ourselves. We argue to defend ourselves, our work, and our loved ones from external threat. We do it to get our way, or just to get ahead. As a two-time debating world champion, Bo has made a career out of arguing. Over the past few years, however, he's noticed how we're not only arguing more and more, but getting worse at it - a fact proven by our polarised politics. By tracing his own journey from immigrant kid to world champion, as well as those of illustrious participants in the sport such as Malcolm X, Edmund Burke and Sally Rooney, Seo shows how the skills of debating - information gathering, truth finding, lucidity, organization, and persuasion - are often the cornerstone of successful careers and happy lives. Along the way, he provides the reader with an unforgettable toolkit to use debate as a means to improve their own. This book is an everyperson's guide to disagreeing well, so that the outcome of having had an argument is better than not having it at all. Taking readers on a thrilling intellectual adventure into the eccentric and brilliant subculture of competitive debate, The Art of Disagreeing Well proves that good-faith debate can enrich and improve our lives, friendships, democracies and in the process, our world.

This edited collection comprises foundational texts and new contributions that revisit the theory of the "audience commodity" as first articulated by Dallas Smythe. Contributors focus on the historical and theoretical importance of this theory to critical studies of media/communication, culture, society, economics, and technology - a theory that has underpinned critical media studies for more than three decades, but has yet to be compiled in a single edited collection. The primary objective is to appraise its relevance in relation to changes in media and communication since the time of Smythe's writing, principally addressing the rise of digital, online, and mobile media. In addition to updating this perspective, contributors confront the topic critically in order to test its limits. Contextualizing theories of the audience commodity within an intellectual history, they consider their enduring relationship to the field of media/communication studies as well as the important legacy of Dallas Smythe.

There is hardly any aspect of verbal communication that has not been investigated using the analytical tools developed by corpus linguists. This is especially true in the case of English, which commands a vast international research community, and corpora are becoming increasingly specialised, as they account for areas of language use shaped by specific sociolectal (register, genre, variety) and speaker (gender, profession, status) variables. Corpus analysis is driven by a common interest in 'linguistic evidence', viewed as a source of insights into language phenomena or of lexical, semantic and contrastive data for subsequent applications. Among the latter, pedagogical settings are highly prominent, as corpora can be used to monitor classroom output, raise learner awareness and inform teaching materials. The eighteen chapters in this volume focus on contexts where English is employed by specialists in the professions or academia and debate some of the challenges arising from the complex relationship between linguistic theory, data-mining tools and statistical methods.

Neil Postman's most popular work, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), provided an insightful critique of the effects of television on public discourse in America, arguing that television's bias towards entertaining content trivializes serious issues and undermines the basis of democratic culture. Lance Strate, who earned his doctorate under Neil Postman and is one of the leading media ecology scholars of our time, re-examines Postman's arguments, updating his analysis and critique for the twenty-first-century media environment that includes the expansion of television programming via cable and satellite as well as the Internet, the web, social media, and mobile technologies. Integrating Postman's arguments about television with his critique of technology in general, Strate considers the current state of journalism, politics, religion, and education in American culture. Strate also contextualizes Amusing Ourselves to Death through an examination of Postman's life and career and the field of media ecology that Postman introduced. This is a book about our prospects for the future, which can only be based on the ways in which we think and talk about the present.

This edited collection comprises foundational texts and new contributions that revisit the theory of the "audience commodity" as first articulated by Dallas Smythe. Contributors focus on the historical and theoretical importance of this theory to critical studies of media/communication, culture, society, economics, and technology - a theory that has underpinned critical media studies for more than three decades, but has yet to be compiled in a single edited collection. The primary objective is to appraise its relevance in relation to changes in media and communication since the time of Smythe's writing, principally addressing the rise of digital, online, and mobile media. In addition to updating this perspective, contributors confront the topic critically in order to test its limits. Contextualizing theories of the audience commodity within an intellectual history, they consider their enduring relationship to the field of media/communication studies as well as the important legacy of Dallas Smythe.

Video games have evolved to become a pervasive format which is beyond entertainment, enjoyed by a broad group of people rather than as a niche activity by hardcore gamers. However, to date, academic studies focusing on game localization and accessibility are few and far between, despite the fact that further research in localization and accessibility would be beneficial to all. The different contributions in this pioneering volume address the emerging fields of Game Accessibility and Game Localization from different angles, providing insightful information about these relatively unexplored academic areas with such close tights to the industry. The volume is divided in two sections: the first section includes four contributions on Game Accessibility, dealing with issues such as universally accessible games and guidelines for promoting accessibility. The second section of the book includes nine contributions focussing on different issues affecting game translation and localization, such as case studies, culturalization, fan translation, and terminology management for the game localization industry.

The book is one of the few in-depth investigations into the nature of EU legal translation and its impact on national legal languages. It is also the first attempt to characterise EU Polish, a language of supranational law and a hybrid variant of legal Polish emerging via translation. The book applies Chesterman's concept of textual fit, that is how translations differ from non-translations, to demonstrate empirically on large corpora how the Polish eurolect departs from the conventions of legal and general Polish both at the macrostructural and the microstructural level. The findings are juxtaposed with the pre-accession version of Polish law to track the "Europeanisation" of legal Polish - recent changes brought about by the unprecedented inflow of EU translations.

Over the last few years there has been a burgeoning interest in both space and place as linguistic phenomena. Some of this interest stemmed from studies on the situatedness of language and speech in time and space and how deixis anchors speech to a context. Both our frame of reference with respect to surrounding space and how we conceive and describe it are closely linked to the language we speak. This is why different cultures perceive spatial relations differently, with speakers of one language, for instance, encoding spatial relations with respect to absolute directions while speakers of a different language use egocentric terms. This book focuses on space, place and the discursive construction of identity in the present, globalized era, where technological developments are causing a change in the perception of spatial boundaries and geographical locations, and identities are experienced in hitherto unknown ways.

New technologies and new media have significantly influenced the process of political communication. They have created new opportunities such as the great interactivity of communication, the personalization of a message or an uncountable number of possibilities for campaigning. This publication is a collection of socio-political studies which analyze the phenomenon of political communication in the 21st century. The main focus is on new media, especially on the Internet as well as on social media or social networks. However, there are also papers which examine traditional channels of political communication in the era of new technologies. Moreover, to the advantage of this book, the chapters explore the phenomenon of political communication not only in the USA and Western Europe, but also in Central Europe, Latin America and Africa.

This book has won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award 2014. Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has evolved from a niche service to a mass phenomenon; it has become instrumental for everyday communication as well as for political debates, crisis communication, marketing, and cultural participation. But the basic idea behind it has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. Drawing on the experience of leading international Twitter researchers from a variety of disciplines and contexts, this is the first book to document the various notions and concepts of Twitter communication, providing a detailed and comprehensive overview of current research into the uses of Twitter. It also presents methods for analyzing Twitter data and outlines their practical application in different research contexts.

The emergence of what are called `new media' and `social media' is one of the most discussed topics in contemporary societies. Because media and public communication are mostly analyzed within particular theoretical frameworks and within specific disciplinary fields, polarized views have been created with cyberoptimists and celebrants on one side and cyberpessimists and skeptics on the other. Thus we lack an understanding of the interdependencies and convergence between disciplines and practices. The second edition of this book expertly synthesizes competing theories and disciplinary viewpoints and examines the latest data, including international research from fast-growing markets such as China, to provide a comprehensive, holistic view of the twenty-first century media (r)evolution. Dr. Macnamara argues that the key changes are located in practices rather than technologies and that public communication practices are emergent in highly significant ways. Engaging and accessible, this book is essential reading for scholars and professionals in media and communication and an invaluable text for courses in media studies, journalism, advertising, public relations and organisational and political communication.

The modern age has further expanded on the multifaceted character of English, which is used not only in many places in the world, but also by a variety of users in numerous contexts. Technical innovations have led to the rise of new registers and offered scholars new tools to study language variation. Set in the context of the electronic medium of social networking, and additionally enriched with findings from the field of language attitude studies, this study explores features of English used in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles, here represented by the UK, India, and Poland. The analysis of the English used by Facebook members demonstrates cultural differences as well as gender and age similarities in the area of e.g. politeness, emotionality, informality or code-switching.

Today's world is in turmoil. Economic crises are bringing countries to the brink of ruin, and old models are being questioned. The same sense of crisis also exists in contemporary education, and there is a need to explore new educational models. Digital Learning Lives: Trajectories, Literacies, and Schooling is a contribution in this direction. This book explores the importance of the adoption of digital technologies by contemporary education systems. Partly a synthesis of findings from projects carried out in Norway by the author over the past 15 years, the data have been extended to raise key questions about the effectiveness of current education strategies for the Facebook and YouTube generation. Along the way, a promising approach for future developments in education is introduced that embraces the engagement of digital media - what Ola Erstad terms 'learning lives'. Use of digital media in schools and in everyday culture becomes the catalyst for exploring learning as life-deep (studying identity processes), life-wide (studying learners across contexts), and life-long (studying learning as trajectories and timescales). The book is targeted toward courses on digital learning, educational change, school development, and formal-informal learning.

Grounded in the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), a usage-based meaning construction model of language of recent design, this research argues that illocutionary meaning either results from filling in constructional variables such as X in the Can You XVP? construction or from affording access to abstract situational cognitive models through the metonymic activation of relevant elements of their structure. One such model is the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, which is incorporated into the description of pragmatic meaning and presented as lying at the core of the conventionalization process of illocutionary constructions. The inferential path based on the instantiation of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model determines the activation of speech act values that may become conventionalized within a linguistic community. The study determines the applicability of the analytical tools developed by the LCM for illocutionary description. The illocutionary acts selected are those proposed by the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model as exploiting cultural principles of interaction.

The book proposes a multi-perspective analytical model for the understanding of corporate identity meanings embedded in historical discourse for the web. The suggested theoretical framework conflates methodological perspectives derived from Discourse Analysis, Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics. The contribution of Cognitive Linguistics to the proposed analysis is based on two main assumptions. First, the lack of principled distinction between semantics and pragmatics, whereby meaning is a function of the activation of conceptual knowledge structures in context. Second - and this is crucial for hypertext analysis - language, as the outcome of general properties of cognition, is closely related to visual perception. The originality of this approach to web discourse analysis resides in the deployment of tools considering the cross-modal integration of different resource systems. It also offers interpretive keys for the understanding of mechanisms underlying the formatting of the message as a multimodal construct. The empirical analyses presented in the book illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodological approach.

What is the breaking news in the world today? How did you find out this news? How do you know it is true? Was it reported ethically? What checks and balances are being put on the news media? The answers to these questions reflect the themes of this book. The chapters are by experienced journalists, academics and practitioners in the field. They unravel and clearly present the recent and on-going developments in journalism and the press around the globe, including the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. Chapters deal with the phone hacking and data thefts in the UK that provoked a major inquiry into press ethics and standards. Twitter is examined and found to be a valuable tool for reporters in the Arab world and research shows how, in Australia, readers use Twitter to pass along news topics. Chapters also explore the use of the mobile phone to access news in sub-Saharan Nigeria, the role of media magnates in presenting political views in Europe, and Wikipedia's representation of conflict. This collection of fourteen chapters by leading authors examines journalism as practised today and what we might expect from it in the future.

This book is a collection of articles covering the theme of interaction. Interaction combines two crucial elements: the intrapersonal and the interpersonal. Accordingly, the authors approach this issue from two complementary perspectives: from the internal and external or cognitive and social perspective. The papers that take the former perspective focus on cognitive bases of interaction, on the representation of motion, on metaphor and metonymy, or gestures, perception and cognition. The topic that dominates the papers that take the social stance towards the topic of interaction is identity. By applying a variety of new analytical tools and concepts, the authors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society and institutions mould us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of these categories.