Shelton Jackson «Spike Lee is one of the most culturally influential and provocative film directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together seminal writings -- from classic scholarship to new research -- this book focuses on this revolutionary film auteur and cultural provocateur to explore contemporary questions around issues of race, politics, sexuality, gender roles, filmmaking, commercialism, celebrity, and the role of media in public discourse. Situating Lee as an important contributor to a variety of American discourses, the book high-lights his commitment to exploring issues of relevance to the Black community. His work demands that his audiences take inventory of his and their understandings of the complexities of race relations, the often deleterious influence of media messages, the long term legacy of racism, the liberating effects of sexual freedom, the controversies that arise from colorism, the separatist nature of classism, and the cultural contributions and triumphs of historical figures. This book seeks to stimulate continued debate by examining the complexities in Lee's various sociopolitical claims and their ideological impacts.

This volume brings together a selection of contributions presented at the 15th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes, held at the University of Bergamo (Italy) from 29 August to 2 September 2005. The conference title, « New Trends in Specialized Discourse, reflects the emphasis given to recent orientations in research, coming from established as well as new authors in the field. As suggested by the title of this volume, the analysis of specialized discourse calls for a specialized discourse analysis. When applied linguists deal with vocational discourses, they are faced with a double challenge: on the one hand, an understanding of textualisations often alien to the general language; on the other hand, the use of analytical tools designed specifically for their investigation. The studies presented in this volume position themselves somewhere along this continuum, focusing alternatively on converging/diverging features of texts and discourses.

Investigating Specialized Discourse is a shortened and revised textbook edition of the monograph Specialized Discourse (2003). This book analyses the various features of specialized discourse in order to assess its degree of specificity and diversification, as compared to general language. Prior to any analysis of such traits, the notion of specialized discourse and its distinctive properties are clarified. The presence of such properties is accounted for not only in linguistic but also in pragmatic terms since the approach is interpretative rather than merely descriptive. Indeed, the complexity of this discourse calls for a multidimensional analysis, covering both lexis and morpho-syntax as well as textual patterning. Some lexical aspects, morpho-syntactic features and textual genres are also examined from a diachronic perspective, thus showing how various conventions concerning specialized discourse have developed over the last centuries.

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.

Against the general neglect of attention phenomena in linguistics, this study, anchored in Cognitive Semantics, offers a first systematic adaptation of Leonard Talmy's groundbreaking model of linguistic attention, applied to Webbased data of English from an emerging lexical network of emo(tion). Some fifty basic attention-related factors combine to yield increasingly complex patterns of interaction, convergence, and conflict affecting all levels of linguistic recombination, from simplex morphemes up to the text format. Differences in attentional profiles of linguistic representations may well account for conceptual alternativity, another fundamental cognitive principle in language: In their verbal interactions, interlocutors, in production and reception, will have to attend to bottom-up mechanisms and top-down strategies of attention in organizing conceptual content and conveying subtle ceptions of reality.

In light of the crisis surrounding traditional media and the radical changes resulting from the advent of the Internet and the social media, various media outlets have argued, or more subtly, hinted at the demise of the printed news, or the end of traditional media. This backdrop forms the genesis for this thought-provoking and provocative volume for imagining life without media. While there is some skepticism toward the radical hypothesis of the death of the media, there is mounting concern, at the same time, regarding the changing media space(s) and the relevance of the media's roles and places in different and diverse social spheres. Unanimously, contributors report that while these roles and places have changed, the difficulty lies in where and how to delineate them. The chapters provide some answers to the hypothesis of life without media, and in many instances raise new questions and doubts.

This volume explores the complex relations between normsand exemplars of genres from business and technical communication. Contributors compare a variety of types of norm with textual practices in a variety of ways. The genres examined are typical of the range of audiences and media of workplace and business communication: product withdrawal notices, press releases, job ads, oral presentations, sales letters and tenders, chairman's reports, and technical reports. They are compared with norms set by teachers, by unimaginative practice, by more or less self-appointed experts, or by practioners who may not share the national or professional culture of their colleagues. However accurate these may be they never do justice to the complexity of 'reality'. The contributors to this volume use a wide variety of methods in their attempt to capture this reality. Many analyse texts, but all combine this procedure with at least one other approach and often more: questionnaires, experiments assessing the effect of manipulated texts, analysis of practitioner comments, and use of natural sources of practitioner judgements like award for good practice.

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.

In light of the crisis surrounding traditional media and the radical changes resulting from the advent of the Internet and the social media, various media outlets have argued, or more subtly, hinted at the demise of the printed news, or the end of traditional media. This backdrop forms the genesis for this thought-provoking and provocative volume for imagining life without media. While there is some skepticism toward the radical hypothesis of the death of the media, there is mounting concern, at the same time, regarding the changing media space(s) and the relevance of the media's roles and places in different and diverse social spheres. Unanimously, contributors report that while these roles and places have changed, the difficulty lies in where and how to delineate them. The chapters provide some answers to the hypothesis of life without media, and in many instances raise new questions and doubts.

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.

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.

First published in 1983, this book represents a substantial body of detailed research on children's language and communication, and more generally on the nature of interactive spoken discourse. It looks at areas of competence often examined in young children's speech have that have not been described for adults - leading to insights not only in the character of adult conversation but also the process of acquiring this competence. The authors set forward strategies for conversing at different stage of life, while also relating these strategies to, and formulating hypotheses concerning, the dynamics of language variation and change.

This volume focuses on the nature of official correspondence produced m the period after 1500, from Early Modern to nineteenth-century English. The contributions reflect the extent to which the genre is somewhat plastic in this period, gradually acquiring distinguishing conventions and protocols as the situations in which the letters themselves are encoded acquire more distinctiveness. Although correspondence has long been the object of diachronic studies, very little seems to be available as far as specialized usage is concerned, hence the specific interest in letters exchanged within scientific, diplomatic, and business networks. In addition, the study of business and official correspondence offered here profits from a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological approach, as it relies on a rich array of databases and corpora of correspondence, ranging from highly specialized collections to more broadly constructed diagnostic corpora, in which correspondence is just one register or text-type. While specific attention is paid to phenomena relating to the expression of positive and negative politeness through the investigation of authentic (rather than constructed) texts, methodological issues are also taken into consideration.

Computer games have fascinated millions of users for more than 30 years. Today, they constitute the strongest sector in the media-entertainment industry and are part of the experience of digital daily life. Computer Game Studies require a deep understanding of functional and communicational mechanisms of games that support the player's immersion in virtual worlds. Unfortunately, the discussion and the academic research about usage and effects of computer games mostly takes place isolated within different scientific contexts with various theoretical and methodological approaches. Therefore, this anthology combines the perspectives of Media Studies, Game Studies, and Communication Studies, and presents their findings in an interdisciplinary approach.

This is a comprehensive introduction to English text-linguistics. It deals with those areas of text-linguistics that have enjoyed widespread attention in English linguistics, notably aspects of cohesion and coherence. Further topics are corpus-based studies in lexical patterns and in text classifications, psycho-linguistic and cognitive studies in text constitution and decoder-orientation. One special feature of this book is that it not only covers abstract lexical and grammatical structures but also medium-dependent written and spoken presentation.

With World English, learners experience the world through content and ideas from National Geographic and TED, providing the motivation to talk about what's most important to them.

The enthymeme in education is essential because it reflects what humans do when they think. It informs not only how we make inferences about the world to discover new knowledge, but also how we express those discoveries to influence the minds of others. Thus, the enthymeme provides an effective pedagogical approach to the analysis and synthesis of ideas in the classroom. In this volume, such an approach is applied to composition instruction, second-language learning, advertising, specialized medical texts, and detective fiction to help prepare students for the challenges of modern life. (Michael D. Hood)

This volume reflects the results of a workshop on the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, held within the 15th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes ('New Trends in Specialized Discourse', Bergamo 2005). The articles deal with developments from the late medieval period to the present day, and the book encompasses studies in which the long-established tradition of domain-specific English is highlighted. The fields of contributions range from scientific to legal to political and business discourse. Special attention is given to argumentation, in an attempt to assess the time-depth of typical rhetorical strategies. Some methodological innovations are introduced in corpus linguistics. Numerous contributions bring new materials to scholarly discussion, as recently released or in-progress 'second-generation' corpora are used as data. Recent changes in present-day legal and scientific writing are also discussed as they witness fast adaptation to new requirements, due to the advent and growing familiarity of new technologies, international law and changes in academia.

alieNATION presents research conducted by a national election team and leading scholars in political communication that explores a range of important topics and variables affecting voter attitudes and behavior in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. In exploring the messages, issues, and voters of the 2012 election, these studies employ multiple methods including experimental design, content analysis, rhetorical criticism, and survey research. Whereas other election research tends to investigate either the content or effects of campaign communication, the more comprehensive and systematic nature of this collection enables alieNATION to cohere thematically around considerations of voter alienation, political engagement, political efficacy, and ultimately, citizens' voting decisions.

The Jewish Press' purpose is to promote Jewish Orthodoxy. The book explores this popular American Jewish newspaper and more precisely the development of the paper's ideology over a period of forty years offering a new understanding of the phenomenon Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy must be understood as a dynamic concept continually changing as a result of historical developments and hegemonic struggles with other ideologies about telling the Jew in modern society how he is to understand himself and the surrounding world.

Corporations engage young people and musicians in brand-building activities. These activities unfold in media-dense social spaces. Social networking sites, the user-generated content of web 2.0, live music events, digital cameras and cell phones are all used in constructing valuable brands. This book addresses the integration of popular music culture, corporate branding, and young people's mediated cultural practices. These intersections provide a rich site for examining how young people build brands within spaces and practices that they perceive as meaningful. The book is based on extensive ethnographic empirical research, drawing on participant observation, textual analysis and interviews with young people, musicians, marketers and other participants in the cultural industries. Contemporary theories of marketing and branding are brought together with critical and cultural accounts of mediated social life. The book explores the distinctive concerns and debates of these different perspectives and the lively interface between them.

From high-tech kitchen gadgets and magazines to the Food Network, the last few decades have seen a huge rise in food-focused consumption, media, and culture. The discourses surrounding food range from media coverage of school lunchrooms and hunger issues, to news stories about urban gardening or buying organic products at the local farmers market. Food is no longer viewed merely as a means of survival. International and comprehensive in approach, this volume is the first book-length study of food from a communication perspective. Scholars examine and explore this emerging field to provide definitive and foundational examples of how food operates as a system of communication, and how communication theory and practices can be understood by considering food in this way. In doing so, the book serves to inspire future dialogues on the subject due to its vast array of ideas about food and its relationship to our communication practices.

What are the points of contact between the study of language and the study of history? What are the possibilities for collaboration between linguists and historians, and what prevents it? This volume, the proceedings of an international conference held at the University of Bristol in April 2009, presents twenty-two articles by linguists and historians, exploring the relationship between the fields theoretically, conceptually and in practice. Contributions focus on a variety of European and American languages, in historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present day. Key themes at the intersection of these two disciplines are the standardization and classification of languages, the social and demographic history of medieval and early modern Europe, the study of language and history 'from below', and the function of language in modern politics. The value of interdisciplinary collaboration is demonstrated in a wide-ranging set of case studies, on topics including language contact in Northern and Central Europe, the relationship between peninsular and transatlantic Spanish, and new approaches to the recent histories of Nicaragua, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. The volume seeks out the interdependencies between the two fields and asks why exchanges between linguists and historians remain the exception rather than the rule.

A follow-on from Actors' Audition Speeches" this title includes speeches from plays written and produced in the 1990s, with extracts from West End productions ("Art" and "Cressida"), and films ("Pulp Fiction"). Comments from directors, casting directors, actors and teachers are included."

Lankshear (literacy and new technologies, James Cook U. Australia) and Knobel (language and literacy education, Queensland U. of Technology, Australia) have chosen the contributors to this volume based on the idea of emphasizing the plurality of digital literacies, by which they mean to refer to the diversity of specific accounts of digital literacy that exist and consequent implications for digital literacy policy, the strength and usefulness of a sociocultural perspective on literacy as practice (according to which literacy is best understood as literacies), and the benefits that may accrue from adopting an expansive view of digital literacy and its significance for educational learning. They present 12 chapters addressing such subjects as the required cognitive skills for Internet literacy, digital literacy as information savvy, digital literacy policies in the European Union, digital literacy in enterprises, the digital literacies of online shoppers, digital literacy and participation in online social networking spaces, and digital literacy and the law.