Inspired by Frank Palmer's work, this book addresses a set of specific topics pertaining to the description of modality in English and places them in a broader context. A number of more general theoretical and typological matters are also raised, which bear upon the theory of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces. The methodology adopted is mostly functional-typological, though some reference is made to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from cognitive linguistics to parametric variation. Modal meanings are seen to extend beyond particular lexical and grammatical exponents, through sentential semantics and into actual contexts of use. At the same time, the study of modality seems to challenge commonly held views on the relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis. Other languages discussed include Brazilian Portuguese, Classical and Modern Greek and Spanish.

This book received the Enrique Alcaraz research award in 2010. This volume derives from the COMINTER-SIMULNEG research project which aims at designing a pragmatic model for the analysis of intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons, as well as developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings. Contributions to this volume focus on three main issues: (a) explaining intercultural communication; (b) research on intercultural business communication; (c) the use of simulation and gaming methodology for the acquisition of communicative and cross-cultural competence in business settings. This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study and practice of intercultural business communication, borrowing concepts from social anthropology, social cognition, cognitive linguistics, and intercultural pragmatics.

More than ever, professional English is now cruising towards an enormous challenge in the European university context due to the extremely significant moment we are living in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The European convergence process is demanding immediate reflections, serious analyses, and profound reforms in specialized language teaching that lead to reach Bologna standards by 2010. This book aims to present an overview of professional English in the current academic landscape in Europe. It intends to shed light on a range of issues, both theoretical and practical, related to ESP, focusing on discourse analysis, corpus analysis, information and communication technologies, methodological approaches, curriculum design, and empirical research into language learning in broad terms. Because teachers need to be researchers and inquirers, this overview thus makes a contribution to the professional English field with the purpose of highlighting several important questions in the entire ESP academic mainstream. Scholars from different European universities explore specialized languages and document ESP teaching methodologies at university levels from a multidimensional perspective.

Throughout the political spectrum, successful arguments often rely on fear appeals, whether implicit or explicit. Dominant arguments prey on people's fears - of economic failure, cultural backwardness, or lack of personal safety. Counterarguments feed on other fears, suggesting that audiences are being duped by emotional smokescreens. With chapters on the political, institutional, and cultural manifestations of fear, this book offers diverse investigations into how insecurity and the search for certainty shape contemporary political economic decisions, and explores how the rhetorical manipulation of such fears illuminates a larger struggle for social control.

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.

The news media play a vital role in keeping the public informed and maintaining democratic processes. But that essential function has come under threat as emerging technologies and changing social trends, sped up by global economic turmoil, have disrupted traditional business models and practices, creating a financial crisis. Quality journalism is expensive to produce - so how will it survive as current sources of revenue shrink? Funding Journalism in the Digital Age not only explores the current challenges, but also provides a comprehensive look at business models and strategies that could sustain the news industry as it makes the transition from print and broadcast distribution to primarily digital platforms. The authors bring widespread international journalism experience to provide a global perspective on how news organizations are evolving, investigating innovative commercial projects in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Norway, South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere.

Drawing from interviews with Internet researchers from across the globe who work in diverse disciplines and in a wide array of online venues, this book examines ethical issues and questions that Internet researchers may encounter throughout the research process. Although the ethics of Internet research are complex, the aim of the book is to provide a rhetorical, case-based process to aid researchers in ethical decision making. In doing so, the book provides Internet researchers with useful resources and heuristics for engaging in ethical practices, interactions, and problem solving for their research.

Climate Change and the Media brings together an international group of scholars to discuss one of the most important issues in human history: climate change. Since public understanding of the issue relies heavily on media coverage, the media plays a pivotal role in the way we address it. This edited collection - the first scholarly work to examine the relationship between climate change and the media - examines the changing nature of media coverage around the world, from the USA, the UK, and Europe, to China, Australasia, and the developing world. Chapters consider the impact of public relations and fictional programming, the relationship between public understanding and media coverage, and the impact of the media industries themselves on climate change. At a time when governments must take action to alleviate the catastrophic risk that climate change poses, this collection expertly details the pivotal role the media plays in this most fundamental of issues.

Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics explores the relationship between rhetoric's materiality and the social world in the late modern political context. Taking as their point of departure a reprint of Michael Calvin McGee's 1982 call to reconceptualize rhetoric as the palpable "experience" of sociality, the authors in this volume grapple anew with the role of communication practices in contemporary collective life. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, these twelve original essays supplement, extend, and challenge McGee's position, collectively advocating on behalf of a shift in theoretical and critical attention from rhetorical materialism to rhetoric's materiality.

Throughout the world, the mass media are responsible for shaping the form and content of experiences. In this book, David L. Altheide examines how the mass media, including news and popular culture, have cast terrorism, propaganda and social control post 9/11. Altheide shows how fear works with terrorism to alter discourse, social meanings, and our sense of being in the world. Emphasis is placed on the different institutional interventions and how these particular stories become framed and inform the wider media narratives of terror. The author argues that post 9/11 we are witnessing the emergence of new communication formats that not only constitute counter-narratives, but also shape future communicative experience. The text is suitable for scholars and students interested in the ongoing relationship between the media and terror post 9/11.

Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution draws together the work of over twenty leading international writers, journalists, theorists and campaigners in the field of peace journalism. Mainstream media tend to promote the interests of the military and governments in their coverage of warfare. This major new text aims to provide a definitive, up-to-date, critical, engaging and accessible overview exploring the role of the media in conflict resolution. Sections focus in detail on theory, international practice, and critiques of mainstream media performance from a peace perspective; countries discussed include the U.S., U.K., Germany, Cyprus, Sweden, Canada, India, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. Chapters examine a wide variety of issues including mainstream newspapers, indigenous media, blogs and radical alternative websites. The book includes a foreword by award-winning investigative journalist John Pilger and a critical afterword by cultural commentator Jeffery Klaehn.

The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games. It is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses covering mobile phone or gaming culture, media history and educational technology, as well as researchers and the general public.

Argumentation in Higher Education offers professors, lecturers and researchers informative guidance for teaching effective argumentation skills to their undergraduate and graduate students. This professional guide aims to make the complex topic of argumentation open and transparent. Grounded in empirical research and theory, but with student voices heard strongly throughout, this book fills the gap of argumentation instruction for the undergraduate and graduate level.

Written to enlighten even the most experienced professor, this text contributes to a better understanding of the demands of speaking, writing, and visual argumentation in higher education, and will undoubtedly inform and enhance course design. The book argues for a more explicit treatment of argument (the product) and argumentation (the process) in higher education, so that the ground rules of the academic discipline in question are made clear. Each chapter concludes with practical exercises for staff development use.

Topics discussed include:

• The importance of argument
• The current state of argumentation in higher education
• Generic skills in argumentation
• The balance between generic and discipline specific skills
• Information communication technologies and visual argumentation

How can we best teach argumentation so that students feel fully empowered in their academic composition? Professors (new and experienced), lecturers, researchers, professional developers and writing coaches worldwide grappling with this question will find this accessible text to be an extremely valuable resource.

Richard Andrews is Professor in English at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives examines the spontaneous actions of ordinary people, caught up in extraordinary events, who felt compelled to adopt the role of a news reporter. This collection of twenty-one original, thought-provoking chapters investigates citizen journalism in the West, including the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia, as well as its development in a variety of other national contexts around the globe, including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Palestine, South Korea, Vietnam, and even Antarctica. It engages with several of the most significant topics for this important area of inquiry from fresh, challenging perspectives. Its aim is to assess the contribution of citizen journalism to crisis reporting, and to encourage new forms of dialogue and debate about how it may be improved in future.

Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives examines the spontaneous actions of ordinary people, caught up in extraordinary events, who felt compelled to adopt the role of a news reporter. This collection of twenty-one original, thought-provoking chapters investigates citizen journalism in the West, including the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia, as well as its development in a variety of other national contexts around the globe, including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Palestine, South Korea, Vietnam, and even Antarctica. It engages with several of the most significant topics for this important area of inquiry from fresh, challenging perspectives. Its aim is to assess the contribution of citizen journalism to crisis reporting, and to encourage new forms of dialogue and debate about how it may be improved in future.

This volume explores the relationship between shared disciplinary norms and individual traits in academic speech and writing. Despite the standardising pressure of cultural and language-related factors, academic communication remains in many ways a highly personal affair, with active participation in a disciplinary community requiring a multidimensional discourse that combines the professional, institutional, social and individual identities of its members. The first section of the volume deals with tensions involving individual/collective values and the analysis of collective vs. individual discoursal features in academic discourse. The second section comprises longitudinal investigations of the academic output of single scholars, so as to highlight the individuality in their choices and the reasons for not conforming with the commonality of conventions shared by their professional community. The third part deals with genres that are meant to impose commonality on the members of an academic community, not only in the drafting of specialized texts but also when these are reviewed or evaluated for possible publication.

The essays assembled in this volume focus on philosophical questions regarding various aspects of communication. They are predicated on the author's conviction that communication between human beings, regardless of the many difficulties involved, is something of sufficient importance to justify a patient philosophical exploration such as that embarked upon here. Interwoven with philosophical considerations readers will find insights gained from psychoanalytical thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. The essays address a wide range of themes. Sometimes they concern fundamental things, such as the question of the very possibility of communication or the indispensable function of communication in sexual relations. The communicational significance of a certain kind of architecture is scrutinized, as well as that of images in our media-saturated, postmodern world, together with the connection between the latter and the experience of identity today. Other essays concentrate on communicational phenomena such as seduction and Kristeva's notion of 'revolt', the difficulties surrounding communication in the age of 'Empire', and the reappearance of communicational sophistry as a theme in contemporary cinema.

This book attempts to analyse irony, paradox, oxymoron, overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism from the point of view of both Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. In order to do so, we have regarded each trope as a cognitive model, and observed that the various ICMs that resulted from this approach had in common an essential feature: they were all constructed around the creation of contrasts. Also, we have developed a common processing model for these ICMs, which shows that these so-called figures of speech can be fully considered conceptual mechanisms of meaning creation and derivation. Apart from determining which specific pragmatic implications these models bring about and studying their underlying cognitive operations, we have argued that they should be described in terms of the contextual effects they produce. Therefore, a new classification and definition of these tropes is provided.

Computer games are increasingly prevalent, and cause both curiosity and concern in the general public, so understanding these games and play is important. Game researchers need to work quickly to document, report, and analyse the effect on our modern society as an increasing amount of people make new and drastically different choices in how they spend their time. Perceiving Play: The Art and Study of Computer Games looks at the directions and findings of this research, and examines how game research integrates the studies of social science, ethnography, textual analysis and criticism, economy, law, and technology.

This book examines how Japanese learners of English learned about managing politeness while they were studying at language schools in New Zealand. Specifically, it investigates how they learned to produce and interpret a range of disagreement strategies during oppositional talk with native speakers of English. Employing a combined qualitative and quantitative approach to data analysis, the book discusses the initial pragmatic competence of the learners, and describes how their competence developed over a ten-week period. The book outlines some points of cultural divergence which may have influenced the direction and the extent of the learners' pragmatic development. It also sheds light on the language-acquisition strategies utilised by the learners during their tenure in the host culture. Most crucially, the book illuminates patterns of directness and indirectness in the learners' selected disagreement strategies. These patterns challenge the generally accepted theory that politeness always increases with social distance.

Making New Media offers a series of case studies from the author's work with students and teachers from the mid-90s to the present day, charting the dramatic rise of new media in schools. Work across a wide range of media is presented: computer animation, digital video and film, computer games and machinima. The author tackles the vital contemporary themes of literacy and creativity, making an innovative argument for the combination of traditions of social semiotics and cultural studies in the study of literacy and new media. This volume should be read by every undergraduate and graduate student, as well as any faculty member, involved with or interested in any aspect of new media.

Global Auteurs employs auteur theory to examine the work of three contemporary and innovative directors: Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier, and Michael Winterbottom. With extensive background information on the global film industry, and on auteur theory and its implications for ideological critique, this book's insightful case studies examine both ideologies the filmmakers re-circulate and ideologies that they confront in textual form. The discussion of Pedro Almodovar devotes particular attention to mass mediation, the family, and gender in the corpus of his films, while Lars von Trier's corpus is interpreted as driven by a motif that characterizes all of his films: the «failed idealist. Michael Winterbottom's body of work presents a genre-diverse, post-MTV style concerned with «outsiders and taboo, representation and truth, and human rights. Global Auteurs' sophisticated approach to decoding film is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses on film, global mass media, and contemporary Europe.

Global Auteurs employs auteur theory to examine the work of three contemporary and innovative directors: Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier, and Michael Winterbottom. With extensive background information on the global film industry, and on auteur theory and its implications for ideological critique, this book's insightful case studies examine both ideologies the filmmakers re-circulate and ideologies that they confront in textual form. The discussion of Pedro Almodovar devotes particular attention to mass mediation, the family, and gender in the corpus of his films, while Lars von Trier's corpus is interpreted as driven by a motif that characterizes all of his films: the «failed idealist. Michael Winterbottom's body of work presents a genre-diverse, post-MTV style concerned with «outsiders and taboo, representation and truth, and human rights. Global Auteurs' sophisticated approach to decoding film is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses on film, global mass media, and contemporary Europe.

Has the internet changed the nature of conducting controversies? This question cannot be answered easily as different forms of human interaction in an online environment exist and controversies in an online environment have not been analyzed from a linguistic point of view so far. On the other hand, there are many linguistic analyses of controversies in the Early Modern Period. First, this volume describes the communicative background of two online discussion forums dedicated to the study of historical arms and armor. Then, the volume analyzes the similarities and differences between Early Modern controversies and controversies in online internet discussion forums. Further, this book offers an accurate analysis of the strategies used in online discussion forums, analyzing two controversial threads taken from two online discussion forums and provides insights into the individual tactics and strategies applied in online controversies and highlights the similarities and differences of applied principles, norms, and rules. The book finally comments on stylistic choices used by participants in the controversies.

This volume is made up of 17 chapters which have developed out of papers and workshop sessions presented at the event entitled «Corpora: Seminar and Workshops, held at the University of Padua, March 29-31, 2007. It maintains the straightforward, practical approach which characterized that event, meant as an introduction to the use of corpora even for novices. At the same time it goes into a wide range of different applications for corpora in language teaching and language research in higher education. One of these involves the creation and use of learner corpora. Another application involves corpus-assisted research into political discourse in the media. Language for special purposes is also focussed on as a research topic, an academic discipline, and language to be translated. Multimodal corpora are also considered. Proposals are made for corpus-based research into the language of films, and into translation (and mediation) universals. A corpus-based study of text complexity in reading tests is also presented. Large-scale corpora commercially available are also discussed. An online module for translator training is presented, as is an Internet-accessible corpus of Old English poetry.