Signs exist as fundamental markers of the urban landscape. Whether in the form of street signs offering directions, the airbrushed promises of advertising media or the vandalized detournements of street art, signs pervade urban spaces and provide a tangible 'text' upon which the logics of both cities and ourselves are written. Cities of Signs charts the way that signs exist as key elements of contemporary urban space, and explores what it means to live within these spaces, amongst cities of signs. This refreshing take on the way that urban space is lived and experienced is a timely contribution to the literature in urban studies, sociology and education alike. In decoding the cultural production at play in urban environments, Cities of Signs presents a dynamic approach to understanding how culture is produced and consumed within the cityscape.

Signs exist as fundamental markers of the urban landscape. Whether in the form of street signs offering directions, the airbrushed promises of advertising media or the vandalized detournements of street art, signs pervade urban spaces and provide a tangible 'text' upon which the logics of both cities and ourselves are written. Cities of Signs charts the way that signs exist as key elements of contemporary urban space, and explores what it means to live within these spaces, amongst cities of signs. This refreshing take on the way that urban space is lived and experienced is a timely contribution to the literature in urban studies, sociology and education alike. In decoding the cultural production at play in urban environments, Cities of Signs presents a dynamic approach to understanding how culture is produced and consumed within the cityscape.

In response to the growing scope and popularity of wedding-related offerings and the media attention given to celebrity and royal weddings, The Bride Factory critically examines various bridal media outlets, artifacts, and the messages they convey about women today. The book departs from conventional wisdom and other treatments of the bridal industry as a scholarly topic by revealing how media portray women in modern American society, and how these portrayals reflect feminism and femininity and illustrate the hegemony created by these media. The book discusses the portrayal of women as brides in media coverage throughout history; the various forms of wedding media, including print, television, and the Internet; how bridal media forward ideals of feminine beauty; how reality wedding programs depict brides - and the new "bridezilla" - as agents of control over their perfect day; the role of men in wedding planning; and the extent to which the white wedding ideal is embraced or resisted, with special attention given to alternative wedding media. Cohesive and multidisciplinary in its approach, The Bride Factory is the first major publication to shed critical light on bridal media and their feminist implications.

An unmissable collection of eight unconventional and captivating short stories for young and adult learners. "I love Olly's work - and you will too!" - Barbara Oakley, PhD, Author of New York Times bestseller A Mind for Numbers Short Stories in English for Beginners has been written especially for students from beginner to intermediate level, designed to give a sense of achievement, and most importantly - enjoyment! Mapped to A2-B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference, these eight captivating stories will both entertain you, and give you a feeling of progress when listening. What does this book give you? · Eight stories in a variety of exciting genres, from science fiction and crime to history and thriller - making learning fun, while you gain a wide range of new vocabulary · Controlled language at your level, including the 1000 most frequent words, to help you progress confidently · Authentic spoken dialogues, to help you learn conversational expressions and improve your speaking ability · Pleasure! It's much easier to learn a new language when you're having fun, and research shows that if you're enjoying listening in a foreign language, you won't experience the usual feelings of frustration - 'It's too hard!' 'I don't understand!' · Accessible grammar so you learn new structures naturally, in a stress-free way Carefully curated to make learning a new language easy, these stories will entertain you, while at the same time allowing you to benefit from an improved range of vocabulary and a better grasp of the language, without ever feeling overwhelmed or frustrated. From science fiction to fantasy, to crime and thrillers, Short Stories in English for Beginners will make learning English easy and enjoyable.

This edited volume details multiple and dynamic histories of relations between public service broadcasters and the World Wide Web. What does it mean to be a national broadcaster in a global communications environment? What are the commercial and public service pressures that were brought to bear when public service broadcasters implemented web services? How did "one-to-many" broadcasters adapt to the "many-to-many" medium of the internet? The thematic organisation of this collection addresses such major issues, while each chapter offers a particular historical account of relations between public service broadcasters and the World Wide Web.

This book explores the linguistic nature of American movie conversation, pointing out its resemblances to face-to-face conversation. The reason for such an investigation lies in the fact that movie language is traditionally considered to be non-representative of spontaneous language. The book presents a corpus-driven study of the similarities between face-to-face and movie conversation, using detailed consideration of individual lexical phrases and linguistic features as well as Biber's Multi-Dimensional Analysis (1998). The data from an existing spoken American English corpus - the Longman Spoken American Corpus - is compared to the American Movie Corpus, a corpus of American movie conversation purposely built for the research. On the basis of evidence from these corpora, the book shows that contemporary movie conversation does not differ significantly from face-to-face conversation, and can therefore be legitimately used to study and teach natural spoken language.

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.

One of the world's most influential and prolific media scholars, George Gerbner played a major role in the development of communication theory and research. His critical approach to mass communication changed the way we think about media industries, the messages and images they produce, and their social and cultural impacts. Gerbner is most widely known for his decades of work on television violence, but his research and writing focused on many other vital aspects of the symbolic cultural environment. This book provides a broad-based introduction to Gerbner's theories of mass communication, his long-term research on media content and effects, and the critical and policy contributions of his work. Although hundreds of studies have been conducted based on Gerbner's ideas, this is the first volume to provide a concise and comprehensive overview of his many contributions to the field.

The novels of Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, and Don DeLillo propose new readings of justice in contemporary American literature. Jason S. Polley argues that such distinctive writers as Smiley, Franzen, and DeLillo reconfigure what he calls "acts of justice" in various modalities and spaces. These authors re-conceptualize justice in their portrayals of peripheral groups, such as women, minorities, and outcasts. In lieu of fictionalizing justice in conventional courtrooms, these writers' narratives make a virtue of representing the undetermined and everyday presence of justice. As a result, Smiley, Franzen, and DeLillo succeed in demonstrating the ordinariness of personal concerns with justice. Loosely tracing a legacy of justice in American literature, this book also compares contemporary American narratives to canonized earlier American novels, such as Melville's Moby Dick, James's The Bostonians, and Norris's McTeague. The book likewise examines contemporary writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Polley concludes by observing that justice in contemporary American life is not about closure, but is an open-ended practice of human action, a theory that corresponds to postmodern theories of narrative.

Exam Board: SQA Level: National 5 Subject: English First teaching: September 2017 First exam: Summer 2018 Successfully develop the key language skills that students must demonstrate across the National 5 English assessments. Covering reading, writing, talking and listening - vital skills for learning, life and work - this course companion helps students to fulfil their potential at N5 and beyond. - Introduces the language skills required for National 5 English, offering advice for studying and revising these skills throughout the school year - Focuses on strategies for approaching the RUAE and Scottish Texts sections of the exam, providing explanations of command words and different question types, worked examples and practice questions - Takes students step by step through the process of analysing an extract/passage, looking at word choice, imagery, structure and many other linguistic techniques - Improves every student's language skills, with dozens of ready-made and accessible activities, including independent work, group discussion points and extension tasks - with answers provided online at hoddergibson.co.uk/answers-N5-English-Language

Soap operas and telenovelas are watched by millions of people around the world every day. As cultural, social, and economic phenomena, examining them will further our understanding of the role of global media content in the digital age. Moreover, as these programs continue to be exported and transformed at regional levels, and through digitalization, it is more important than ever to analyze where the genre has been, where it is now, and where it is going. This collection brings together original scholarship from an international and trans-disciplinary perspective. Chapters address timely issues, theories, and debates that are inextricably linked to soap operas and telenovelas as global industries, as sites for new audiences, and as hybrid cultural products within the digital landscape. Bringing depth and originality to the subject area, each chapter demonstrates the richness of these genres and their long-term significance as the televisual landscape evolves and becomes increasingly reliant on technological and creative innovations.

Online journalism has taken center stage in debates about the future of news. Instead of speculating, this volume offers rich empirical evidence about actual developments in online newsrooms. The authors use ethnographic methodologies to provide a vivid, close analysis of processes like newsroom integration, the transition of newspaper and radio journalists to digital multimedia production, the management of user-generated content, the coverage of electoral campaigns, the pressure of marketing logics, the relationship with bloggers or the redefinition of news genres. This second volume of Making Online News presents twelve all-new case studies of newsrooms around the world, including the United States of America, United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Zimbabwe and Malaysia.

This book represents a fresh look at cohesion, the point of departure being Halliday and Hasan's seminal Cohesion in English, which is examined in depth as are other notable approaches to cohesion such as Hoey's Patterns of Lexis in Text. It also compares different studies of relevance to cohesion from other areas of linguistics, such as: generative grammar, Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), and corpus linguistics. In this way, this work extends discussion of cohesion beyond the realms of systemic linguistics to include a broader spectrum of approaches including research into languages other than English. The main focus, however, is on varieties of English and on general and specialised discourse types. Rather than limiting itself to the text as product, the manifestation of a discourse, this book looks at cohesion from the wider perspective of discourse, seen as an interactive process. Consequently, different sociolinguistic and cultural factors are also taken into consideration: How far is cohesion a constitutive feature of text? What is the precise link between cohesion and coherence? What specific role does discourse have in phenomena such as anaphora? Do such things as cohesive universals exist across languages? How far do socio-cultural, or discourse-specific, conventions contribute to the type and degree of cohesion present in a text?

The main focus of this volume is on urbanity as a discursive way of human life in the city. Discourse is specified here in terms of semiotic codes and processes that link city dwellers as communicating selves into interpersonal and intersubjective collectivities when they create and interpret similar meanings embodied in material bearers. Accordingly, the unfolding of the semiotic web is understood, firstly, as detecting and evaluating the growth and manifestation of the sphere of meaning-bearers or a sequence of meaning-bearing events, and secondly, as identifying and explaining the constituents and aspects of discourse in the light of signs and/or sign-processes that aggregate individual participants of communication into discursive linkages on a lower level and discursive communities – on a higher level of social grouping. Some contributions deal with the discursive properties of human individuals in urban environments, and some others are devoted either to the meta-discourses on the city or discourses in the city.

This book questions how to monitor the contribution of mass media to democracy, and focuses on the initiatives, achievements and flaws of media monitoring. Moving beyond previous studies which have tended to discuss the legal issues related to media freedom alone, On Media Monitoring takes a broader approach, examining media structure, ownership, policy, economics, company conduct, law and regulation - all important indicators of how well the mass media serve contemporary democracies. Throughout, the book strikes a balance between monitoring initiatives with an academic, governmental, and non-governmental origin. The book - which includes a new monitoring model, the Media for Democracy Monitor, together with the results of its initial empirical implementation - is intended to further discussion about how to monitor the contribution of the mass media to democracy. It is suitable for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars who teach and research in this area.

Online Territories brings key research and writings in the interdisciplinary study of new media and society together to answer questions arising from the ways in which online technologies are currently being envisioned, used, and experienced. The book offers an up-to-date contextualization of online practices and explores, from a variety of perspectives, the emergence of new experiences and routines in relation to - and new conceptions of - social space. This volume addresses the need for further, research-based contextualization of preexisting theories related with globalization, mobility, citizenship and civic participation, socio-spatial dynamics, network society, and others. Online territories are traced in relation to three distinct and interrelated pathways - the everyday; the civic and the public; and the transnational/translocal - by taking mediation, communicative practice, and social space as departure points. The book includes an afterword by David Morley.

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.

Soap operas and telenovelas are watched by millions of people around the world every day. As cultural, social, and economic phenomena, examining them will further our understanding of the role of global media content in the digital age. Moreover, as these programs continue to be exported and transformed at regional levels, and through digitalization, it is more important than ever to analyze where the genre has been, where it is now, and where it is going. This collection brings together original scholarship from an international and trans-disciplinary perspective. Chapters address timely issues, theories, and debates that are inextricably linked to soap operas and telenovelas as global industries, as sites for new audiences, and as hybrid cultural products within the digital landscape. Bringing depth and originality to the subject area, each chapter demonstrates the richness of these genres and their long-term significance as the televisual landscape evolves and becomes increasingly reliant on technological and creative innovations.

This book examines how common e-learning technologies open up compelling, if limited, experiential spaces for users, similar to the imaginary worlds opened up by works of fiction. However, these experiential worlds are markedly different from the "real" world of physical objects and embodied relations. This book shows these differences to be of central importance for teaching and learning.

This book brings together a selection of papers originally presented at the fifth conference on Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise (DICOEN V) held in Milan in September 2009, and mainly focuses on the relevance of discourse and communication to the world of business and organizations as seen from a variety of disciplines (linguistics, communication studies, management studies, sociology, marketing). What unites the contributions is the discursive framework they adopt for the analysis of corporate communication, looking at it as a situated activity in a broadly constructionist paradigm. The various sections are organized along an internal-to-external-communication gradient, starting from the analysis of communication within a company's ordinary operational activities and moving gradually towards types of discourse that are specifically aimed at communication to the public at large, including their representation in the media. The picture that emerges is a good approximation to an accurate and updated snapshot of the state of the art in research and expertise in the area of corporate and institutional communication.