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Subject collection: Pragmatics (804 titles, 1978–2015)
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Subject collection: Pragmatics (804 titles, 1978–2015)
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Collection Contents
1 - 100 of 804 results
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Linguistic Variation in Research Articles
Author(s): Bethany GrayLinguistic Variation in Research Articles investigates the linguistic characteristics of academic research articles, going beyond a traditional analysis of the generically-defined research article to take into account varied realizations of research articles within and across disciplines. It combines corpus-based analyses of 70+ linguistic features with analyses of the situational, or non-linguistic, characteristics of the Academic Journal Registers Corpus: 270 research articles from 6 diverse disciplines (philosophy, history, political science, applied linguistics, biology, physics) and representing three sub-registers (theoretical, quantitative, and qualitative research). Comprehensive analyses include a lexical/grammatical survey, an exploration of structural complexity, and a Multi-Dimensional analysis, all interpreted relative to the situational analysis of the corpus. The finding that linguistic variation in research articles does not occur along a single parameter like discipline is discussed relative to our understanding of disciplinary practices, the multidimensional nature of variation in research articles, and resulting methodological considerations for corpus studies of disciplinary writing.
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Discourse-oriented Syntax
Editor(s): Josef Bayer, Roland Hinterhölzl and Andreas TrotzkeMore LessUntil recently, little attention has been paid within syntax to components of discourse meaning that go beyond information structure and fall into the domain of non-at-issue meaning operating at the level of illocutionary force. To approach this domain, many of the contributions of this volume deal with the syntax of discourse particles. However, the issue of how to account for discourse particles within a more explicit map of the illocutionary domain is a good starting point for considering further phenomena related to the syntax of speech acts. By focusing on speech-act related particles and/or meaning domains, this volume makes a new contribution to the field, as existing collections either do not offer a comparatively narrow focus on particles or are not limited to syntax-oriented approaches. The primary audience of this volume are researchers and graduate students interested in state-of-the-art approaches to the syntax-discourse interface within the cartographic approach to syntax.
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Metaphor in Specialist Discourse
Editor(s): J. Berenike Herrmann and Tony Berber SardinhaMore LessMetaphor in Specialist Discourse presents multiple perspectives on metaphor use in specialist and popularized discourse contexts. Using genre and register as starting parameters for deeper exploration, and pushing the boundaries further to open up new areas and possibilities, ten independent articles investigate metaphor use across a range of specialist domains of discourse, such as biology research articles, psychological counseling, soccer commentaries, workfloor communication, and penal policy documents. Framed by two theoretical chapters, the book is a contribution to the study of metaphor use in distinct discourse settings that will be of value to linguists and metaphor scholars of different persuasions, graduate students of linguistics and related disciplines, and practitioners of specialized areas with an interest in (verbal or gestural) language use in their areas of expertise. It shows that aspects of discourse variation are the beginning of, not an afterthought to, accurate empirical metaphor studies.
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The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions
Author(s): Shelley StaplesThe Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions: Contrasting the communicative styles of U.S. and international nurses is the first book to quantitatively examine a wide range of linguistic features in a corpus of interactions between nurses and standardized patients. The main goal of this book is to compare the discourse of U.S. (L1 English speaking) and international (L2 English speaking) nurses. The research design relies on a mixed method approach, including both quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of lexico-grammatical, interactional, prosodic, fluency, and non-verbal features; assessments of interactional effectiveness; and qualitative interviews with nurses. The book offers a detailed description of the situational characteristics of the interactions and compares the discourse of nurses and patients in order to contextualize differences in the communicative styles of the two nurse groups. The results provide new insight into the way that sociocultural and linguistic aspects of nurse discourse contribute to the delivery of patient-centered care.
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Time and Emergence in Grammar
Author(s): Simona Pekarek Doehler, Elwys De Stefani and Anne-Sylvie HorlacherThis monograph examines how language contributes to the social coordination of actions in talk-in-interaction. Focusing on a set of frequently used constructions in French (left-dislocation, right-dislocation, topicalization, and hanging topic), the study provides an empirically rich contribution to the understanding of grammar as thoroughly temporal, emergent, and contingent upon its use in social interaction. Based on data from a range of everyday interactions, the authors investigate speakers’ use of these constructions as resources for organizing social interaction, showing how speakers continuously adapt, revise, and extend grammatical trajectories in real time in response to local contingencies. The book is designed to be both informative for the specialized scholar and accessible to the graduate student familiar with conversation analysis and/or interactional linguistics.
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Beyond Aspect
Editor(s): Doris L. Payne and Shahar ShirtzMore LessCertain grammatical elements help hearers know how propositions are conceptually related: Does a given proposition advance the foregrounded event line, or not? Initiate versus continue an event chain? Indicate that one proposition belongs to a different "mental space" from the previous one? Provide background information? Studies in this volume show that African languages sometimes support, but often refute the idea that perfective aspect or past tense marks the narrative event line. Rather, languages may employ clause level constructions, conjunctions or connectives, tonal melodies on verbs or subjects, specialized auxiliaries, special verb forms and even dependent clause and imperfective aspect forms. Often, correlation of such grammatical elements with the event line is a subcase of a more general function. Analyses in this volume contribute to developing a typology of the expression of discourse functions, a field of research which has so far been minimally addressed from a typological perspective.
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The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns
Editor(s): Laure Gardelle and Sandrine SorlinMore LessThis volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP’s, recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental, if not universal, category, whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance, personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis, and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position), as well as their pragmatic functions in an extensive range of genres such as advertising, TV series, charity appeals, mother/child interaction or computer-mediated communication. Moreover, one section is devoted to the pragmatics of antecedentless pronouns and so-called ‘impersonal’ personal forms. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and students interested in the pragmatics of functional words.
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Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders
Editor(s): John Wilson and Diana BoxerMore LessDiscourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders focuses on the discourse practices of women in global political leadership. It provides a series of discursive studies of women in positions of political leadership. ‘Political leadership’ is defined as achieving a senior position within a political organization and will often indicate a senior role in government or opposition. The volume draws on a diverse collection of studies from across the globe, reflecting a variety of cultures and distinct polities. The primary aim is to consider in what way(s) discursive practice underpins, reflects, or is appropriated in terms of women’s political success and achievements within politics. The chapters employ differing theoretical approaches all bound by the discursive insights they provide, and in terms of their contribution to understanding the role of language and discourse in the construction of gendered identities within political contexts.
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Scrutinizing Argumentation in Practice
Editor(s): Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart GarssenMore LessScrutinizing Argumentation in Practice contains a selection of papers reflecting upon the use of argumentation in real life contexts. The first five sections are devoted to argumentation in a specific institutional context: scientific controversies, argumentation in politics, argumentation in a legal context, argumentation in education, argumentation in an interpersonal context. The last section deals with strategic maneuvering as a vital concept in studying argumentation in practice.
The contributors are: Francesco Arcidiacono, Michael J. Baker, Sarah Bigi, Marina Bletsas, Stephanie Breux, William O. Dailey, Marianne Doury, Claudio Duran, Frans H. van Eemeren, Lindsay M. Ellis, Jeanne Fahnestock, Eveline T. Feteris, Bart Garssen, Anca Gâţă, Salma I. Ghanem, Sara Greco, Edward A. Hinck, Robert S. Hinck, Shelly S. Hinck, Henrike Jansen, Takayuki Kato, Susan L. Kline, Pascale Mansier, Bert Meuffels, Celine Miserez-Caperos, D’Arcy Oaks, Sachinidou Paraskevi, Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, H. José Plug, Takeshi Suzuki, and David Zarefsky.
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Singing, Speaking and Writing Politics
Editor(s): Mirjana N. DedaićMore LessThe discourses of the post-apartheid South Africa embody symbols of change and promises of new lessons in history. This is the first volume that brings together analyses of a variety of discourses produced in South Africa through which we follow the evolution of transitional processes in the country’s political institutions and in the opinions of its populace. The book offers to the reader a visit to the Parliament, a peek into the internet forums, analyses of the country's official papers and speeches, and the media accounts. Through all these discourses we see the burning questions – "Who Are We Now?" and "Who Do We Want To Be?" – being repetitively examined and identities cross-formed while the country deals with new, post-apartheid challenges, as well as successes.
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The Power of Satire
Editor(s): Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de LeeuwMore LessSatire is clearly one of today’s most controversial socio-cultural topics. In this edited volume, The Power of Satire, it is studied for the first time as a dynamic, discursive mode of performance with the power of crossing and contesting cultural boundaries. The collected essays reflect the fundamental shift from literary satire or straightforward literary rhetoric with a relatively limited societal impact, to satire’s multi-mediality in the transnational public space where it can cause intercultural clashes and negotiations on a large scale. An appropriate set of heuristic themes – space, target, rhetoric, media, time – serves as the analytical framework for the investigations and determines the organization of the book as a whole. The contributions, written by an international group of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, manifest academic standards with a balance between theoretical analyses and evaluations on the one hand, and in-depth case studies on the other.
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Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics
Editor(s): María Jesús Pinar SanzMore LessThe aim of this volume is to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics. The innovative nature of the volume in relation to those existing in the field lies in the fact that it brings together contributions from three of the main approaches dealing with Multimodality – Cognitive Linguistics and multimodal metaphors (Forceville & Urios Aparisi, 2009), social semiotics and systemic functional grammar and multimodal interactional analysis (Jewitt, 2009) –highlighting the importance of multimodal resources, and showing the close relationship between this field of study and Cognitive Linguistics applied to a variety of genres –ranging from comics, films, cartoons, picturebooks or visuals in tapestry to name a few. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics Vol. 11:2 (2013).
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Contemporary Chinese Discourse and Social Practice in China
Editor(s): Linda Tsung and Wei WangMore LessSignificant socio-political changes in China have had great impact on Chinese discourse. Changes to the discourse have become an increasing focus of scholarship. This book examines contemporary Chinese discourse and social practice in China with a focus on the role that language plays in the on-going transformation of Chinese society. With a view to producing new insights into the interdependence between discourse and social practice, this volume explores how discourse has been changing in a context-dependent way; how social practice can lead to shifts in the use of discourse; and how identities and attitudes are constructed through language use. Largely based on empirical studies, this book indicates that Chinese discourse has not only been an integral part of social change, but also Chinese discourse itself is changing, reflecting ideologies, values, attitudes, identities and social practice. The book is a great resource for scholars in diverse disciplinary studies including linguistics, communication, education, media and political studies concerning contemporary China.
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Discursive Strategies and Political Hegemony
Author(s): Can KüçükaliWith the help of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this book approaches Turkish politics from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to deepen our understanding of political power and discourse. This study re-conceptualizes discursive strategies as hegemonic projects and thirteen governmental speeches are analyzed accordingly. It also provides readers with a theoretical discussion on the nature of political discourse through references to deliberative, agonistic and critical realistic approaches.
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Made-in-Canada Humour
Author(s): Beverly J. RasporichMade-in-Canada-Humour is an interdisciplinary survey and analysis of Canadian humour and humorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book focuses on a variety of genres. It includes celebrated Canadian writers and poets with ironic and satiric perspectives; oral storytellers of tall tales in the country and the city; newspaper print humorists; representative national and regional cartoonists; and comedians of stage, radio and television. The humour gives voice to Canadian values and experiences, and consequently, techniques and styles of humour particular to the country. While a persistent comic theme has been joking at the expense of the United States, both countries have influenced one another’s humour. Canada’s unique humorous tradition also reflects its emergence from a colonial country to a postcolonial and postmodern nation with contemporary humour that addresses gender and racial issues.
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Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue
Editor(s): Răzvan Săftoiu, Maria-Ionela Neagu and Stanca MădaMore LessPersuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue is about the rediscovery of humans as proficient users of language in the sense that – while involved in a dialogue – they listen, observe, discuss, reason, evaluate and conclude; in other words, speakers are no longer interested in defeating the other and proving him/her wrong, but in learning from the other.
The volume comprises 12 articles, distributed in two sections – Persuasion in Political Dialogue and Persuasive Strategies in Professional Dialogue – which approach the topic of persuasion as it unfolds from political and professional communication. The articles in the proposed volume depict relevant theoretical and practical issues related to persuasion in two communication sites: politics and workplace, and they are results of consistent research conducted by the contributors in various settings. The contributions provide critical, valuable insights into the dynamic process of creating and maintaining relationships at an individual and at a professional level.
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Rethinking Syntactocentrism
Author(s): Andreas TrotzkeThe term ‘syntactocentrism’ has been used to criticize the claim that syntax, as regarded in generative linguistics, plays the central role in modeling the mental architecture of the human language faculty. This research monograph explores the conjecture that many of the objections to the generative perspective, as they are formulated in alternative frameworks such as construction grammar, disappear once the consequences of recent minimalist theory are taken seriously. To show this, the book applies recent concepts of minimalist grammar to phenomena like the syntactic flexibility of idioms, the pragmatics of left-periphery-movement, or opacity effects involved in subextraction patterns. The book makes a new contribution to the field, as existing monographs on architectural matters in minimalism neither discuss alternative frameworks at length nor place a premium on pragmatic explanations for syntactic facts. The primary audience of this book are researchers and graduate students interested in a state-of-the-art discussion of grammatical architecture.
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Sociology of Discourse
Author(s): Óscar García AgustínSociology of Discourse takes the perspective that collective actors like social movements are capable of creating social change from below by creating new institutions through alternative discourses. Institutionalization becomes a process of moving away from existing institutions towards creating new ones. While discourses entail openness and enable the questioning of what is instituted, institutions offer continuity and stability to social mobilizations. This dual movement of openness and stabilization explains how social struggles ensure their continuity, without completely assuming the logic of the dominant order. The book proposes an analytical model of social change, which is unfolded through three intertwined areas: discourse, communication, and institution. Collective experiences of social change, from the anti-globalization movement to Occupy, illustrate the main theoretical points and concepts. Through the example of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, the book concludes by analyzing how social change from below is possible.
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Case in Russian
Author(s): Alexandra BeytenbratThis volume presents an analysis of Russian case from a sign-oriented perspective. The study was inspired by William Diver’s analysis of Latin case and follows the spirit of the Columbia School of linguistics. The fundamental premise that underlies this volume is that language is a communicative tool shaped by human behavior.In this study, case is viewed as a semantic entity. Each case is assigned an invariant meaning within a larger semantic system, which is validated through numerous examples from spoken language and literary texts to illustrate that the distribution of cases is semantically motivated and defined by communicative principles that can be associated with human behavior.
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Discourse, Identity and Legitimacy
Author(s): Majid KhosraviNikThis book is a critical study of the ways that discourses of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in the reporting of a major international political conflict. Taking Iran’s nuclear programme as a case study, this book offers extensive textual analysis, comparative investigation and socio-political contextualisation of national identity in newspaper reporting. In addition to providing comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis, the book provides a valuable extensive discussion of journalistic practice in Iranian and British contexts, as well as offering insights into historical development of ‘discourses in place’ in Iran. Across four separate chapters, major national and influential newspapers from both countries are critically analysed in terms of their micro-linguistic and macro-discoursal content and strategies. The book is a vital source for interdisciplinary scholarship and will appeal to students and researchers across the critical social sciences, particularly those in linguistics, media and communication studies, journalism and international politics.
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The Dynamics of Political Discourse
Editor(s): Anita Fetzer, Elda Weizman and Lawrence N. BerlinMore LessRethinking Sinclair and Coulthard’s sequentiality-based notion of the follow-up, this volume explores its forms and communicative functions in traditional and contemporary modes of communication (parliamentary sessions, interviews, debates, speeches, op-eds, discussion forums and Twitter) wherein political actors address challenges to their political agenda and to their political face. In so doing, the volume achieves two major advances. First, its contributions expand the understanding of follow-ups beyond the traditional focus on structural sequentiality, considering communicative function as a defining feature of a follow-up. Second, it broadens the understanding of what constitutes political discourse, as not being limited to a single discourse, but also being able to span multiple discourses of different forms and speech events over time.
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Follow-ups in Political Discourse
Editor(s): Elda Weizman and Anita FetzerMore LessThis book explores the various forms and functions of follow-ups in a range of political speech events. Follow-ups are conceptualized as communicative acts, in and through which a prior communicative act is accepted, challenged, or otherwise negotiated by ratified participants in the exchange or by third parties. The broad view suggested here accommodates a large variation in the functions of follow-ups, e.g. positioning, third-party involvement, evaluation and argumentation, ratification, support, challenge and attendance to face wants. These variations are explored in a range of cultural environments, such as the UK, The Netherlands, Israel and France. Inter-cultural exchanges are studied through the analysis of diplomatic discourse, interpreting and cross-cultural comparison.
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Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse
Editor(s): Birte Bös and Lucia KornexlMore LessThis volume explores the dynamics of genre conventions in historical English news discourse. The contributions cover a wide spectrum of news writing and publication formats: from corantos to modern tabloids, from prototypical hard news stories and crime reports to more specialised genres such as medical and scientific news, advertisements, death notices and spoof news. Investigating linguistic, pragmatic and social factors, the authors trace the triggers, mechanisms and agents of change that have shaped genre conventions in historical news discourse from the 17th century to the present day.
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Pragmatic Markers in Irish English
Editor(s): Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty and Elaine VaughanMore LessPragmatic Markers in Irish English offers 18 studies from the perspective of variational pragmatics by established and younger scholars with an interest in the English of Ireland. Taking a broad definition of pragmatic markers (PMs) as items operating outside the structural limits of the clause that encode speakers’ intentions and interpersonal meanings, this volume includes discussions of traditional PMs like sure that are strongly associated with Irish English, recent globally-spreading innovations like quotative like, and studies of tag questions, vocatives and emoticons. The data sets used cover most of the existing and developing corpora of Irish English as well as historical legal depositions, films, advertising and recent fiction, interviews, recorded conversations, and blogs. The authors address general issues such as what corpora of Irish English might add to the description of PMs in general, the interaction of Irish and Irish English, historical and contemporary uses of specific PMs, and the usage of recent immigrants to Ireland.
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Argumentation in Political Deliberation
Editor(s): Marcin Lewiński and Dima MohammedMore LessThe goal of this volume is to further the examination of the role, shape, and quality of argumentation in political deliberation. The chapters collected in the volume employ the concepts and methods developed within argumentation theory to investigate the specifics of political discourse across various deliberative arenas: from debates in the European Parliament, consensus conferences and public hearings in France, discussions in Dutch online forums, to exchanges of comments in online versions of British newspapers. In this way, the studies reveal the inner workings of argumentative interactions that constitute deliberative discourse – and thus importantly contribute to the study of public deliberation. This should be of interest to the students of argumentation, deliberation, and political discourse. In addition, the volume problematizes and theorizes some vital issues related to the study of situated argumentation, thus advancing the study of argumentation in context.
Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context, Vol. 2:1 (2013).
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Dialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities
Editor(s): Dale Koike and Carl S. BlythMore LessDialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities contains a collection of new articles that approach the study of dialogue through the construct of the ‘community’, that is, a group of people who come together for any number of reasons; e.g. geographical location, a common goal, a search for unity or bonding, or a particular set of circumstances. The authors address a wide range of topics such as dialogic skills as situated practice, the learning of culture, and the negotiation of identities between native speakers and L2 learners. This volume also investigates how native and non-native speakers learn various community-based aspects of dialogic interaction, such as how to interpret social contexts, stances, frames and gestures. Despite different methodologies and frameworks, the studies demonstrate that native speakers and L2 learners alike use multiple ‘vocalizations’ of a language.
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Creating Social Orientation Through Language
Author(s): Andreas LanglotzThis monograph develops a new socio-cognitive theory of sense-making for analyzing the creative management of situated social meaning. Drawing on cognitive-linguistic and social-interactional heuristics in an innovative way, the book both theorizes and demonstrates how embodied cognizers create complex situated conceptualizations of self and other, which guide and support their interactions. It shows how these sense-making processes are managed through the coordinated social interaction of two (or more) communicative partners.
To illustrate the theory, the book draws on two distinct data sets: front-desk tourist-information transactions and online-workgroup discussions. It scrutinizes how the communicative partners use verbal humour as a powerful strategy to creatively establish a situated social image for themselves.
This book addresses specialists and advanced students in the areas of cognitive linguistics as well as interactional approaches to language. Moreover, it will be of great value to readers interested in verbal humour, business communication, and computer-mediated communication.
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Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness
Editor(s): Marina TerkourafiMore LessInterdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness brings together the work of linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and second language experts in order to provide readers with a snapshot of the possibilities for studying im/politeness in the 21st century. The volume is organized along methodological lines in three parts each preceded by a brief introduction outlining the evolution and advantages and disadvantages of the relevant methodologies, while a specially commissioned epilogue places the volume in the field as a whole. Part I is dedicated to self-reporting studies, Part II covers observational studies, and Part III introduces experimental studies. A central goal of the present collection is to make a case for the relevance of all these types of data and of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to the ongoing theoretical debates in the field of im/politeness.
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Understanding Patients' Voices
Author(s): Marta Antón and Elizabeth M. GoeringThis volume illustrates the process of conducting interdisciplinary, multi-cultural research into the relationship between patient language use and chronic disease management. The ten chapters in this book provide a model for interdisciplinary research in health discourse from start to finish. Part I describes in detail the conceptualization and design of a multi-year research project exploring language use among people living with diabetes. Part II offers a sampler of a variety of qualitative, quantitative, and contrastive methodologies that have considerable potential in the study of health discourse. Part III brings the research process full circle by discussing issues related to adapting research protocols to diverse cultural contexts, translating results into practice, and working in interdisciplinary teams.
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Crime and Corpus
Author(s): Ulrike TabbertReports on crime in newspapers do not provide a neutral representation of criminals and their offences but instead construct them in accordance with societal discourse surrounding this issue. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of Linguistics, Criminology, and Media Studies and demonstrates how Linguistics can contribute to the study of crime in the media. By combining the tools offered by Corpus Linguistics and Critical Stylistics (a text-based framework for Critical Discourse Analysis), evidence is provided for predominant perceptions of crime and their underlying ideologies in both British and German society. This study names and illustrates the most significant linguistic devices used to construct offenders, victims, and crimes in two newspaper corpora compiled from the German and British press. These devices are then linked to criminological frameworks.
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Gender Across Languages
Editor(s): Marlis Hellinger and Heiko MotschenbacherMore LessThis is the fourth volume of a comprehensive reference work which provides systematic descriptions of the manifestations of gender in languages of diverse areal, typological and socio-cultural affiliations. To the 30 languages already analysed in previous volumes, Vol. 4 adds another 12 languages whose gendered structures have received little or no academic attention in the past. Again, the collection includes a broad spectrum of languages: It contains languages with and without grammatical gender, a language with noun classification and a classifier language; larger national languages as well as smaller languages with minority status; and, of course, members of diverse language families, i.e. Indo-European as well as Finno-Ugrian, Iroquois, Tai-Kadai and Niger-Congo. The volume illustrates the tremendous variation found in the area of gender representation across languages. At the same time, it will provide the much-needed material required for an explicitly comparative approach to linguistic manifestations of gender.
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Sensory Adjectives in the Discourse of Food
Author(s): Catherine DiederichSensory Adjectives in the Discourse of Food presents a frame-based analysis of sensory descriptors. This book investigates the identification and usefulness of conceptual frames in three respects: First, an analysis of scientific language use shows that a semantic interpretation of the adjectives is dependent on the operationalizations performed in the field of sensory science. Second, a systematic frame semantic analysis of the descriptors sheds light on how meaning is constructed with regard to the lexemes’ wider context, from the utterance to the text type. Third, a comparison with German descriptors tests the applicability of a frame from one language to another (English – German). Framing presents itself as a means to capture the knowledge representation that underlies a particular discourse. With its detailed linguistic analyses and its interdisciplinary treatment of framing across discourse (specialized vs. public discourse), this book is interesting for researchers working within cognitive linguistics, terminology, and sensory science.
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Producing and Managing Restricted Activities
Editor(s): Fabienne H.G. Chevalier and John MooreMore LessThis book examines the kinds of talk that service providers working in various settings (e.g. doctors, healthcare providers, helpline call takers, tourist officers) seek to avoid in their interactions with clients, when such talk may be expected or due in some way. The studies utilise Conversation Analysis to demonstrate how participants use the interactional practices of avoidance and withholding to construct specific activities as restricted. The various authors also show how, in contributing to the restricted character of certain activities, withholding and avoidance in turn contribute to both the accomplishment of the particular work of the specific organisations and to the construction of the specific institutional identities of the professionals. Overall, the collection offers an authoritative account of restriction and avoidance in workplace interaction.
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Languages of Governance in Conflict
Author(s): Ingjerd HoëmThrough an ethnographically based study of local communicative practices in the Pacific atoll society of Tokelau, the book adds to our understanding of how systems of governance are constituted by minute acts of social interaction, and are informed by our conceptions of the nature of sociality. It combines a social anthropological approach to postcolonial studies in which local and trans-national communicative practices related to governance and conflict management are analysed as different language games. The book offers an experience-near approach to local modes of conflict management and patterns of leadership, and documents how micro-level communicative practices have an impact on macro-political processes.
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Temporality in Interaction
Editor(s): Arnulf Deppermann and Susanne GünthnerMore LessTime is a constitutive element of everyday interaction: all verbal interaction is produced and interpreted in time. However, it is only recently that research in linguistics has started to take the temporality of linguistic production and reception in interaction into account by studying the real-time and on-line dimension of spoken language.
This volume is the first systematic collection of studies exploring temporality in interaction and its theoretical foundations. It brings together researchers focusing on how temporality impinges on the production and interpretation of linguistic structures in interaction and how linguistic resources are designed to deal with the exigencies and potentials of temporality in interaction. The volume provides new insights into the temporal design of a range of heretofore unexplored linguistic phenomena from various languages as well as into the temporal aspects of linguistic structures in embodied interaction.
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Narrative Matters in Medical Contexts across Disciplines
Editor(s): Franziska Gygax and Miriam A. LocherMore LessThis collection of original chapters gives center stage to the concept of ‘narrative’ in medical contexts. The contributors come from the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, linguistics, psychology, and medicine and work with texts as diverse as autobiographies, graphic novels, Renaissance medical treatises and reports, short stories, reflective writing, creative writing, and online narratives. The interdisciplinary dialogue shows the richness and scope of the concept ‘narrative’ and demonstrates how crucial it is for practices in the medical context as well as in the contributing disciplines. The collection raises awareness of the great variety and multivocality of narratives on the experience of illness besides paying heed to the many different positions and angles from which these narratives can be perceived, read, and analyzed. The wide range of approaches assembled in this collection provides a comprehensive view on illness and health and on the multiple ways in which they are represented in narrative.
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Israeli Peace Discourse
Author(s): Dalia Gavriely-NuriWhat role do language and discourse play in the advancement of peace? What is the connection between a given society’s “peace language” and the repeated failure of peace initiatives involving it? At the heart of this book lie these basic questions and the attempt to shed light on them from new angles. The book focuses on an analysis of Israeli peace discourse and indicates the need for change in this discourse in order to promote a “culture of peace”. It presents the process of peace-estrangement, a set of linguistic, discursive and cultural devices intended for creating doubt regarding the positive meaning associated with the concept of peace. The approach adopted in this book is the Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CCDA). This approach aims at exposing the cultural codes embedded in the discourse, which contribute to reproducing abuses of social power. The analytic chapters focus on different historical periods, since the beginning of the 20th century to this day, and deal with various genres found in diverse corpora, such as Knesset records and school textbooks.
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Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
Editor(s): Marta Dynel and Jan ChovanecMore LessThis book deals with participation frameworks in modern social and public media. It brings together several cutting-edge research studies that offer exciting new insights into the nature and formats of interpersonal communication in diverse technology-mediated contexts. Some papers introduce new theoretical extensions to participation formats, while others present case studies in various discourse domains spanning public and private genres. Adopting the perspective of the pragmatics of interaction, these contributions discuss data ranging from public, mass-mediated and quasi-authentic texts, fully staged and scripted textual productions, to authentic, non-scripted private messages and comments, both of a permanent and ephemeral nature. The analyses include news interviews, online sports reporting, sitcoms, comedy shows, stand-up comedies, drama series, institutional and personal blogs, tweets, follow-up YouTube video commentaries, and Facebook status updates. All the authors emphasize the role of context and pay attention to how meaning is constructed by participants in interactions in increasingly complex participation frameworks existing in traditional as well as novel technologically mediated interactions.
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Realism and Individualism
Author(s): Mateusz W. Oleksy and Wieslaw OleksyRealism and Individualism. Charles S. Peirce and the Threat of Modern Nominalism discusses the main problems, tenets, assumptions, and arguments involved in Charles S. Peirce's early and late realist stances and subjects to critical scrutiny the still dominant view that Pragmatic Realism merely extends or refines new arguments in support of Scholastic Realism without questioning its basic assumptions. The book presents a critical overview of Peirce’s views on modern nominalism and offers a novel approach to the social-anthropological underpinnings of his realism, especially Pragmatic Realism vis à vis the individualist tendencies in modern thought.
The book is of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, especially students of American pragmatism, anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, as well as to anyone interested in Charles S. Peirce, Duns Scotus, Ockham, and generally to semioticians, social scientists, and sociologists.
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Semantics
Author(s): Igor Mel’čukEditor(s): David Beck and Alain PolguèreMore LessThis book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, starting from the idea that language can be described as a mechanism for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms, or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, the present volume closes the publication of the three volume series. It discusses in detail several linguistic notions crucial to the development of Meaning-Text models of natural languages: semantic and syntactic actants, government pattern, lexical functions, linguistic connotations, phrasemes, the meaning of grammatical cases, and linguistic dependencies. The notions under analysis are illustrated from a variety of languages. Reflecting the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences, whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.
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Subjects in Constructions – Canonical and Non-Canonical
Editor(s): Marja-Liisa Helasvuo and Tuomas HuumoMore LessThis volume analyzes constructions with non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, drawing on insights from cognitive and discourse-functional linguistics. Prototypical subjects have often been characterized in terms of their semantic, syntactic and discourse features, such as animacy, agentivity, topicality, referentiality, definiteness and autonomy of existence of the subject referent. A non-canonical subject is one that lacks some of these features. This may be reflected in its meaning, grammatical coding, and/or discourse function. In discussing non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, the chapters in the volume address the following more general topics: What kinds of grammatical, semantic and discourse criteria can be used to distinguish subjects from non-subjects? To what extent are subject criteria construction-specific? What kinds of constructions have non-canonical subjects? What are the semantic and discourse functions of constructions with non-canonical subjects? Are subjects which are grammatically non-canonical also atypical in terms of their discourse features?
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The Mighty Child
Author(s): Clémentine BeauvaisThe Mighty Child offers an existentialist approach to the theorization and criticism of children’s literature, nuancing the academic claim that children’s literature, specifically defined as ‘didactic’, alienates childhood from adulthood and disempowers its implied child reader. This volume recentres the theoretical debate around the constructions of time and power which characterize conceptions of childhood and adulthood in children’s literature. The ‘hidden’, didactic adult of children’s literature, this volume argues, is not solely the dictatorial planner of the child’s future, but also a disempowered entity, yearning for unpredictability in the semi-educational, semi-aesthetic endeavor of the children’s book. Leaning on current work in the field of children’s literature theory, on French phenomenological existentialism, and on the philosophy and sociology of childhood, The Mighty Child is addressed to contemporary theorists and critics of children’s literature.
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Discourses of Helping Professions
Editor(s): Eva-Maria Graf, Marlene Sator and Thomas Spranz-FogasyMore LessDiscourses of Helping Professions brings together cutting-edge research on professional discourses from both traditional helping contexts such as doctor-patient interaction or psychotherapy and more recent helping contexts such as executive coaching. Unlike workplace, professional and institutional discourse – by now well established fields in linguistic research – discourses of helping professions represent an innovative concept in its orientation to a common communicative goal: solving patients’ and clients’ physical, psychological, emotional, professional or managerial problems via a particular helping discourse. The book sets out to uncover differences, similarities and interferences in how professionals and those seeking help interactively tackle this communicative goal. In its focus on professional helping contexts and its inter-professional perspective, the current book is a primer, intended to spark off more interdisciplinary and (applied) research on helping discourses, a socio-cultural phenomenon that is of growing importance in our post-modern society. As such, it is of great relevance for discourse researchers and discourse practitioners, caretakers and social scientists of all shades as well as for everybody interested in helping professions.
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Requesting in Social Interaction
Editor(s): Paul Drew and Elizabeth Couper-KuhlenMore LessThere has been a remarkable revival of interest in how we conduct social actions in interaction – particularly in requesting, where recent research into video-recorded face-to-face interaction has taken our understanding in novel directions. This collection brings together some of the latest, cutting-edge research into requesting by leading international practitioners of Conversation Analysis. The studies trace a line of conceptual development from ‘directive’ to ‘recruitment’, and explore the acquisitional, cultural, situational and species-specific differentiation of forms for requesting in human social interaction.They represent the latest explorations into the complexities and controversies associated with the apparently simple but essential matter of how we ask another to do something for us.
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Gender, Language and Ideology
Author(s): Momoko NakamuraThe book examines women’s language as an ideological construct historically created by discourse. The aim is to demonstrate, by delineating a genealogy of Japanese women’s language, that, to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language, and to account for why and how they are related as they are, we must consider history, discourse and ideology. The book analyzes multiple discourse examples spanning the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII years, mostly translated into English for the first time, locating them in political, social and academic developments and describing each historical period in a manner easily accessible for those readers not familiar with Japanese history. This is the first book that describes a comprehensive development of Japanese women’s language and will greatly interest students of Japanese language, gender and language studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and history, as well as women’s studies and sexuality studies.
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Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts
Editor(s): Andrzej Zuczkowski, Ramona Bongelli, Ilaria Riccioni and Carla CanestrariMore LessThis volume is a collection of 18 papers on the communication of certainty and uncertainty. The first part introduces recent theoretical developments and general models on the topic and its relations with modality, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, epistemicity, evidentiality, hedging, mitigation and speech acts. In the second part, results from empirical studies in medical and supportive contexts are presented, all of which are based on a conversational analysis approach. These papers report on professional dialogues including advice giving in gynecological consultations, breaking diagnostic bad news to patients, emergency calls, addiction therapeutic community meetings and bureaucratic-institutional interactions. The final part concerns the qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora, addressing scientific writing (both research and popular articles) and academic communication in English, German, Spanish and Romanian. The collection is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective and to health professionals interested in the practical implications of communicating certainty or uncertainty.
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The Pragmatics of Discourse Coherence
Editor(s): Helmut Gruber and Gisela RedekerMore LessOver the past four decades, discourse coherence has been studied from linguistic, psycholinguistic, computational, and applied perspectives. This volume identifies current issues and under-researched topics in the pragmatics of discourse coherence. Nine studies from various disciplines address the realization and signalling of coherence relations in various genres and languages, their acquisition and use by first- and second-language learners and university students, the relationship between coherence relations and genre-specific discourse structure, and extensions of the coherence paradigm to multimodal discourse and visual art. This collection will be of interest to researchers from linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication, and multimodal semiotics.
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Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between
Editor(s): Sibilla Cantarini, Werner Abraham and Elisabeth LeissMore LessThe selected papers of this volume cover five main topics, namely ‘Certainty: The conceptual differential’; ‘(Un)Certainty as attitudinality’; ‘Dialogical exchange and speech acts’; ‘Onomasiology’; and ‘Applications in exegesis and religious discourse’. By examining the general theme of the communication of certainty and uncertainty from different scientific fields, theoretical approaches and perspectives, this compendium of state-of-the-art research papers provides both an interdisciplinary comparison of the latest investigations, methods and findings, and new advances and theoretical insights with a common focus on human communication.
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Discourse Segmentation in Romance Languages
Editor(s): Salvador Pons BorderíaMore LessThis volume gathers together for the first time contributions from the most relevant approaches in discourse segmentation developed in the last fifteen years in Romance languages. All these approaches share the assumption that discourses (either oral or written) can be fully divided into units and subunits: just like sentences are fully analyzed with the help of Syntax, discourse can be fully analyzed with the help of Pragmatics. In this sense, the approaches in this volume represent a step forward with respect to the issues in segmentation addressed by Conversational Analysis or by Discourse Analysis. The research questions addressed in this volume range from the distribution of foci to the coupling of gestures and discourse units, the treatment of discourse markers or the interplay between intonation and discourse organization; all of great interest for General Linguistics, as well as for Romance Languages.
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Educating in Dialog
Editor(s): Sebastian Feller and Ilker YenginMore LessEducating in Dialog: Constructing meaning and building knowledge with dialogic technology contains a collection of new articles on the relationship of learning, dialog and technology. The articles combine different views of dialogic learning stemming from a multiplicity of discipline backgrounds and research interests including educational design, educational science, epistemology, cognitive linguistics, cultural studies, and mobile learning, to name a few. The authors discuss and explore a variety of topics that range from knowledge building over learning communities to dialogic technologies for knowledge co‐construction. Discussing technology and learning against this broad background is indispensable, as the gap between what learners actually need for successful learning and what current technology offers becomes increasingly wide. This book provides thought-provoking views of recent developments in the area of technology supported learning for everyone who is interested in educational technologies, collaborative learning, and dialog.
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Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News
Author(s): Jan ChovanecThis book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.
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Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies
Editor(s): Tommaso Raso and Heliana MelloMore LessThe authors of this book share a common interest in the following topics: the importance of corpora compilation for the empirical study of human language; the importance of pragmatic categories such as emotion, attitude, illocution and information structure in linguistic theory; and a passionate belief in the central role of prosody for the analysis of speech. Four distinct sections (spoken corpora compilation; spoken corpora annotation; prosody; and syntax and information structure) give the book the structure in which the authors present innovative methodologies that focus on the compilation of third generation spoken corpora; multilevel spoken corpora annotation and its functions; and additionally a debate is initiated about the reference unit in the study of spoken language via information structure. The book is accompanied by a web site with a rich array of audio/video files. The web site can be found at the following address: DOI: 10.1075/scl.61.media
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Corporate Argumentation in Takeover Bids
Author(s): Rudi PalmieriThis volume systematically investigates the role of argumentation in takeover bids. The announcement of these financial proposals triggers an argumentative situation, in which both the economic desirability and the social acceptability of the deal become argumentative issues for different classes of stakeholders (shareholders, employees, customers, etc.). The study focuses on the strategic maneuvers that corporate directors deploy in order to persuade their audiences while complying with precise regulatory requirements, designed to allow shareholders to make reasonable decisions.
A conceptual reframing of takeovers as an argumentative context brings to light the different argumentative situations of friendly and hostile bids. The argumentative strategies that corporate directors adopt in the two situations are identified and analyzed on the basis of a corpus of takeover documents referring to offers launched in the UK market between 2006 and 2010. The argumentative reconstruction focuses in particular on the inferential configuration of arguments, which is accomplished by means of the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT). This kind of analysis enables capturing the inherently argumentative processes through which information becomes a relevant starting point for investment decisions.
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Reclaiming Control as a Semantic and Pragmatic Phenomenon
Author(s): Patrick J. DuffleyThis monograph is part of a growing research agenda in which semantics and pragmatics not only complement the grammar, but replace it. The analysis is based on the assumption that human language is not primarily about form, but about form-meaning pairings. This runs counter to the autonomous-syntax postulate underlying Landau (2013)’s Control in Generative Grammar that form must be hived off from meaning and studied separately. Duffley shows control to depend on meaning in combination with inferences based on the nature of the events expressed by the matrix and complement, the matrix subject, the semantic relation between matrix and complement, and a number of other factors.
The conclusions call for a reconsideration of Ariel (2010)’s distinction in Defining Pragmatics between semantics and pragmatics on the basis of cancelability: many control readings are not cancelable although they are pragmatically inferred. It is proposed that the line be drawn rather between what is linguistically expressed and what is not linguistically expressed but still communicated.
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Frames of Understanding in Text and Discourse
Author(s): Alexander ZiemHow do words mean? What is the nature of meaning? How can we grasp a word’s meaning? The frame-semantic approach developed in this book offers some well-founded answers to such long-standing, but still controversial issues. Following Charles Fillmore’s definition of frames as both organizers of experience and tools for understanding, the monograph attempts to examine one of the most important concepts of Cognitive Linguistics in more detail. The point of departure is Fillmore’s conception of “frames of understanding” – an approach to (cognitive) semantics that Fillmore developed from 1975 to 1985. The envisaged Understanding Semantics (“U-Semantics”) is a semantic theory sui generis whose significance for linguistic research cannot be overestimated. In addition to its crucial role in the development of the theoretical foundations of U-semantics, corpus-based frame semantics can be applied fruitfully in the investigation of knowledge-building processes in text and discourse.
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Fictive Interaction
Author(s): Esther PascualLanguage is intimately related to interaction. The question arises: Is the structure of interaction somehow mirrored in language structure and use? This book suggests a positive answer to this question by examining the ubiquitous phenomenon of fictive interaction, in which non-genuine conversational turns appear in discourse, even within clauses, phrases, and lexical items (e.g. “Not happy? Money back! guarantee”). The book is based on a collection of hundreds of examples of fictive interaction at all grammatical levels from a wide variety of spoken, written, and signed languages, and from many different discourse genres. Special attention is devoted to the strategic use of fictive interaction in legal argumentation, with a focus on high-profile criminal trials. Both trial lawyers and lay jurors often present material evidence or murder victims as speaking, and express emotions and intentions in conversational terms. The book thus establishes the role of the conversational turn—rather than the sentence—as the basic unit of language, and the role of conversation as a frame that structures cognition, discourse, and grammar.
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Political Argumentation in the United States
Author(s): David ZarefskyIn the United States, political argumentation occurs in institutionalized settings and the broader public forum, in efforts to resolve conflict and efforts to foster it, in settings with time limits and controversies that extend over centuries. From the ratification of the U.S. Constitution to the presidency of Barack Obama, this book contains twenty studies of U.S. political argumentation, grouped under four themes: early American political discourse, Abraham Lincoln’s political argumentation, argumentation about foreign policy, and public policy argumentation since the 1960s.
Deploying methods of rhetorical criticism, argument analysis and evaluation, the studies are rich in contextual grounding and critical perspective. They integrate the European emphasis on politics as an argumentative context with the U.S. tradition of public address studies.
Two essays have never before been published. The others are retrieved from journals and books published between 1979 and 2014. The introductory essay is new for this volume.
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Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens
Author(s): Irene TheodoropoulouThis ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.
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Interacting with Objects
Editor(s): Maurice Nevile, Pentti Haddington, Trine Heinemann and Mirka RauniomaaMore LessObjects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.
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Contexts of Subordination
Editor(s): Laura Visapää, Jyrki Kalliokoski and Helena SorvaMore LessContexts of Subordination: Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive, interactional and typological perspectives, and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use, as an interactional resource available to language users, in both written and spoken language. In addition, the authors produce typologically relevant information about subordination in the different varieties and genres of the studied languages (English, Estonian, Finnish, and French). These qualities make the book unique in the field of subordination studies.
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Multiactivity in Social Interaction
Editor(s): Pentti Haddington, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada and Maurice NevileMore LessDoing more than one thing at the same time – a phenomenon that is often called ‘multitasking’ – is characteristic to many situations in everyday and professional life. Although we all experience it, its real time features remain understudied. Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking offers a fresh view to the phenomenon by presenting studies that explore how two or more activities can be related and made co-relevant as people interact with one another. The studies build on the basis that multiactivity is a social, verbal and embodied phenomenon. They investigate multiactivity by using video recordings of real-life interactions from a range of different contexts, such as medical settings, office workplaces and car driving. With the companion collection Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. A close appreciation of how people use language and interact for and during multiactivity will not only interest researchers in language and social interaction, communication studies and discourse analysis, but will be very valuable for scholars in cognitive sciences, psychology and sociology.
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Intersubjectivity and Intersubjectification in Grammar and Discourse
Editor(s): Lieselotte Brems, Lobke Ghesquière and Freek Van de VeldeMore LessRecent years saw a growing interest in the study of subjectivity, as the linguistic expression of speaker involvement. Intersubjectivity, defined by Traugott as "the linguistic expression of a speaker/writer's attention to the hearer/reader", on the other hand, has so far received little explicit attention in its own right, let alone systematic definition and operationalization. Intersubjectivity and seemingly related notions such as interpersonal meaning, appraisal, stance and metadiscourse, frequently appear in cognitive-functional accounts, as well as historical and more applied approaches. These domains offer (partly) conflicting uses of 'intersubjectivity', differ in the overall scope of the concept and the phenomena it may cover.This book brings together contributions from a variety of different approaches, with the aim of disentangling the current web of intertwined notions of intersubjectivity. Rather than focusing on the potentially conflicting views, the volume aspires to resolve some of the conceptual puzzle by cross-fertilization between the different views, and spark discussion on how to operationalize 'intersubjectivity' in linguistic research. Originally published in English Text Construction 5:1 (2012).
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Profiling Discourse Participants
Author(s): Barbara De CockThe construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.
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Literature as Dialogue
Editor(s): Roger D. SellMore LessHow is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a welcoming invitation. This their audiences have then been able to negotiate in a spirit of dialogical interchange.
Part I of the book poses the question: How, in offering their invitation, have writers respected their audiences’ human autonomy? This is the province of what Åbo scholars call "communicational criticism". Part II asks how an audience negotiating a literary invitation can be encouraged to respect the human autonomy of the writer who has offered it. In Åbo parlance, such encouragement is the task of "mediating criticism". These two modes of criticism naturally complement each other, and in their shared concern for communicational ethics ultimately seek to further a post-postmodern world that would be global without being hegemonic.
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From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance
Editor(s): Mandana Seyfeddinipur and Marianne GullbergMore LessLanguage use is fundamentally multimodal. Speakers use their hands to point to locations, to represent content and to comment on ongoing talk; they position their bodies to show their orientation and stance in interaction; they use facial displays to comment on what is being said; and they engage in mutual gaze to establish intersubjectivity. This volume brings together studies by leading scholars from several fields on gaze and facial displays, on the relationship between gestures, sign, and language, on pointing and other conventionalized forms of manual expression, on gestures and language evolution, and on gestures in child development. The papers in this collection honor Adam Kendon whose pioneering work has laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for contemporary studies of multimodality, gestures, and utterance visible action.
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Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on
Editor(s): Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano PintoMore LessApproximately a quarter of a century ago, the Multi-Dimensional (MD) approach—one of the most powerful (and controversial) methods in Corpus Linguistics—saw its first book-length treatment. In its eleven chapters, this volume presents all new contributions covering a wide range of written and spoken registers, such as movies, music, magazine texts, student writing, social media, letters to the editor, and reports, in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) and contexts (engineering, journalism, the classroom, the entertainment industry, the Internet, etc.). The book also includes a personal account of the development of the method by its creator, Doug Biber, an introduction to MD statistics, as well as an application of MD analysis to corpus design. The book should be essential reading to anyone with an interest in how texts, genres, and registers are used in society, what their lexis and grammar look like, and how they are interrelated.
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Argumentation and Health
Editor(s): Sara Rubinelli and Francisca Snoeck HenkemansMore LessIn recent years, there has been a growing interest in the role of argumentation in the health care domain. Argumentation and Health is a collection of essays by argumentation theorists reflecting on the way in which the institutional context of health care shapes the argumentative interaction. The volume provides for the first time an overview of the most important recent developments and achievements of the study of argumentation in medical and public oriented health communication. In Argumentation and Health , attention is paid to argumentation in different forms of health communication, such as the medical consultation, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, health brochures and health risk communication.
This book is of interest to argumentation theorists, (health) communication scholars, healthcare practitioners, students of medicine and health-related fields, and all other researchers and practitioners interested in the function and characteristics of argumentation in health communication. Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context, Vol. 1:1 (2012).
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Trust and Discourse
Editor(s): Katja Pelsmaekers, Geert Jacobs and Craig RolloMore LessTrust and Discourse: Organizational perspectives offers a timely collection of new articles on the relationship between discursive practices in organizational or institutional contexts and the psychological/moral category of trust. As globalization, the drive for efficiency and accountability, and increased time pressure lead groups and individuals to rethink the way they communicate, it is becoming more and more important to investigate how these streamlined and impersonal forms of communication affect issues of responsibility, authenticity and – ultimately – trust. The book deals with a variety of organizational settings ranging from in-hospital bedside teaching encounters and government communication following a nuclear accident to job interviews and foreign news reporting. This comprehensive study of an emerging new field will provide essential reading for linguists, discourse analysts, communication scholars, and other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in society, including interactional sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, ethnography, multimodality and organizational studies.
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Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation
Author(s): Xiaoting LiOne major feature of conversation is that people take turns to speak. Based on audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation, this book explores the role of syntax, prosody, body movements as well as their interplay in turn organization in the temporal unfolding of action and interaction. Adopting the methodology of interactional linguistics, this book offers a fine-grained analysis of the three multimodal resources and the sequential environments in which they appear. It demonstrates that syntax, prosody and body movements not only converge but also diverge in projecting possible turn completion. As one of the few systematic studies of multimodality in Mandarin interaction, this book will be of interest to researchers in Chinese linguistics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis.
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Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres
Editor(s): Luz Gil-Salom and Carmen Soler-MonrealMore LessDialogicity in Written Specialised Genres analyses how human beings intentionally establish a network of relations that contribute to the construction of discourse in different genres in academic, promotional and professional domains in English, Spanish and Italian. The chapters in the present volume investigate individual voices, both those assumed by the writer and those attributed to others, and how they act interpersonally and become explicit in the discourse. From a number of different research approaches, contributing authors focus on various textual components: self-mention, impersonation, attribution markers, engagement markers, attitude markers, boosters, hedges, reporting verbs, politeness strategies and citations. The collection is unusual in that it addresses these issues not only from the perspective of English, but also from that of Spanish and Italian. It thus represents a refreshing reassessment of the contrastive dimension in the study of voice and dialogic relations, taking into consideration language, specialised fields and genre. The volume will appeal to researchers interested in language as multidimensional dialogue, particularly with regard to different written specialised texts from different linguistic backgrounds. Novice writers may also find it of help in order to attain a greater understanding of the dialogic nature of writing.
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Phraseological Substitutions in Newspaper Headlines
Author(s): Sylvia JakiThe major purpose of newspaper headlines is to trigger the reader’s interest. A popular way to achieve this goal is the use of phraseological modifications. Based on previous findings from various linguistic disciplines, this book provides an interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the reception of substitutions like More than Meats the Eye. It develops an empirical methodology for investigating the complex cognitive processes involved, using a large sample of authentic examples for illustration. Along these lines, this volume not only shows what associations readers make when they encounter a lexical substitution and what factors facilitate the recognition of the canonical form. It also addresses the question of how meaning is constructed in terms of Conceptual Integration Theory and establishes an experimentally supported model of interpretation. This multifaceted perspective renders Phraseological Substitutions in Newspaper Headlines: "More than Meats the Eye" relevant to scholars and advanced students from a wide range of linguistic areas, such as phraseology, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and humour research, but also to interested journalists.
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SMS Communication
Editor(s): Louise-Amélie Cougnon and Cédrick FaironMore LessThe media often point an accusatory finger at new technologies; they suggest that there is always a loss of information or quality, or even that computer-mediated communication is destroying language. Most linguists, on the contrary, are firmly convinced that it is better to consider language as an evolving and changing entity. From this point of view, language is a social tool that has to be studied in-depth through the prism of objectivity, as a process in motion which is influenced by new social and technological stakes, rather than as a fading organism. In this volume we study and describe the societal phenomenon of SMS writing in its full complexity. The aim of this volume is threefold: to present recent linguistic research in the field of SMS communication; to inform the reader about existing large SMS corpora and processing tools and, finally, to display the many linguistic aspects that can be studied via a corpus of text messages.
These articles were previously published in Lingvisticae Investigationes Vol. 35:2 (2012).
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Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Danielle MatthewsMore LessPragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the topic, a flourishing literature has reported on the broad set of skills that can be called pragmatic. This volume aims to bring that literature together in a digestible format. It provides a series of succinct review chapters on 19 key topics ranging from preverbal skills right up to irony and argumentative discourse. Each chapter equips the reader with an overview of current theories, key empirical findings and questions for new research. This valuable resource will be of interest to scholars of psychology, linguistics, speech therapy, and cognitive science.
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Evidentiality in Interaction
Editor(s): Janis B. Nuckolls and Lev MichaelMore LessIn recent decades, linguists have significantly advanced our understanding of the grammatical properties of evidentials, but their social and interactional properties and uses have received less attention. This volume, originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics and Society (issue 3:2, 2012), draws together complementary perspectives on the social and interactional life of evidentiality, drawing on data from diverse languages, including Albanian, English, Garrwa (Pama-Nyungan, Australia), Huamalíes Quechua (Quechuan, Peru), Nanti (Arawak, Peru), and Pastaza Quichua (Quechuan, Ecuador). The language-specific studies in this volume are all based on the close analysis of discourse or communicative interaction, and examine both evidential systems of varying degrees of grammaticalization and 'evidential strategies' present in languages without grammaticalized evidentials. The analyses presented draw on conversational analysis, ethnography of communication, ethnopoetics, pragmatics, and theories of deixis and indexicality, and will be of interest to students of evidentiality in a variety of analytical traditions.
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The Discourse Studies Reader
Editor(s): Johannes Angermuller, Dominique Maingueneau and Ruth WodakMore LessDiscourse Studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social production of meaning across the entire spectrum of the social sciences and humanities. The Discourse Studies Reader brings together 40 key readings from discourse researchers in Europe and North America, some of which are now translated into English for the first time. Divided into seven sections – ‘Theoretical Inspirations: Structuralism versus Pragmatics’, ‘From Structuralism to Poststructuralism’, ‘Enunciative Pragmatics’, ‘Interactionism’, ‘Sociopragmatics’, ‘Historical Knowledge’ and ‘Critical Approaches’ – The Discourse Studies Reader offers a comprehensive overview of the main currents in discourse studies, both discourse theory and discourse analysis. With short introductions elaborating the broader context, the sections present key selections from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds by placing them into their respective epistemological traditions. The Discourse Studies Reader is an indispensable textbook for students and scholars alike who are interested in discourse theoretical questions and working with discourse analytical methods.
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Pragmatic Competence and Relevance
Author(s): Elly IfantidouThis book probes into under-researched issues in L2 pragmatics. Firstly, pragmatic competence, pragmatic awareness and metapragmatic awareness are re-defined and clearly distinguished on theoretical grounds. Secondly, pragmatic competence and its manifestations are evaluated on empirical grounds by distinct criteria and validated testing measures. More importantly, genuine pragmatic inference is elicited in contexts of online interpretation where figurative speech plays a central role. Genre-specific discourse which occurs in editorials and news reports serves as a natural testbed for examining the role of advanced mind-reading abilities in developing pragmatic competence. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory accommodates the findings of empirical assessment and yields new insights in the cognitive procedures activated during interpretation. The comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of pragmatic competence makes this book of interest to researchers and students in pragmatics, L2 theory and applications, genre studies, and to those concerned with the cognitive underpinnings of communication in L2.
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The Expression of Inequality in Interaction
Editor(s): Hanna Pishwa and Rainer SchulzeMore LessIn keeping with the profile of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, this volume presents and discusses issues that are central to aspects of social inequality, power, dominance and status as expressed in discourse in its broadest sense. The volume aggregates research efforts of the past years, and it constitutes a point of departure for future studies. The contributions challenge the widespread assumption that concepts such as inequality, power, dominance and status are predetermined in discourse; the volume, including contributions by international scholars from various disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and social psychology rather emphasizes the co-constructedness of these concepts in ordinary discourse and thus advances the potential for insights into how aspects of inequality, power, dominance and status are both made and understood.
This volume has been designed to promote recent research on a classic topic, relating discursive, cognitive and social dimensions of inequality in most of the social sciences and the humanities.
The volume aims at an international readership, making this book of interest to both researchers and advanced students in linguistic pragmatics, usage-based linguistics, ethnography of speaking, sociology and social psychology.
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Usage-based Approaches to Japanese Grammar
Editor(s): Kaori Kabata and Tsuyoshi OnoMore LessThis volume brings together papers that take usage-based approaches to study the nature of human language, with a focus on the grammar of Japanese. The 12 chapters provide a rich array of data and methodologies, with topics ranging from phonology, modality, and grammatical morphemes, to sentential construction and discourse-level phenomena such as turn-taking, speech register, and language change. As a whole, they demonstrate that usage-based linguistics illuminates various phenomena in the language that could not have been well accounted for by resorting solely to a formal theory such as the Universal-Grammar-based approach. Reflecting theoretical, methodological, and technological advancements made in and outside the field of cognitive-functional linguistics in recent years, the papers contained in this volume, both individually and collectively, have significant implications towards linguistics in general and Japanese linguistics in particular, as we as Japanese language teaching.
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Development of Pragmatic and Discourse Skills in Chinese-Speaking Children
Editor(s): Zhu Hua and Lixian JinMore LessFor many years, studies of the development of pragmatic and discourse skills in young children have predominantly focused on English and other European languages, as with the field of child language development in general. This volume, originally published in Chinese Language and Discourse 3:1 (2012), brings together a team of researchers from China, the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. It explores the development of pragmatic and discourse skills among Chinese-speaking children by investigating the development of pragmatic features specific to the Chinese language and culture (i.e. the use of null forms and overt forms in self/other reference and time expressions), socio-cultural factors in child-directed speech and comprehension of semiotic resources in children’s early childhood. The studies reported in the volume draw upon data of different kinds including recorded spontaneous speech, corpus, questionnaires and experimental data. The findings not only highlight a number of developmental patterns which may be attributed to the Chinese language(s) and culture, but also contribute to the understanding of some key issues in the development of pragmatic and discourse skills irrespective of linguistic backgrounds.
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The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse
Editor(s): María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco Gonzálvez-García and Angela DowningMore LessOver the last forty years, the functionalist approach to linguistic description and explanation has given rise to several major schools of thought that share two crucial assumptions: (i) form is not independent of meaning/function or language use; and (ii) linguistic description and explanation need to take into account the communicative function of language. This volume offers readers interested in functional linguistics a selected sample of studies that jointly prove the efficacy of the analytical tools and procedures broadly accepted within the functionalist tradition in order to investigate language and discourse, with special focus on key pragmatic/discourse notions such as contextualization, grammaticalisation, reference, politeness, (in-)directness, discourse markers, speech acts, subjective evaluation and sentiment analysis in texts, among others. In addition, this volume offers specific corpus-based techniques for the objective contextualisation of linguistic data, which is crucial given the central role allotted to context in both functional linguistics and pragmatics/discourse analysis.
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From Text to Political Positions
Editor(s): Bertie Kaal, Isa Maks and Annemarie van ElfrinkhofMore LessFrom Text to Political Positions addresses cross-disciplinary innovation in political text analysis for party positioning. Drawing on political science, computational methods and discourse analysis, it presents a diverse collection of analytical models including pure quantitative and qualitative approaches. By bringing together the prevailing text-analysis methods from each discipline the volume aims to alert researchers to new and exciting possibilities of text analyses across their own disciplinary boundary.
The volume builds on the fact that each of the disciplines has a common interest in extracting information from political texts. The focus on political texts thus facilitates interdisciplinary cross-overs. The volume also includes chapters combining methods as examples of cross-disciplinary endeavours. These chapters present an open discussion of the constraints and (dis)advantages of either quantitative or qualitative methods when evaluating the possibilities of combining analytic tools.
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Auxiliary Selection in Spanish
Author(s): Malte RosemeyerAlthough usage-based linguistics emphasises the need for studies of language change to take frequency effects into account, there is a lack of research that tries to systematically model frequency effects and their relation to diffusion processes in language change. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the change in Spanish perfect auxiliary selection between Old and Early Modern Spanish that led to the gradual replacement of the auxiliary ser ‘be’ with the auxiliary haber ‘have’. It analyses this process in terms of the interaction between gradience, gradualness, and the conserving effects of frequency and persistence in language change. The study contributes to the theory and methodology of diachronic linguistics, additionally offering insights on how to explain synchronic grammatical variation both within a language and between languages. The book is of interest to the fields of Spanish and Romance linguistics, syntax, as well as historical and variationist linguistics.
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Let's talk politics
Editor(s): Hilde Van Belle, Kris Rutten, Paul Gillaerts, Dorien Van De Mieroop and Baldwin Van GorpMore LessIn this volume on political argumentation, the study of argument takes place within a rhetorical framework. As such, it is a contribution to the study of argumentation-in-context with an explicit rhetorical approach. Rather than focusing on the poor quality of political participation and political understanding by citizens, this volume explores how the study of rhetoric, both as an academic discipline and as a political practice, stands in a unique position to critically engage with a ‘contextualized’ understanding of politics and civic engagement. Many contributions in this volume confront classical rhetorical concepts and theories with current political developments such as globalization and multiculturalism and the emergence of new democracies. Others focus explicitly on deliberative rhetoric in the political realm, or undertake a critical analysis of political texts and public events in order to explore what this can imply for the development of a ‘critical’ citizenship.
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Cognitive Grammar in Literature
Editor(s): Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan YuanMore LessThis is the first book to present an account of literary meaning and effects drawing on our best understanding of mind and language in the form of a Cognitive Grammar. The contributors provide exemplary analyses of a range of literature from science fiction, dystopia, absurdism and graphic novels to the poetry of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Sassoon, Balassi, and Dylan Thomas, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Barrett Browning, Whitman, Owen and others. The application of Cognitive Grammar allows the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself to be conducted in newly valid ways. With a Foreword by the creator of Cognitive Grammar, Ronald Langacker, and an Afterword by the cognitive scientist Todd Oakley, the book represents the latest advance in literary linguistics, cognitive poetics and literary critical practice.
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Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China
Editor(s): Qing Cao, Hailong Tian and Paul ChiltonMore LessAfter three and a half decades of economic reforms, radical changes have occurred in all aspects of life in China. In an authoritarian society, these changes are mediated significantly through the power of language, carefully controlled by the political elites. Discourse, as a way of speaking and doing things, has become an indispensable instrument for the authority to manage a fluid, increasingly fragmented, but highly dynamic and yet fragile society. Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume examines socio-political transformations of contemporary Chinese society through a systematic account, analysis and assessment of its salient discourses and their production, circulation, negotiation, and consequences. In particular, the volume focuses on the interplay of politics and media. The book’s intended readership is academics and students of Chinese studies, language and discourse, and media and communication studies.
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Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
Editor(s): Fabienne H. Baider and Georgeta CislaruMore LessThis book presents new issues in the study of the interface of emotions and language, and their use in social context. Two fundamental questions are tackled: the way different languages encode emotional information and the core role emotions play in languages' structure, use and learning. Seldom treated means of expressing emotions (such as interjections, conditionals, scalarity, allocentric constructions), the social and professional impact of emotions and the latest developments in the interface of speech recognition / emotions are some of the key contributions to this volume. The cross-cultural perspective contrasts new couples of languages (among which Australian aboriginal languages, Cypriot Greek, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) and addresses sociolinguistic, pragmatic and discursive issues. Most of the papers attempt interesting theoretical articulations that aim at a better understanding of the linguistic and sociolinguistic nature of emotions. This book will be highly relevant for students and researchers interested in emotions, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as prosody and philosophy of language.
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Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics
Editor(s): Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker and Jukka TuominenMore LessDiachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, bringing their research traditions in pragmatics and corpus linguistics in dialogue with each other. This is the first time that such a wide range of languages has been brought together to showcase an exciting new field at the intersection of pragmatics, historical linguistics and corpus methodology.
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Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context
Editor(s): Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. MyersMore LessIn this tribute to Knud Lambrecht, a pioneer of Information Structure, a diverse group of scholars examines the intersection of syntax, discourse, pragmatics, and semantics. The six chapters in the first section of the volume consider issues of grammar with new theoretical and applied insights, pertaining to grammatical constructions such as left dislocation, unaccusatives, null complements, and passives. While the first half of the book presents studies involving a range of languages from Russian to Irish to Italian, the second section is dedicated to papers focused on French. These five chapters feature the application of Construction Grammar and/or Information Structure frameworks to prosody and second language processing, as well as to several distinctive spoken French constructions: clefts, left dislocations, and interrogatives. Collectively, this book offers substantial reading for those interested in the juncture of structure and context, notably a critical take on the important legacy of a preeminent linguist.
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Constructing Collectivity
Editor(s): Theodossia-Soula PavlidouMore LessThis is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to first person non-singular reference (‘we’). Its aim is to explore the interplay between the grammatical means that a language offers for accomplishing collective self-reference and the socio-pragmatic – broadly speaking – functions of ‘we’. Besides an introduction, which offers an overview of the problems and issues associated with first person non-singular reference, the volume comprises fifteen chapters that cover languages as diverse as, e.g., Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Cha’palaa and Norf’k, and various interactional and genre-specific contexts of spoken and written discourse. It, thus, effectively demonstrates the complexity of collective self-reference and the diversity of phenomena that become relevant when ‘we’ is not examined in isolation but within the context of situated language use. The book will be of particular interest to researchers working on person deixis and reference, personal pronouns, collective identities, etc., but will also appeal to linguists whose work lies at the interface between grammar and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse and conversation analysis.
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Evaluation in Context
Editor(s): Geoff Thompson and Laura Alba-JuezMore LessIt is now an acknowledged fact in the world of linguistics that the concept of evaluation is crucial, and that there is very little – if any – discourse that cannot be analyzed through the prism of its evaluative content. This book presents some of the latest developments in the study of this phenomenon. Released more than a decade later than Hunston and Thompson’s (2000) Evaluation in Text, Evaluation in Context is designed as its sequel, in an attempt to continue, update and extend the different avenues of research opened by the earlier work. Both theoretical and empirical studies on the topic are presented, with the intention of scrutinizing as many of its dimensions as possible, by not only looking at evaluative texts, but also considering the aspects of the discursive context that affect the final evaluative meaning at both the production and reception stages of the evaluative act. The editors’ main objective has been to gather contributions which investigate the manifold faces and phases of evaluation by presenting a wide variety of perspectives that include different linguistic theories (e.g. Axiological Semantics, Functionalism or Politeness Theory), different levels of linguistic description (e.g. phonological, lexical or semantic), and different text types and contexts (e.g. the evaluation found in ironic discourse, the multimodality of media discourse or the world of politics, just to name a few). The volume can be of use not only for scholars who study the evaluative function of language, but also for students who wish to pursue research in the area.
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Personalisation in Mass Media Communication
Author(s): Daniela LandertIt seems to be a truism that today’s news media present the news in a more personal and direct way than print newspapers some twenty-five years ago. However, it is far from obvious, how this can be described linguistically. This study develops a model that integrates and differentiates between the various facets of personalisation from a linguistic point of view. It includes 1) contexts that involve the audience by inviting direct interaction and through the use of visual elements; 2) the focus on private individuals who are personally affected by news events; and 3) the use of communicative immediacy, for instance in the form of direct speech and first and second person pronouns. This model is applied to data from five British online news sites, demonstrating how individual features contribute to personalisation, how different features interact, and what personalisation strategies are used by news sites of different market orientations.
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The Great American Scaffold
Author(s): Frank AustermühlBased on extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of American presidential speeches that includes all inaugural addresses and State of the Union messages from 1789 to 2008, as well as major foreign and security policy speeches after 1945, this research monograph analyzes the various forms and functions of intertextual references found in the discourse of American presidents. Working within an original, interdisciplinary theoretical framework established by theories of intertextuality, discourse analysis, and presidential studies, the book discusses five different types of presidential intertextuality, all of which contribute jointly to creating a set of carefully manipulated and politically powerful images of both the American nation and the American presidency. The book is intended for scholars and students in political and presidential studies, communications, American cultural studies, and linguistics, as well as anyone interested in the American presidency in general.
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Language and Food
Editor(s): Polly E. SzatrowskiMore LessThis book investigates the intricate interplay between language and food in natural conversations among people eating and talking about food in English, Japanese, Wolof, Eegimaa, Danish, German, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. It is a socio-cultural/ linguistic study of how adults/ children organize their language and bodies to (1) accomplish rituals and performances of commensality (eating together) and food-related actions, (2) taste, describe, identify and assess food, and influence others’ preferences, (3) create and reinforce individual and group identities through past experiences and stories about food, and (4) socialize one another to food practices, affect, taste, gender and health norms. Using approaches from linguistics, conversation analysis, ethnography, discursive psychology, and linguistic anthropology, this book elucidates the dynamic verbal and nonverbal co-construction of food practices, assessments, categories, and identities in conversations over and about food, and contributes to research on contextualized social, cultural, and cognitive activity, language and food, and cross-cultural understanding.
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Language and Power in Blogs
Author(s): Brook BolanderLanguage and Power in Blogs systematically analyses the discursive practices of bloggers and their readers in eight English-language personal/diary blogs. The main focus is thereby placed on ties between these practices and power. The book demonstrates that the exercise of power in this mode can be studied via the analysis of conversational control (turn-taking, speakership and topic control), coupled with research on agreements and disagreements. In this vein, it reveals that control of the floor is strongly tied not solely to rates of participation, but more strikingly to the types of contributions interlocutors make. With its detailed linguistic analyses and comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of language use and power, the book is interesting for researchers and students working within the domains of pragmatics, discourse analysis, text linguistics and corpus linguistics, in both offline and online settings.
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Meta-informative Centering in Utterances
Editor(s): André Włodarczyk and Hélène WłodarczykMore LessThe notion of information has nowadays become crucial both in our daily life and in many branches of science and technology. In language studies, this notion was used as a technical term for the first time about at least fifty years ago. It is argued, however, that "Old" and "New", used traditionally for characterising information, refer in fact to the meta-informative status of communicated chunks of information. They provide information about other information. Since subjects and objects, as attention-driven phrases, are also related to aboutness, the presented Meta-Informative Centering (MIC) framework includes predication theory. By applying the MIC theory to their analyses of English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Greek, Latin, and Japanese, the authors provide comprehensive explanations of the most puzzling aspects of the pragmatic use of basic universal linguistic categories. It seems clear now that canonical syntactic patterns, their permutations, and diverse transformations do indeed reflect very truly the meta-informative encapsulation of utterances. As a consequence, this book presents new and coherent theoretical solutions as well as their very efficient applications.
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Exploring the Dynamics of Multilingualism
Editor(s): Anne-Claude Berthoud, François Grin and Georges LüdiMore LessThis book addresses the meanings and implications of multilingualism and its uses in a context of rapid changes, in Europe and around the world. All types of organisations, including the political institutions of the European Union, universities and private-sector companies must rise to the many challenges posed by operating in a multilingual environment. This requires them, in particular, to make the best use of speakers’ very diverse linguistic repertoires.
The contributions in this volume, which stem from the DYLAN research project financed by the European Commission as part of its Sixth Framework Programme, examine at close range how these repertoires develop, how they change and how actors adapt skilfully the use of their repertoires to different objectives and conditions. These different strategies are also examined in terms of their capacity to ensure efficient and fair communication in a multilingual Europe.
Careful observation of actors’ multilingual practices reveals finely tuned communicational strategies drawing on a wide range of different languages, including national languages, minority languages and lingue franche. Understanding these practices, their meaning and their implications, helps to show in what way and under what conditions they are not merely a response to a problem, but an asset for political institutions, universities and business.
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Discourse and Crisis
Editor(s): Antoon De Rycker and Zuraidah Mohd DonMore LessDiscourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives brings together an exciting collection of studies into crisis as text and context, as unfolding process and unresolved problem. Crisis is viewed as a complex phenomenon that – in its prevalence, disruptiveness and (appearance of) inevitability – is both socially produced and discursively constituted. The book offers multiple critical perspectives: in-depth linguistically informed analyses of the discourses of power and collaboration implicated in crisis construal and recovery; detailed examination of the critical role that language plays during the crisis life-cycle; and further problematization of the semiotic-material complexity of crisis and its usefulness as an analytical concept. The research focus is on the discursive and interactive mediation of crisis in organizational, political and media texts. The volume contains contributions from across the world, offering a polyphonic overview of ‘discourse and crisis’ research. This impressive volume will be useful to researchers and academics working on the intersection of crisis, language and communication. It is also of interest to practitioners in organizational management, politics and policy, and media.
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Prosody and Humor
Editor(s): Salvatore Attardo, Manuela Maria Wagner and Eduardo Urios-AparisiMore LessThis is the first-ever book-length collection of articles on the subject of prosody and humor. The chapters are written by the recognized leaders in the field and present the cutting edge of the research in this new interdisciplinary field of study. The book covers a broad range of languages, using several theoretical approaches, ranging from cognitive semantic theories, to discourse analysis, and anthropology. All the contributions are anchored in instrumental empirical data analysis. The topics covered range from humor in conversation, to sitcom scripts, from riddles to intonation jokes, from irony in a laboratory setting to irony occurring in conversation, from friends’ conversations in France, to business meetings in rural Brazil. The unifying theme is the search for markers of the humorous or ironical intentions of the speakers or of the genre of interaction. Originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 19:2 (2011) and 19:3 (2011).
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Listenership Behaviours in Intercultural Encounters
Author(s): Keiko TsuchiyaHow do people listen in a conversation, especially in an intercultural setting, and how do they shift from listener to speaker in the particular context? This book investigates listenership behaviours of a tutor and a student in the context of academic supervision sessions at a university in the UK, comparing British tutor - British student conversations with British tutor - Japanese student conversations in English. A new research methodology, a time-aligned multimodal corpus analysis, is introduced for analysing listenership and turn-taking structure, synthesising visual data with verbal data in timeline. The method also integrates discourse-pragmatic and conversation analytic approaches with the corpus-based analysis. This work reports strategies in use of response tokens for framework shifts and multi-functional nature of hand gestures observed in the conversations. Therefore, this book is highly relevant for researchers and postgraduate students, who study pragmatic and discursive practice in intercultural settings using multimodal corpora.
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Chinese Language Narration
Editor(s): Allyssa McCabe and Chien-ju ChangMore LessChinese Language Narration: Culture, cognition, and emotion is a collection of papers presenting original research on narration in Mandarin, especially as it contrasts to what is known regarding narration in English. One chapter addresses dinner table conversation between Chinese immigrant parents and children in the United States compared to non-immigrant peers. Other chapters consider evaluation patterns in Mandarin versus English, referencing strategies, coherence patterns, socioeconomic differences among Taiwanese Mandarin-speaking children, and differences in narration due to Specific Language Impairment and schizophrenia. Several chapters address developmental concerns. Distinctive aspects of narration in Mandarin are linked to larger issues of autobiographical memory. Mandarin is spoken by far more people than any other language, yet narration in this language has received notably less attention than narration in Western languages. This collective effort is a critical addition to our understanding of cross-cultural similarities and differences in how people make sense of experiences through narrative.
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