Books

The collection of articles in Discourse Studies in Public Communication illustrates that public communication is a fascinating, evidence-based storehouse for research in discourse analysis. The contributions to this volume — in the spheres of political rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and corporate and academic communication — provide good evidence of contemporary social structure, social phenomena, and social issues. In this way, following the parameters of different analytical frameworks (critical discourse analysis, cognitive metaphor theory, appraisal theory, multimodality, etc.), the contributors address not only the linguistic aspects of texts but also, and more importantly, the cultural and cognitive dimensions of public communication in a range of real life communicative contexts and kinds of discourse. Although the volume is addressed, first and foremost, to readers with diverse interests in English linguistics, it may also prove valuable to scholars in other non-linguistic research fields like communication studies, social theory, political science, or psychology.

Discourse topics are a frequently mentioned but rarely operationalised concept in linguistics. Taking a text linguistic approach and defining discourse topics as clusterings of concepts, this book examines and compares methods for investigating topic boundaries, topic identification and topic development. The first book to be devoted to topics in extended discourse, Discourse Topics examines topics in several genres and generates new insights into the nature of discourse topics that challenge the status quo. It is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing and psychology whose work concerns topics.

This 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.

After 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.

While there is a growing body of psycholinguistic experimental research on mappings between language and vision on a word and sentence level, there are almost no studies on how speakers perceive, conceptualise and spontaneously describe a complex visual scene on higher levels of discourse. This book explores the relationship between language, eye movements and cognition, and brings together discourse analysis with cognitively oriented behavioral research. Based on the analysis of data drawn from spoken descriptive discourse, spontaneous conversation, and experimental investigations, this work offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language, vision and mental imagery. Verbal and visual data, synchronised and correlated by means of a multimodal scoring method, are used as two windows to the mind to show how language and vision, in concert, can elucidate covert mental processes.

Until 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.

The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.

This book considers the discourses that come into play in organizational change. The book outlines the tensions that arise for people having to enact change, and analyzes the ways in which they position themselves in changing organizational environments. The book takes a social semiotic perspective on discourse, organization and change. Here, discourse encompasses not only the multi-modal resources that people mobilize in organizational (inter)action, but also the practices and transformative dynamics afforded by those resources. The organizational changes highlighted in the book revolve around three dimensions of work that are increasingly coming to the fore: participation, boundary-spanning and knowledging. These dimensions are explored through case studies, including a health planning project, an initiative to standardize work practices, and the tension between paper-based and IT-based reporting. The book addresses the relevance of this discourse perspective to organizational research more broadly, by investigating organization as a dynamic of ‘resemiotizations’.



Cover illustration by John Reid

Death inhabits our collective imaginary, even though sometimes, like a squatter, it hides discretely in order to avoid conflicts. It is undoubtedly a multi-faceted subject of study, which requires consideration from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This book deals with this phenomenon, and more specifically with the discourses that surround – and construct our perspectives and understanding of – death and dying. Of course, the present volume does not attempt to be exhaustive, and considers the subject from several standpoints, including linguistics, anthropology, history of medicine, and importantly, literary studies. It combines various points of view and different methodologies of knowledge, in the hope that they come together to constitute a written dialogue –or more precisely, a polylogue.

The ordering of the texts in this volume provides readers with an itinerary that begins with more general approaches, such as a historical presentation of the medicalisation of death and an in-depth reflection on the best way to die, and ends with studies of specific literary works from different periods.

The itinerary that this book provides is framed by a discourse analysis-based overview that explores how different approaches to death and dying intersect and complement each other in an interdisciplinary endeavour. This analysis focuses on literary and non-literary genres in order to shed some new light on a topic that is inexhaustible because of its sociocultural relevance.