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The book explores eleven debates held at the Bahraini Council of Representatives (or the Parliament) over 2007-2010 to comprehend how parliamentary discourse contributes towards identity formation within Bahraini society. Within the framework of critical discourse studies the book traces the ideological struggle over power in the linguistic content of legislative discourse through a range of discursive strategies and devices.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The authors contend that the discursive choices across the political spectrum in the legislative debates reflected strong sectarian characteristics which contained in it the seeds of political unrest of 2011 the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of Bahrain. Parliamentary rhetoric and its resonance in the public sphere the authors argue revealed the underlying contradictions in Bahraini society. The book highlights the significance of legislative discourse as a platform of social cohesion and its instability being symptomatic of contradictions within society.

This volume presents an in-depth analysis of language variation in Jamaican radio newscasts and talk shows. It explores the interaction of global and local varieties of English with regard to newscasters’ and talk show hosts’ language use and listeners’ attitudes. The book illustrates the benefits of an integrated approach to mass media: the analysis takes into account radio talk and the perception of the audience it is context-sensitive paying close attention to variation within and between genres and it combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to demonstrate the complexity of language in the media. The book contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of World Englishes in the 21st century and endonormative stabilization processes in linguistically heterogeneous postcolonial speech communities and shows how mass media both challenge and reproduce sociolinguistic stratification. This volume will be relevant for researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics language attitudes and language in the media.

The Low Countries are famous for their radically changing landscape over the last 1000 years. Like the landscape the linguistic situation has also undergone major changes. In Holland an early form of Frisian was spoken until very roughly 1100 and in parts of North Holland it disappeared even later. The hunt for traces of Frisian or Ingvaeonic in the dialects of the western Low Countries has been going on for around 150 years but a synthesis of the available evidence has never appeared. The main aim of this book is to fill that gap. It follows the lead of many recent studies on the nature and effects of language contact situations in the past. The topic is approached from two different angles: Dutch dialectology in all its geographic and diachronic variation and comparative Germanic linguistics. In the end the minute details and the bigger picture merge into one possible account of the early and high medieval processes that determined the make-up of western Dutch.

Contextualizing Pragma-Dialectics contains a selection of 18 article reporting on research conducted in the past decade in which the institutional context in which argumentative discourse takes place is systematically taken into account. Some articles provide relevant theoretical backgrounds other articles make clear how the extended pragma-dialectical theory can be used to analyse and evaluate argumentative discourse in specific institutional contexts. Next to argumentative discourse in the legal domain and the medical context of health communication a great deal of attention is paid to various argumentative practices in the political domain or dealing with specific social issues. A contribution on multimodal argumentation is also included. All contributing authors are actively engaged in the International Learned Institute for Argumentation Studies (ILIAS).

Sonic Signatures is devoted to the representation of sound patterns and sound structures across a diverse range of typologically distinct languages with the overall aim of understanding the nature of linguistic data structures from a principled balance between representational economy and the interfaces of phonology with other domains including acoustic and visual. The volume embraces data spanning from Nivkh vowel harmony to Maxakalí sign language and from the representation of consonant clusters in adult Laurentian French and to those found in child Greek and child Brazilian Portuguese. The volume strives towards concrete commitments to the theoretical understanding of empirical territory both familiar but with a novel take (English stress) and novel but with immediate relevance (Hungarian suffix allomorphy). With authors contributing from five continents the book offers a range of perspectives on the representation of sound patterns while nonetheless retaining a tight focus on the core questions of which characteristics and signatures are specifically encoded for these patterns in the phonological component of the language faculty.

In recent years an increasing number of linguists have re-examined the question of whether markedness has explanatory power or whether it is a phenomenon that begs explanation itself. This volume brings together a collection of articles with a broad range of critical viewpoints on the notion of markedness in phonological theory. The contributions span a variety of phonological frameworks and relate to morphosyntax historical linguistics neurolinguistics biolinguistics and language typology. This volume will be of particular interest to phonologists of both synchronic and diachronic persuasions and has strong implications for the architecture of grammar with respect to phonology and its interfaces with morphosyntax and phonetics.

This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities constraints of cognitive processing together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements explored from different approaches both formal and functional and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based sociolinguistic and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.

This book presents an interdisciplinary study that straddles four academic fields namely autobiography stylistics narratology and translation studies. It shows that foregrounding is manifested in the language of autobiography alerting readers to an authorial tone with certain ideological affiliations. In refuting the presumed conflation between the author narrator and character in autobiography the study emphasizes readers’ role in constructing an implied author. The issues of implied translator assumed translation and rewriting are explored through a comparative analysis of the English and Chinese autobiographies by Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew. The analysis identifies different foregrounding practices and attributes these differences to an implied translator. Further evidence derived from narrative-communicative situations in the two autobiographies underscores divergent personae of the implied authors. The study aims to establish a deeper understanding of how translation and rewriting have a far-reaching impact on the self- and world-making functions of autobiography. This book will be of special interest to scholars and students of linguistics literature translation and political science.

This unique volume brings together various academic voices and critical reflections on discursive manifestations of hate and radicalism in contemporary public discourses. The authors venture into an array of socio-political contexts and public spaces providing a compelling overview of similarities and divergences continuities and discontinuities outward hatred and the “politics of denial” the use of collective symbols and construction of individual identities. Multiple genres are taken under scrutiny including blogs forums internet websites and newspaper coverage political speeches and debates news reports and broadcast interactions with a view to capturing the themes and pragma-rhetorical strategies within texts abundant with radical and hateful messages. In addition to examining discourse dynamics and the underlying logic of such texts the contributors to this monograph explore the ideological motivations and the consequences they might have for social actions on both an individual and collective level.

Highly relevant in the contemporary world divided by conflicts power and resource struggles right-wing extremism and crusades against the imaginary Other the book presents state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research that should be of interest to specialists in pragmatics rhetoric sociolinguistics discourse analysis corpus linguistics as well as media and communication studies.

Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3:1 (2015).

Featuring multidisciplinary and transcultural investigations this volume showcases state-of-the-art scholarship about the impact of argumentation-based discourses and field-specific argumentation practices in a wide range of communities of practice belonging to the media social legal and political spheres. The investigations make use of integrative wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and empirical research methodologies with a focus on argumentation strategies in real-life environments both private and public and in constantly growing virtual environments. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book brings together linguists argumentation scholars philosophers and communication specialists who convincingly show how interpersonal and/or intergroup interactions shape challenge or change the argumentative practices of users what argumentation skills and strategies become critical and consequential how argumentative discourse contexts may stimulate or prevent critical reflection and debate and what are the wider implications at personal institutional and societal levels. Reaching beyond the boundaries of linguistics and argumentation sciences this book should be a valuable resource for researchers as well as practitioners in the fields of pragmatic linguistics argumentation studies rhetoric discourse analysis political sciences and media studies.