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Social Media and Society brings together a range of scholars working at the intersection of discourse studies digital media and society. It is meant to respond to changes in discourse technologies i.e. the techno-discursive dynamic of social media discourses. The book critically engages with the digital dynamics of representations around discourses of identity politics and culture. Other than its topical focus on highly pertinent discourses the book aspires to offer some fresh insights into the theory methods and implementation of CDS in digital environments. The book can be viewed as part of the developing research framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies which seeks to integrate the impact of new mediation technologies on discursive meaning-making with its critical contextualisation. In addition to its strongly global outlook the book incorporates a wide range of research perspectives including CDA sociolinguistics political discourse studies media and technology discourse theory popular culture feminism etc.

This is the first edited volume dedicated to both teachers and learners of second/foreign language (L2) pragmatics. It comprises a collection of studies that explore how teachers background and practices and individual learners differences contribute to the teaching and learning of L2 pragmatics. Also included are chapters that present pedagogical approaches that bring teachers and learners together in action in the classroom setting. Written by an international team of experts the volume examines the most relevant topics on instructional pragmatics in a variety of language contexts including Brazil China Germany Japan Spain the United States and Vietnam. This global perspective represents a key contribution in the current increasingly multilingual and multicultural society. Taken together the findings presented have diverse research and pedagogical implications and provide new directions to explore L2 pragmatic competence. This innovative book will be a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students as well as for language teachers and course developers.

This volume offers insight into different aspects of an interesting but fairly understudied language family opens a path to new inquiries and provides valuable contribution to linguistics in general and to Iranian linguistics in particular. The articles in this volume offer novel analyses of significant properties of some of the Iranian languages and contribute to various linguistic subareas such as experimental and historical linguistics as well as the morphology syntax and semantics of several members of this language family. Specifically this volume features a few articles on the Ezafe construction which shed new light on this interesting phenomenon of Western Iranian languages from historical comparative and syntactic points of view. Moreover a few articles address the syntax and formal semantics of properties of Persian offering new insight into particular constructions in this language which are also fruitful for the general theory of linguistics. Crucially all authors raise important questions opening up the path for further investigations.

This collected volume showcases cutting-edge research in the rapidly developing area of sign language corpus linguistics in various sign language contexts across the globe. Each chapter provides a detailed account of particular national corpora and methodological considerations in their construction. Part 1 focuses on corpus-based linguistic findings covering aspects of morphology syntax multilingualism and regional and diachronic variation. Part 2 explores innovative solutions to challenges in building and annotating sign language corpora touching on the construction of comparable sign language corpora collaboration challenges at the national level phonological arrangement of digital lexicons and (semi-)automatic annotation. This unique volume documenting the growth in breadth and depth within the discipline of sign language corpus linguistics is a key resource for researchers teachers and postgraduate students in the field of sign language linguistics and will also provide valuable insights for other researchers interested in corpus linguistics Construction Grammar and gesture studies.

Responding to Questions at Press Conferences makes clear how the spokespersons at China’s diplomatic press conferences maneuver strategically in defining the issues in the empirical counterpart of the confrontation stage when responding to the journalists’ questions and how this confrontational maneuvering is meant to be instrumental in convincing the intended audience. The detailed and systematic analysis of the various modes of confrontational maneuvering adopted by the spokespersons elucidate how China’s recently established “progressive” diplomatic style is shaped by its spokespersons’ argumentative discourse.

This volume offers a critical discursive-argumentative framework that scrutinizes the discursive construction and moreover the argumentative justification of authoritarian attitudes on newspaper front pages in highly polarized times of multiple ‘crises’ in Greece. At the same time it aspires to outline novel research avenues for scholars working in the fields of critical discourse and argumentation studies multimodality and communication studies that go beyond the study of the meaning potential of multimodal artifacts and focus on the study of the argumentative inferences that are triggered by multimodal discourses in polarized contexts. It frames the theoretical discussion based on concepts such as Nikos Poulantzas’ ‘authoritarian statism’ as well as Antonio Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ and ‘intellectuals’. Methodologically it draws on the agenda of multimodal critical discourse analysis integrating principles and tools from social semiotics and (multimodal) argumentation studies with a particular focus on inference in argumentation.

This scholarly edition invites us to reconsider our assumptions about the French language by showcasing the oeuvre of one of the pioneers of diachronic Spoken French corpus linguistics William J. Ashby and the ground-breaking findings to come out of his influential Tours corpora (1976 & 1995) including two real-time studies appearing for the first time in English translation. To help readers visualize just how radically different the morphosyntax morphophonology and semantics of Spoken French are from French-on-the-page the editor has developed a glossing framework designed to capture the systemic radically-prefixal morphology of Spoken French and the variability of change-in-progress. The model presented here and used to gloss the examples from the Tours corpus is also suitable for corpus-tagging. The volume is organized into sections preceded by an Editor’s note and followed by suggestions for further reading and closes with an appendix of French corpora. This scholarly edition was written for advanced undergraduates graduate students and scholars in the field.

This collection presents novel insights into the micro- and macro-variation of causal clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. It contains a general introduction to the topic setting the scene and nine chapters based on data from Dutch German English Icelandic Chinese and Japanese. Topics discussed in the individual chapters involve inter alia external internal and linear syntax of adverbial clauses expressing a causal relation their semantic interpretation and information-structural properties verb position volitionality and the development of particular causal conjunctions. The findings gained here are of synchronic and diachronic nature and offer new theoretical perspectives on how causal dependency relationships are expressed by inherent causal morpho-syntactic patterns. They also provide a deeper comprehension of how sentential modifiers work emerge and develop in general. This volume is an asset to grammarians syntacticians theoretical and historical linguists.

The aspiration of an Atlas is to cover the whole world by compiling cartographical material representing territories from across the five continents. This book intends to contribute to that ideally comprehensive yet always unfinished Atlas with pieces gathered from all of the Earth’s regions. However its focus is not so much of a geographical nature (although maps and geographical reflections are not absent in its pages) but of a historical-analytical one. As such the Atlas engages in the historical analysis of interpreters (of both language and cultures) in multiple interpreting settings and places including in zones which are less frequently studied in specialized literature in different historical periods and at various scales. All the interpreters described in the book share the ability to speak two or more languages and to use them as vehicles; otherwise their individual socio-professional statuses vary so much that there is no similarity between a Venetian dragoman in Istanbul and a prisoner of war or between a locally-recruited interpreter and a missionary. Each contributor has approached the specific spatial and temporal dimensions of their subject as perceived through their different methodological lenses. This multifaceted perspective which is expected to provide fertile soil for future interdisciplinary research has been possible thanks to a balanced combination of scholars from History and from Translation and Interpreting Studies.

This volume is intended as a celebration of Kristin Davidse’s work and its impact within the broad traditions of cognitive functional and usage-based grammars. Reflecting this wide functionalist lens the contributions develop ideas central to Neo-Firthian theories of grammar (in particular Semiotic Grammar and SFL) the Prague School Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) and broader cognitive-functional (e.g. Construction Grammar) and usage-based approaches (e.g. Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization theory corpus-based sociolinguistics). The range of topics addressed makes the volume particularly relevant to linguists investigating information structure construction grammar functional discourse grammar spatial deixis pronoun and case systems and/or the semantics of verbal constructions.