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Transformative Reading belongs to a growing tradition of studies investigating the functions of aesthetic experiences in our lives. Philosophers literary theorists and psychologists have suggested that aesthetic experiences implicate and develop our sense of ourselves. Literary texts as one such experience challenge readers and extend their imagination by means of complex or deviating plots. Reading literary narrative fiction helps readers develop imaginary selves in a safe way enhancing their theory of mind. It might also contribute to the development of readers’ interpersonal competencies and foster pro-sociality altruistic behaviour and empathy. This book uses empirical research methods to focus on the processes of literary reading revealing two pathways for the transformative powers of literature. It also reveals how an understanding of these pathways might be beneficial in educational settings – in schools in the workplace and in medical contexts.

This book provides a comprehensive description of the situational and linguistic characteristics of undergraduate student writing considering both assignment type and discipline. Drawing on a corpus of more than 900 undergraduate student assignments from four disciplinary groups (Arts and Humanities Social Sciences Physical Sciences and Life Sciences) the book combines corpus-based analyses of linguistic features with analyses of communicative purposes and text characteristics. Variation in University Writing takes a new approach to register variation by grouping assignments by their communicative purpose (to argue to explain to compare to describe to narrate a personal event to give a procedural recount to give personal advice and to propose) rather than register categories. A multidimensional analysis provides a detailed description of the linguistic patterns of undergraduate writing. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to teachers of writing instructors of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and researchers of university writing.

Although there is a large literature on referentiality going back to at least the nineteenth and early twentieth century much of this early work is based on constructed data and most of it is on English. The chapters in this volume contribute to a growing body of work that examines referentiality through naturalistic data in context. Taking an interactional approach to (non)referentiality contributors to this volume ask how participants talk in real time about persons and things as individuals or as categories and what distinguishes ‘referential’ from ‘nonreferential’ ‘specific’ from ‘nonspecific’ and ‘generic’ from ‘nongeneric’. Crucially we ask whether these distinctions even matter to participants in conversation and if they do what the evidence for that would be. Contributors investigate these issues using data from conversational interaction in a variety of social contexts – including between close friends and family to more casual acquaintances in service encounters and between adults and children – and in a range of languages: English Finnish French Indonesian Japanese and Mandarin. Collectively the chapters develop insights showing that reference is often fluid dynamic and indeterminate that referential indeterminacy is typically unproblematic for participants that shifts in referentiality tend to be tied to specific social goals and that reference and referentiality emerge dialogically and interactionally.

This book presents the first in-depth investigation of modality in Galician linguistics offering a theoretical discussion of modal categories and a fine-grained description of epistemic adverbs. The first half of the monograph deconstructs the most relevant approaches to modal categories and shows how the traditional concept of modality is a problematic notion how it relates to other concepts such as evidentiality and mitigation and how it ought to be conceived of in order to become a more useful instrument for linguistic analysis. A new way of understanding modality is explored and illustrated through Galician examples. The second half of the book zooms in on six epistemic adverbs which are exhaustively studied from both a formal and a functional perspective. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative perspective the book shows that adverbs make up a rich semantic scale and establishes several factors that condition their occurrence in discourse challenging previous conceptions of this grammatical domain.

As a first attempt to date this book addresses the notion of hypocrisy from a pragmatic perspective and devises a comprehensive model of verbal hypocrisy. The studies included adopt emic and etic approaches in order to contribute jointly towards an understanding of what appears to be a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Going beyond hypocrisy as a mere moral vice this volume establishes its pragmatic space and confronts it with adjacent notions which unlike hypocrisy have been subject to pragmatic examination. The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy is of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics discourse analysis sociolinguistics rhetoric communication and media studies as well as corpus linguistics and by its transdisciplinary nature to researchers in philosophy sociology and political science. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the interplay between language culture and society across varieties and registers of English.

The ongoing migration ‘crisis’ in European countries (2015 to date) has fostered different stances and practices within European nation-states ranging from xenophobia to solidarity. In this context two contradictory discourses seem to coexist: the national racist discourse and the humanitarian antiracist one. This volume brings together studies investigating diverse semiotic strategies through which liquid racism emerges which consists of ambiguities and contradictory interpretations due to the fact that racist views infiltrate discourse intended as antiracist. The volume includes critical and pragmatic analyses of texts coming from various sources such as news articles parliamentary discourse political cartoons video clips advertising campaigns based on personal stories and jokes. It is an outcome of the research project “TRACE: Tracing Racism in Anti-raCist discoursE: A critical approach to European public speech on the migrant and refugee crisis” (HFRI-FM17-42 HFRI 2019-2022 Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation).

Spotlighting case studies of manipulation practices at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis in different countries and socio-political circumstances the authors expose context-specific discourse and argumentation strategies of 'infodemics’ (misleading information and fake news) public policy mismanagement deceptive online and offline communication tactics and conspiracy narratives which end up disrupting community social cohesion. In addition to targeting manipulation-driven dissent across discourse genres through corpus-based investigations a major strength of this volume consists in debunking manipulation while foregrounding compelling acts of counter-manipulation. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The volume’s breadth of topics depth of analytical insights and range of methodological frameworks provide unique perspectives by capturing crisis-related manipulations across a worldwide political and cultural spectrum (Austria Brazil China the Czech Republic Portugal Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States) with a focus on the scale and extent of multifaceted repercussions. Reaching beyond the boundaries of pragmatics and discourse analysis this book should be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners of rhetoric argumentation media studies social and political sciences.

This book is about one of the most fundamental action sequences found across human societies and socio-cultural contexts: polar questions and their responses. Question–answer sequences are among the most basic building blocks for sequences of action in interaction and are ubiquitous among the languages of the world. Among different types of questions polar questions are the most common occurring with greater frequency in all studied languages. This volume presents a collection of conversation analytic studies into responses to polar questions across ten different typologically diverse languages in a range of action environments and social contexts. The studies explore different ways in which speakers can respond to polar questions and the relationships between response design the action implemented by the response and the context in which it occurs. Taken together the studies assembled in the volume present a nuanced view of polar responses as a situated social action.

As the legislative bodies of democratic nations parliaments play a fundamental role in society. Consequently the linguistic practices observed in parliamentary discourse are of importance to everyone. This volume brings together leading researchers in areas of corpus linguistics big data parliamentary discourse and historical linguistics in a truly interdisciplinary exploration at the vanguard of big data and corpus methods with the aim to investigate the intersection between linguistic and social change. Making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods the studies included in this volume range from a focus on explicitly linguistic phenomena to topics that contribute to our understanding of language and society more generally. It breaks new ground in its critical reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges of using large corpora of parliamentary discourse to study both the specialised language of parliamentary speech and the societies that the parliaments in question represent and govern.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics broadly conceived as the cognitive social and cultural study of language and communication i.e. the science of language use.

The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.

Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop