Browse Books

The goal of this volume is to explore and make sense of the overall scope implications and consequences of shifting discourses of war peace and neutrality across time and space in relation to conflict-ridden geopolitical environments characterized by power struggles political polarizations divergent goal settings and ideological confrontations (from the Russo-Japanese war 1904–1905 to Russia’s war against Ukraine 2022-present). Through a broad range of cutting-edge case studies (Finland Germany India Japan Poland Romania Russia/Soviet Union/Russian Federation Slovakia Sweden The Netherlands Ukraine USA) the authors go beyond mainstream studies on war and peace by challenging existing paradigms and undergoing in-depth scrutiny of discourse argumentation strategies historical metanarratives reflective storytelling and visual mediatization. Readers are called upon to reflect on evaluate and discuss issues raised by questions like the following: To what extent are dogmatic and power-based discourse practices consequential in the evolution of political language and the language of international diplomacy regarding processes of war peace and neutrality? In what ways have the mainstream and alternative news media changed the war reporting style the audience-oriented verbal and visual communication strategies and the emotion-triggering narratives?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 history social and political sciences.

Register and Discourse through the Lens of Corpus Linguistics offers a rigorous and engaging exploration of two of the field’s most dynamic areas. Drawing on key frameworks – including Construction Grammar Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies Speech Act Theory and Local Grammar – the volume showcases how qualitative and quantitative corpus-driven methods illuminate the interplay between linguistic form communicative function and contextual embedding. Across eleven chapters contributors examine a breadth of linguistic features from swearing syntactic fragments prenominal modification nonstandard forms and phraseology to interruption and humour expressive acts epistemic presupposition expertise and predictive stance. The studies span diverse settings – teen talk Reddit forums news media historical newspapers workplace interaction political debate and economic discourse – and incorporate synchronic and diachronic perspectives as well as cross-linguistic comparisons. Collectively the chapters demonstrate how register and discourse intersect as mutually informing dimensions of language use enriching established research traditions and offering practical models for future inquiry. Their insights extend beyond corpus linguistics resonating with scholarship in sociolinguistics pragmatics World Englishes and applied linguistics.

A current trend in contrastive corpus linguistics is to take register variation as a point of departure for identifying similarities and differences across languages. This volume looks back at central previous contributions in this area and adds to our store of knowledge in the form of nine studies comparing English to five other languages in a wide variety of registers representing written spoken and written-to-be-spoken modes of communication. The volume starts with a semi-systematic review of previous research on corpus-based register variation comparing English with the other languages represented in the volume’s studies which are Dutch French German Norwegian and Spanish. In the subsequent nine chapters a variety of topics are explored ranging from verb and noun phrases to adverbials and other lexico-grammatical constructions. This book will be of interest to scholars experts and novices in the fields of contrastive corpus linguistics register studies and translation studies.

After an original foreword from Andreas Musolff setting the stage of the book Crises We Live By offers a series of case studies that highlight different ways of conceptualizing and speaking about crisis above all metaphorically. Its title echoes Lakoff and Johnson’s famous Metaphors We Live By (1980) and speaks to the unprecedented awareness of the theme of crisis and its conceptualization that has emerged in contemporary media and discourse. The book makes an innovative contribution to crisis studies and to Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT) by extending its historical reach back to antiquity and by adopting a transdisciplinary approach that takes into account the specific cultural context and framing of each metaphor for crisis.

Emancipatory Pragmatics represents a unique contribution to the field of pragmatics. Most research in the field has focused on English and other Western languages but the study of Japanese and other non-Western languages as is done in this volume has led to a broader understanding of language use. Here thirteen articles each break new ground by discussing the application of ba theory to pragmatics research. Ba and basho which are Japanese terms often translated as “field” or “context” are central to expanding the theory of pragmatics to explain features not only of non-Western languages but of all languages. By presenting an introduction to the perspective of Emancipatory Pragmatics and discussing ba theory in detail it becomes obvious that this is an innovative approach to questions relevant for the study of all languages. Thus it is useful both for students new to the field as well as for seasoned researchers.

This ebook is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

The Making of Multi-Unit Turns is the first book-length treatment to comprehensively describe extended turns produced by a single speaker. It draws on multiparty everyday conversations in English using the methods of Conversation Analysis. It brings together the currently scattered literature on MUTs and goes on to expand our understanding of the ‘natural history’ of MUTs by showing how speakers and recipients deploy linguistic and embodied behaviours in intricate ways from the launch of an extended turn of talk to beyond the end of the MUT. The chapters report on the diverse ways in which speakers secure a second turn-constructional unit and show how grammatical prosodic gestural and postural resources as well as gaze direction are deployed to extend the speaker’s floor in a long MUT. Further investigating how speakers and their recipients transition out of the MUT and return to turn-by-turn talk and how recipients sometimes disrupt an extended MUT this book aims to provide a fresh understanding of the orderliness which underlies our everyday interactions.

The COVID-19 pandemic set off a maelstrom of social cultural and political changes—as well as some surprising linguistic ones. This volume explores these dramatic changes through the lens of Cognitive Linguistics analysing noteworthy examples of pandemic discourse to reveal correspondences and contrasts between different cultures’ conceptions of the illness and its aftermath. The contributions examine a variety of genres including newspaper articles storefront signs artistic creations personal interviews social media comments and political speeches. They look at communication in various domains—business media politics economics art and psychiatry. And they compare past and present showing how the modern pandemic both continued and interrupted previous patterns of discourse around illness and disease. These diverse analyses show how Cognitive Linguistics on the cutting edge of quantitative sociocultural and interdisciplinary turns in linguistics can be a powerful theoretical tool in uncovering parallels and variations in how different cultures communicate in times of crisis.

This monograph offers a cultural-cognitive approach to the study of identity construction at a cultural group level and how it patterns language exemplified with Hong Kong English. For this cultural values political ideology language models and reported self- and other-perception as constitutive elements of the speech community’s cultural cognition are explored for the understanding of the cultural model of the SELF. Rooted in the disciplinary synthesis of Cultural Linguistics and World Englishes and its corpus-based approach this book offers new applications and methodological extensions in the study of the acculturation processes of Englishes around the world and the cognitive substrates that inform them. The present study showcases that human experience is fundamentally cultural. Hence this book will enlighten anyone interested in the workings of cognition as connected to language and culture i.e. researchers and students working in the fields of Cultural Linguistics Cognitive Linguistics World Englishes (linguistic) anthropology critical discourse analysis social science sociolinguistics cultural studies and political science.

Storytelling is a means of fostering a sense of identity belonging and continuity. Through stories Indigenous peoples understand and interpret the world and learn how to survive in spite of external forces such as colonialism. Storytelling has been studied by many scholars across myriad disciplines; however its importance in dealing with trauma and in shaping identity demand further study. This volume contributes to an understanding of the importance of storytelling in shaping identity and healing trauma and as a method of resistance among Indigenous peoples in North America. The book will attract readers interested in Native North American studies Canadian studies and cultural studies. In particular the audience will include scholars investigating the importance of storytelling and its impact on healing and resistance among Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of media: fiction and non-fiction works documentaries poetry activist work movies and TV series.

Personalization has become a central feature of political communication. Politicians appear on late-night talk shows smile from billboards and post family photos on social media – placing themselves at the heart of public discourse. As individual personalities take center stage abstract political ideologies and political collectives fade into the background. The Person in Politics explores the linguistic dimension of this shift through the cognitive semantic analysis of pronominal references. Drawing on a thorough account of how pronouns are used in American presidential nomination acceptance speeches and with what purpose this work investigates how politicians emphasize individual leadership and craft collective identities with personal pronouns. Offering valuable insights into the intersection of language and political campaign rhetoric this book is relevant for scholars of cognitive linguistics and political communication as well as practicioners seeking to navigate the evolving field of political discourse.

This monograph introduces the Evaluative Discourse Metaphor model which argues that participants in public and semi-public online discourse (re)use evaluative metaphors to construct and maintain communities. We explore how such metaphors trigger others with similar forms though not necessarily the same evaluative targets generating discourse spaces unified by a shared evaluative ethos. The model draws on a discourse-based view of metaphor Hallidayan metafunctions Du Bois’s stance triangle and insights from computer-mediated communication with a focus on affordances and community-building. We define or redefine key concepts including single evaluative metaphors metaphorical complexes triggers bondicons and chains. Rather than departing from existing literature we integrate it into a framework valuable to scholars in metaphor studies digital ethnography discourse analysis and online communication.

This is the first comprehensive volume to explore the tendency from ‘intersubjective’ to ‘textual’ functions in semantic-pragmatic change. It challenges the influential hypothesis based on the pioneering works by Traugott i.e. the unidirectionality of change from objective to subjective and then to intersubjective meanings. In this framework textual meanings precede (inter)subjective ones. Questioning this established trajectory the contributions in this volume offer fresh perspectives on the development of intersubjective and textual functions. The chapters provide new empirical data about different constructions (modals conditionals discourse markers non-lexical items etc.) across a variety of largely unrelated languages (Ainu Mandarin Chinese English German Japanese Italian Sicilian Spanish).<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book collects a multifaceted reflection for researchers interested in language change especially at the interface of semantics and pragmatics providing readers with an opportunity to better understand the crucial processes of textualization and intersubjectification.

Grammar in Action: Building comprehensive grammars of talk-in-interaction investigates the possibility of writing comprehensive grammars of languages based on analyses of interaction. The volume combines two traditions in language studies that have hitherto been separate: Interactional Linguistics which analyzes instances of language use in naturally occurring interactions and Descriptive Grammars which describe the grammatical regularities of languages. The authors are skilled researchers in Interactional Linguistics. They analyze interactional phenomena in Danish English Finnish French German Italian and Swedish making concrete proposals about how grammatical phenomena might be described in a comprehensive interactional grammar. The volume also proposes solutions to problems that an interactional grammar faces for instance the written language bias the role of prosody and the body in the grammar how to approach different target audiences and how a web-based grammar could be useful for rendering the complexities of grammar in interaction.

This volume of stylistic scholarship is dedicated to the memory of one of the most inspirational and kindest stylistics scholars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries Peter Verdonk (1934-2021). Verdonk was Professor of Stylistics at the University of Amsterdam and one of the founding members of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). Many of his colleagues from PALA have contributed chapters to this volume. Each author has chosen as their starting point one of Verdonk’s ideas on literary and linguistic style. Through his many nuanced and illuminating stylistic analyses Verdonk’s works explore questions pertaining to: How can we recognise styles and stylistic features? How is style used in literary and non-literary contexts? What is the relationship between text and discourse and between production and reception? And centrally how can we consider ‘style’ as ‘motivated choice’. The chapters in this volume are erudite and inspirational. Reflecting Verdonk's own influence on the discipline of stylistics and his career-long support of younger scholars they will motivate new stylistics researchers and students for decades to come.

El presente volumen explora la riqueza y pluralidad del turismo y su discurso a través de un análisis interdisciplinario que proporciona una visión integral del impacto del turismo en diversas esferas comunicativas sociales y culturales. Esta obra recopila un total de quince investigaciones que destacan la naturaleza intercultural multifacética y multilingüe de esta actividad así como la variedad de géneros discursivos que merecen un análisis detenido.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>El volumen aborda desde la influencia de las redes sociales y la creación de nuevos formatos del discurso turístico hasta la emoción y la subjetividad presentes en las comunicaciones promocionales. Ofrece una panorámica de cómo el turismo contemporáneo se entrelaza con múltiples dimensiones y formatos discursivos subrayando los desafíos estratégicos que enfrentan traductores terminólogos y lingüistas.<br/><br/> This volume explores the richness and plurality of tourism and its discourse through an interdisciplinary analysis providing a comprehensive view of the impact of tourism on various communicative social and cultural spheres. It compiles a total of fifteen investigations which highlight the intercultural multifaceted and multilingual nature of this activity as well as the variety of discursive genres that merit close analysis. <br/>The volume addresses everything from the influence of social networks and the creation of new formats of tourism discourse to the emotion and subjectivity present in promotional communications. It provides an overview of how contemporary tourism is intertwined with multiple dimensions and discursive formats highlighting the strategic challenges facing translators terminologists and linguists.

This volume extends research on ideology in the news into the historical sphere spanning discourse from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The chapters investigate the ideological representation and assessment of political events across three continents such as uprisings independence and genocide but also of pervasive socio-cultural aspects like gender and language. For this they rely on a wide range of sources from handwritten news letters via general daily papers to specialized magazines and from classical editorial content to letters published in newspapers. The geographical and linguistic focus of the texts investigated comprises British American Italian German and Polish discourse. The articles use both qualitative and quantitative corpus-based methodology such as keyword or collocational analysis. The book is of interest for scholars in (historical) linguistics history and journalism studies.

The rise of influencers as power-players in the social media landscape is a defining feature of the digital era one that has received much attention from a variety of social science disciplines. But despite the key role that language along with other semiotic modes plays in the construction and communication of influencer selves discourse analytic and pragmatic research on the topic is lagging behind. This volume attempts to fill this void by offering contextually sensitive insights into influencers’ multi-modal communication on a range of platforms. The contributions rework established modes and tools of discourse analysis and pragmatics to shed empirical light on influencer identities and tensions (e.g. doing authenticity vis-à-vis promoting brands). We specifically attend to (a) the interplay between media affordances and communication practices and (b) the co-constructional interactive nature of influencer selves with networked audiences ranging from ‘affect’ to ‘hate’.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In addition to linguists we hope that the volume will be of interest to scholars and students of social media communication from sociological cultural studies anthropological and/or social psychological perspectives.

The volume aims to advance understanding of argumentative practices in different communicative contexts with special regard for those with heightened public resonance: politics media and public debate in general. Furthermore it intends to explore the linguistic aspects of argumentation including both explicit codification with the related issue of indicators and the activation of implicit meanings.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Bringing together different paradigms to account for the relations between contextual factors and discourse realizations the contributions articulate around three foci placing emphasis on one or more of them: the communicative purpose within a given genre or activity type; the argumentative and linguistic features of the investigated discourses among which prototypical patterns argumentative styles and implicit meanings; the assessment of argumentation quality and strategies to cope with illegitimate practices.<br/>

This book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity as well as on their differences and similarities both in synchrony and diachrony and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages including English French German Italian Medieval Latin and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines including pragmatics spoken discourse conversation analysis discourse genres (political commercial notarial discourse) corpus studies language change pragmaticalization and language typology.

This volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms from written to spoken to visual in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis to the macro-level structure of online interaction all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research.

Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics discourse analysis media studies and digitally mediated communication.

This book addresses the problems and challenges of studying the discourse of "danger" cross-linguistically and cross-culturally and proposes the cultural pragmatics of danger as a new field of inquiry. Detailed case studies of several linguacultures include Arabic Chinese Danish English German Japanese and Spanish. Focusing on global and local contexts surrounding “living in dangerous times” this book showcases how the new model of cultural pragmatics can be used to illuminate cultural meanings in discourse. Unlike the universalist approaches to pragmatics cultural pragmatics focuses on understanding the linguacultural logics of discourse and in the case of “danger” the multiple cultural logics around which the themes and domains of “danger” revolve. The approach makes use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) as its principal analytical tool and concepts such as “cultural keywords” and “cultural scripts” figure prominently as bearers of culture-specific meanings. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book will be of interest to students of pragmatics and discourse studies researchers in cultural and cognitive semantics anthropological linguistics global humanities political rhetoric and environmental studies as well as linguists working in applied areas such as risk and disaster studies crisis and emergency communication.

This collection of original papers illustrates recent trends and new perspectives for future research in Interactional Linguistics (IL). Since the research program was started around the turn of the century it has prospered internationally. Recently however new developments have opened up new perspectives for interactional linguistic research.

IL continues to study the details of talk in social interaction with a focus on linguistic resources and structures of verbal and vocal interaction in bodily-visible interactional settings. Increasingly though it embraces methods supported by new technology and broadens its data and research questions to applications in teaching therapy etc.

The volume comprises three parts with 14 contributions: (1) Studying linguistic resources in social interaction; (2) Studying linguistic resources in embodied social interaction; and (3) Studying social interaction in institutional contexts and involving speakers with specific proficiencies.

This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This monograph explores the diverse sociopragmatic functions and meanings of humorous discourse in various online contexts affecting its use. To this end an analytical model is proposed which takes into consideration the aspects of context which are relevant to the production and reception of humor and hence to its sociopragmatic analysis. The model is employed for addressing research questions such as the following: Why may an utterance/text be intended and perceived as humorous by some speakers and fail for others? How and why may speakers attempt to regulate language use through humor? Why and how may the same humorous utterance/text engender diverse and contradictory interpretations? How do speakers create social groups and project social identities through humor? How could the sociopragmatic analysis of humor form the basis for teaching about humor within a critical literacy framework?

This volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL Leiden 2021). The chapters deal with aspects of language use throughout the history of English including efforts to prescribe and regulate language in texts that share specific forms functions and audiences. They feature both quantitative and qualitative analyses of changing language use often in relation to trends of language advice in such metalinguistic works as grammars spelling books and usage guides. The authors showcase work on pragmatics and prescriptivism (understatement between Middle and Late Modern English capitalization of common nouns from Early to Late Modern English and the use of stigmatized grammatical variants in eighteenth-century plays) specific text types (case studies of political legal and medical English) and the language of late modern letters (diachronic stylistic changes letter-copying practices the role of letter-writing manuals and changing spelling practices). This volume will be of interest to those working on pragmatics prescriptivism and sociolinguistics of English historical linguistics language change computational historical linguistics and related sub-disciplines.

The chapters in this volume study the construction representation and negotiation of a variety of social roles through self- and other-reference markers or the discussion of reference as a tool for identification. The chapters uncover new insights both from a historical and present-day perspective and show how positioning the self and other varies what kind of reference choices language users make and what follows from these choices. The data come from a variety of public texts private encounters and questionnaires and the methodologies range from macro to micro perspectives including combinations of qualitative close-reading and quantitative corpus methods and synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The findings enhance our understanding and use of reference practices in the context of global institutional political and multicultural as well as media texts.

Swearing plays an important role in everyday language. We swear in the streets at school universities at work and at home on the means of transport with family and friends. People have used swear words for centuries and they will continue to use them. The Anatomy of Polish Offensive Words examines offensive and vulgar language of young Poles in their everyday life including its forms uses manifestations and the ways in which people censor their words and sentences. The book presents a novel viewpoint on people’s psyche since we observe how society reacts to other humans so as to impose taboos by censoring Polish language.

This book is the first book written in English on Polish swearing intended for the international reader (both linguists and non-linguists) who can benefit from it. It offers an intriguing look into Polish swear words their classification in terms of offensiveness both from the perspective of quantitative and qualitative research but also from the AI (Artificial Intelligence) viewpoint. Mixed methods research i.e. a questionnaire-based study and a corpus-based study makes the research original. The findings deepen our understanding of swearing and its role in language.

Language Change in the 20th Century: Exploring micro-diachronic evolutions in Romance languages examines the distinctive features that set the study of the 20th century apart from preceding periods. With a primary focus on Romance languages including Spanish Italian French and Portuguese the book advocates for the adoption of innovative methodologies to enhance the nuanced retrieval of research data: the use of speaker’s attitudes questionnaires apparent time constructions and S-curves. Additionally new materials are addressed as diachronic data sources: mass-media recordings from radio and TV colloquial conversations and sociolinguistic corpora. Results focus on the evolution of discourse markers address terms as well as on the influence of specific processes such as colloquialization or external mechanisms on the language changes developed during this period. In sum the 20th century is presented in this book as a new strand in diachronic studies rather than another time span.

This volume addresses the issue of pragmatic meaning and interpretation in communication contexts regarding health and does so by combining a series of diverse and complementary approaches which together highlight the relevance of successfully shared understanding to achieve more accessible inclusive and sustainable healthcare systems.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The volume is divided into five thematic sections: 1) Analytical approaches to health communication 2) Intercultural and mediated communication 3) Negotiation and meaning construction 4) Expertise and common ground 5) Uncertainty and evasive answers bringing together a group of top scholars on the much-debated issue of shared understanding both at the micro-level of dialogues between professionals and patients and the macro-level of institutional communication. <br/>In the variety of its contributions it represents an ambitious attempt at setting pragmatics at the core of healthcare communication research and practice by combining conceptual reflections on core topics in the field of pragmatics (among which are speech acts common ground ambiguity implicitness) with discourse and linguistic analysis of real-world examples exploring various problems in health communication.

The present volume explores the meeting ground between Critical Discourse Studies and Cultural Linguistics. The contributions investigate culture-specific conceptualisations ways of framing and conceptual metaphors in political discourse as well as cultural models cultural stereotypes and stereotyping. The individual authors use quantitative (e.g. corpus-based approaches) and/or qualitative methods. They address a range of contexts e.g. Europe the US Japan West Africa and a variety of topics e.g. migration presidential elections identity food culture concepts of health. The papers included in this volume show that ideologies the key concern of Critical Discourse Studies cannot be analysed independently of cultural conceptualisations. In a complementary dialectic fashion cultural conceptualisation the central concern of Cultural Linguistics have ideological implications sometimes subtle sometimes very straightforward. The present volume thus illustrates that travelling on this meeting ground is a natural and fruitful endeavour for both approaches.

What would it mean to invite disability into dialogue? Disability in Dialogue attunes us to the dialogues of and about disability. In the pages of this book we ask readers to consider the dialogic constitution of disability and to imagine its reformulation. We find the voices bodies social norms visceral experiences discourses and acts of resistance that materialize disability in all its dialogic and enfleshed complexity: tensions contradictions provocations frustrations and desires. This volume makes a unique contribution bringing together authors from disciplines as diverse as communication dialogue studies psychology sociology design rhetoric and activism. Because we take dialogue seriously this book is designed to be brave as we examine the ways of being in the world that dialogic practices engender and allow as well as beckon to continue. By way of a variety of frameworks such as discourse analysis dialogue studies narrative analysis and critical approaches to discourse the chapters of this book take us through a polylogue of and about disability demanding that we consider our own roles in bringing forth disabled ways of being and how we might instead choose ways that enable our common existence.

This book is a collection of studies about forms of address in the world’s languages with a focus on contrast and difference. The individual chapters highlight inter- and intralinguistic variation in the expression of address and its sociol-cultural functions across media registers geographical contexts and time – in more than 15 languages. The volume showcases the variety of approaches that exists in current address research including the breadth of contrastive methodologies harnessing surveys and questionnaires focus group discussions corpus linguistics discourse and conversation analysis to offer complementary perspectives on culture-specific address practice. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This volume is for students and researchers of address and social interaction in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences including various sub-disciplines of linguistics (such as contrastive variational and intercultural pragmatics sociolinguistics and morphology) and intercultural communication as well as experts in individual languages and qualitative sociologists.

The present volume offers a fresh perspective on political top-down crisis communication across several countries during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes how leaders address the growing awareness of the dangerous impact of social restrictions along with the controversies surrounding the first vaccination campaigns. Not limited to the Western world it also offers insights from six East European countries Uganda India and Palestine. Topics discussed range from inconsistent communication patterns to populist xenophobic accents propagandistic campaigns on vaccines the impact of authoritarian systems on crisis communication the contrast between scientific and African folk medicine and the use of war metaphors.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>By adopting a comparative perspective this volume contributes to the growing body of literature on crisis communication during the pandemic while highlighting important issues and perspectives that have yet to be extensively explored. Moreover it aims to bridge the gap between linguistic and communication research on leadership communication during times of crisis stimulating an interdisciplinary dialogue.

The Sociophonetics of Dublin English shows how social inequalities and language are connected by the stances speakers take in interaction. It is based on an instrumental phonetic analysis of recorded interviews and broadcasting data and a detailed qualitative account of the same data as well as the socio-cultural context in Ireland. The analysis not only considers macro-social categories but also pragmatic norms and situational more fluid aspects of communication. Contemporary social meanings and associated phonetic realisations are described and explained as the result of diachronic developments. Since the independence of Ireland local pronunciations have been re-evaluated and realisations connected with the former coloniser have fallen out of use even in formal and powerful domains. This investigation thus highlights the importance of diachronic data to understand contemporary sociolinguistic variation.

This e-book is made available as Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis explores applications of rhetorically informed approaches to corpus research. Bringing together contributions from scholars in a variety of fields it takes up questions of how theories and traditions in rhetorical analysis can be integrated with corpus techniques in order to enrich our understanding of language use variation and history. The studies included in this volume shed light on areas as diverse as student academic writing political discourse and the digital humanities. These studies all make use of a dictionary-based tagger called DocuScope which recognizes tens-of-millions of words and phrases and slots them into categories based on their rhetorical functions. While DocuScope provides a through-line that both links the studies’ various analytical procedures and primes their rhetorical insights the volume is about more than the explanatory power of a single tool. It demonstrates how rhetorically informed approaches can complement more established corpus methodologies underscoring their combined potential.

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in interactional humour from social and pragmatic perspectives with fascinating results. Released more than a decade later than Norrick and Chiaro (2009) Humor in Interaction The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts gathers some of the most recent work on humour in interaction with contributions taking (meta)pragmatic approaches to the analysis of various genres of interactive humour in both online and offline settings. This volume illustrates that a range of methodologies and perspectives can be applied to the study of such a complex phenomenon. These include analyses with a cognitive orientation and with multimodal approaches work based on Relevance Theory the General Theory of Verbal Humour and Conversation Analysis among others. In addition all the authors represented here are recognised experts on the subject and in most cases are leading specialists in their respective fields. The book can be of use not only to scholars who study the linguistics of humour in interaction but also to students who wish to pursue research in the area.

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.

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 volume examines rhetorical conventions employed in mechanical engineering research to understand the knowledge-making principles of the discipline as well as their expression within the research article. In particular the study analyses the organisational patterns of mechanical engineering research articles using Swales’s conceptualisation of moves and steps. In addition the research identifies the phraseology associated with specific moves and steps. The study draws on a corpus of 120 mechanical engineering research articles equally distributed across two sub-disciplines (mechanical systems and thermal-fluids engineering) three research traditions (experimental theoretical and mixed methods) and two publication periods (2002–2006 and 2012–2016). It adopts an integrated methodology intertwining various approaches and perspectives including corpus linguistics move analysis discourse analysis and interviews to address two main strands of research enquiry: (i) What are the properties of the rhetorical structures in terms of range frequency and length for each section of mechanical engineering research articles? (ii) What effect does sub-discipline research tradition and publication date have on the rhetorical structure of research articles?

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.

This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics semantics discourse analysis psycholinguistics interactional linguistics natural language processing) in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English German different varieties of French Indonesian Belgian sign language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining of names language acquisition second language learning and various genres such as news articles narratives satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust depending on the context.

In recent years the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses on the assumption that by interrogating creativity new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema music graphic novels etc.) but also its more ‘mundane’ everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use political discourse or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal pictorial auditory and gestural) the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.

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

This volume proposes a novel structural analysis for causative constructions offering a solution for the long-standing mono/bi-clausal dualism. Causatives are claimed to instantiate a ‘complex object’ construction insofar as the causee is not only the subject of the lexical verb but also a participant that is related to the whole event. Furthermore the analysis reveals that the realization of causatives implies a crucial interplay with the pseudo-relative construction a much-debated structure as well. Data from Scandinavian languages are highlighted through the results of an experimental test on the scope of negation and adverbs supporting the present analysis. The book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses the relevant constructions in languages including Italian English French Portuguese and Spanish.

World Englishes and English in postcolonial contexts have been curiously neglected in an otherwise abundant research literature on text types and genres in English. This volume looks at the adaptation transformation and emergence of genres in the particular cultural context of the Anglophone Caribbean. A comprehensive framework for the investigation of text production in postcolonial and global English communities is followed by empirically based case studies on specific text formats such as recipes death notices and obituaries letters to the editor newspaper advice columns radio phone-in programmes online forums and the music genre calypso. Influences from oral versus literate culture as well as status and function of English versus Creole are considered by highlighting written spoken and digital genres. All chapters present surveys from a historical and cross-cultural perspective before exploring specific linguistic and cultural features in the Caribbean texts. This volume will be highly relevant for researchers in World Englishes and Caribbean studies postcolonial pragmatics genre and media studies as well as linguistic anthropology.

This volume addresses demands on external and internal science communication in times of crisis. The contributions discuss present crises such as COVID-19 (e.g. vaccination campaigns or political reactions towards the pandemic in the context of science scepticism) and climate change (e.g. plausibility judgements or the role of scientists). They also relate their approaches to past crises e.g. 9/11 or the Galileo affair. This volume is unique in that it is interdisciplinary from a theoretical and methodological perspective. In that respect the authors apply concepts from corpus linguistics discourse analysis rhetoric news values analysis pragmatics and terminology research to various types of data such as newspaper headlines Tweets open letters corpora or glossaries. The case studies are situated within different cultural contexts with various languages being examined i.e. Polish Arabic English French German and Spanish. Elevating our understanding of the interface of science communication and crisis communication this collection of articles proves valuable to scholars and students from linguistics communication science political science sociology and philosophy of science.

Argumentative Style discusses the various ways in which the defence of a standpoint is given shape in argumentative discourse. In this innovative study the new notion – ‘argumentative style’ – introduced for this purpose is situated in the theoretical framework of the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation. This means that the choices involved in utilising a particular argumentative style do not only concern the presentational dimension but also the topical selection and the audience adaptation of the strategic manoeuvring taking place in the discourse. In identifying the functional variety of the argumentative styles utilised in the political the diplomatic the legal the facilitatory the academic and the medical domain the point of departure is that these argumentative styles manifest themselves in the discourse in the argumentative moves that are made the dialectical routes that are chosen and the strategic considerations that are brought to bear.

Discourse particles have often been treated as a phenomenon restricted to Germanic languages (Abraham 2020) and they still raise questions about their nature as an independent category. This book reveals that this phenomenon exists in other languages as well and provides evidence for their nature as a separate category. The volume brings together a collection of nine papers that focus on three research topics: a) the diachronic development of discourse particles; b) their syntactic analysis; and c) the study of their semantic-pragmatics. Furthermore it also discusses other issues less often dealt with in the literature but of great interest for linguistic theory such as the acquisition of discourse particles by children or the analysis of elements not usually considered discourse particles but whose historical path or microvariation indicates otherwise. Additionally the book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses various languages including Basque Catalan German Italian Laz Mandarin Chinese Old English Portuguese and Spanish.

This book combines explanatory breadth with analytical delicacy. It offers a comprehensive study of a broad array of traditional figures of speech by systematizing linguistic evidence of the cognitive processes underlying them. Such processes are explicitly linked to different communicative consequences thus bringing together pragmatics and cognition. This type of study has allowed the authors to provide new definitions for all the figures while making their dependency relations fully explicit. For example hypallage antonomasia anthimeria and merism are studied as variants of metonymy and analogy paragon and allegory as variants of metaphor. An important feature of the book is its special emphasis on the combinations of figures of speech into conceptually more complex configurations. Finally the book accounts for the principles that regulate the felicity of figurative expressions. The result is a broad integrative framework for the analysis of figurative language grounded in the relationship between pragmatics and cognition.

This volume is the first monograph exploring the functions of visual cues in humor advocating for the development of a non-linguocentric theory of humor performance. It analyzes a corpus of dyadic face-to-face interactions in Spanish and English to study the relationship between humor smiling and gaze and shows how by focusing on these elements it is possible to shed light on the “unsaid” of conversations.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In the book the humorous framing of an utterance is shown to be negotiated and co-constructed dialogically and multimodally through changes and patterns of smiling synchronicity smiling intensity and eye movements. The study also analyzes the multimodal features of failed humor and proposes a new categorization from a dialogic perspective.<br/>Because of its interdisciplinary approach which includes facial expression analysis and eye tracking this book is relevant to humor researchers as well as scholars in social and behavioral sciences interested in multimodality and embodied cognition.