Subject collection: Communication Studies (152 titles, 2000–2015)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the role of argumentation in the health care domain. Argumentation and Health is a collection of essays by argumentation theorists reflecting on the way in which the institutional context of health care shapes the argumentative interaction. The volume provides for the first time an overview of the most important recent developments and achievements of the study of argumentation in medical and public oriented health communication. In Argumentation and Health , attention is paid to argumentation in different forms of health communication, such as the medical consultation, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, health brochures and health risk communication.

This book is of interest to argumentation theorists, (health) communication scholars, healthcare practitioners, students of medicine and health-related fields, and all other researchers and practitioners interested in the function and characteristics of argumentation in health communication. Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context, Vol. 1:1 (2012).

In Argumentation in Political Interviews Corina Andone uses the pragma-dialectical concept of strategic maneuvering to gain a better understanding of political interviews as argumentative practices. She analyzes and evaluates the way in which politicians react in political interviews to the accusation that the position they currently hold is inconsistent with a position they advanced before. The politicians’ responses to such charges are examined for their strategic function by concentrating on a number of concrete cases and explaining how the arguers try to enhance their chances of winning the discussion. In addition, the soundness criteria are formulated for judging properly when the politicians’ responses are indeed reasonable.This book is important to argumentation theorists, discourse analysts, communication scholars and all other researchers and students interested in the way in which language is used for the purpose of persuasion in a political context.

Corina Andone is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of interactional linguistic media studies. It focuses on how people appropriate media in their daily lives. Thus here it is not the talk in the medium itself, but naturally occurring interactions in different media reception situations that are analysed. The idea that media function like a hypodermic needle injecting messages into the masses has long been questioned. Still, the actual moment when people use media in their daily lives has largely been ignored in media studies. This book analyses the minutiae of the moment when people actively appropriate media for their own purposes in different fashions. The reception communities analysed include families watching television, girls gossiping about a talent show, teenagers playing video games, a team of fire-men implementing a new medium in their workplace, radio listeners´ phone ins and others. The languages studied comprise English, German, French, Swedish and Finnish.

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary perspective on key socio-cultural aspects of second language learning. Building on Bakhtin’s philosophy of language and the self, it examines the complex intersections among gender, culture, and agency in the everyday discursive practices of immigrants. Bakhtin’s dialogic framework still remains on the periphery of second language acquisition research. The book embraces not only Bakhtin’s well-known notion of dialogue but also his core concepts of responsibility and ethics in the analysis of immigrants’ narrative samples. The significance of narratives is underscored throughout the book, and a dialogic, discourse-centered approach to narrative as a genre is suggested.

Authoring the Dialogical Self targets a range of disciplines. Scholars in applied linguistics, narrative studies, cultural psychology, and communication studies will find the discussed concepts relevant. The rich data samples and detailed analysis make the book appropriate for graduate courses in TESOL, language and identity, or language and gender.

Agents of Translation contains thirteen case studies by internationally recognized scholars in which translation has been used as a way of influencing the target culture and furthering literary, political and personal interests.

The articles describe Francisco Miranda, the “precursor” of Venezuelan independence, who promoted translations of works on the French Revolution and American independence; 19th century Brazilian translations of articles taken from the Révue Britannique about England; Ahmed Midhat, a late 19th century Turkish journalist who widely translated from Western languages; Henry Vizetelly , who (unsuccessfully) attempted to introduce the works of Zola to a wider public in Victorian Britain; and Henry Bohn, who, also in Victorian Britain, (successfully) published a series of works from the classics, many of which were expurgated; Yukichi Fukuzawa, whose adaptation of a North American geography textbook in the Meiji period promoted the concept of the superiority of the Japanese over their Asian neighbours; Samuli Suomalainen and Juhani Konkka, whose translations helped establish Finnish as a literary language; Hasan Alî Yücel, the Turkish Minister of Education, who set up the Turkish Translation Bureau in 1939; the Senegalese intellectual, Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work showed that the Ancient Egyptians had African rather than Indo-European roots; the Centro Cultural de Évora theatre group, which introduced Brecht and other contemporary drama into Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution; 20^th century Argentine translators of poetry; Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, who have brought translation to the forefront of literary activity in Brazil; and, finally, translators of Bosnian poetry, many of whom work in exile.

Research in the relatively new field of cultural linguistics has implications for second language learning and intercultural communication. This volume is the first of its kind to bring together studies that examine the implications for applied programs of research in these domains. Collectively, the contributions explore the interrelationship between language, culture, and conceptualisations. Each study focuses on a different language-and-culture. The languages-cultures studied include Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, English, Aboriginal English and African English. The particular conceptual bases of the contributions range from theories of embodiment and conceptual metaphors to theories of schemas and cultural scripts. Several authors directly address the application of their observations to the fields of second language/dialect learning and intercultural communication, while others first present a theoretical analysis and then explore its practical implications. Collectively, the contributions establish a novel direction for research in applied linguistics.

Citizenship talk refers to various types of discourse initiated to make citizens take part in politically and socially contested decision-making processes (‘citizen participation’). ‘Citizenship’ has, accordingly, become one of the dazzling key words whenever the democratic deficit of modern societies is moaned about. Asking for citizenship to be conceived of as a communicative achievement, the present book shows that sociolinguistics and pragmatics can essentially contribute to this interdisciplinary up-to-date issue of research: the volume offers a theoretically innovative concept of communicated citizenship and it presents a set of methodological approaches suited to deal with this concept at an empirical level (including contributions from Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Positioning Theory, Speech Act Theory and Ethnography). Furthermore, concrete data and empirical analyses are provided which take up the case of decision-making processes around the application of modern ‘green’ biotechnology (‘GMO field trials’). The volume thus illustrates the kind of findings and results that can be expected from this new and promising approach towards citizenship talk.

The Art of Commemoration focuses on a particular historical event that illustrates how nations define their own identities and establish mutual relations in their discourse: the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 and its Commemoration in 1994. This Commemoration was an innovative and unique form of transnational communication because it brought together representative speakers from all parties involved. They considered the commemorated event from different perspectives: the victim (Poland), the former enemy (Germany) and the former allies (England, USA, France and other countries, as well as Russia which liberated Poland but had not supported the Uprising). A letter from the Pope added a Catholic perspective.

The ‘art of commemoration’ consists in invoking the past events from one’s own perspective while simultaneously considering the other perspectives, as well as in making sense of the past and present at the same time. This volume analyses the artful way in which the speakers coped with these complexities in a full discourse analytic reconstruction of each address.