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

In Exploring Argumentative Contexts Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen bring together a broad variety of essays examining argumentation as it occurs in seven communicative domains: the political context, the historical context, the legal context, the academic context, the medical context, the media context, and the financial context. These essays are written by an international group of argumentation scholars, consisting of Corina Andone, Sarah Bigi, Robert T. Craig, Justin Eckstein, Frans H. van Eemeren, Norman Fairclough, Eveline Feteris, Gerd Fritz, Bart Garssen, Kara Gilbert, Thomas Gloning, G. Thomas Goodnight, Dale A. Herbeck, Darrin Hicks, Thomas Hollihan, Jos Hornikx, Isabela Ieţcu-Fairclough, Gábor Kutrovátz, Maurizio Manzin, Davide Mazzi, Dima Mohammed, Rudi Palmieri, Angela G. Ray, Patricia Riley, Robert C. Rowland, Peter Schulz, Karen Tracy, and Gergana Zlatkova.

If politics is a serious matter and humour a funny one, this volume investigates how and why the boundaries between the two are blurred: politics can be represented in a humorous manner and humour can have a serious intent. Political humour conveys criticism against the political status quo and/or recycles and reinforces dominant views on politics. The data analysed comes from European states with different sociopolitical histories and traditions and the methodologies adopted originate in different fields (discourse analysis, folklore and cultural studies, media studies, sociolinguistics, sociology, theatre semiotics). The first part of the volume is dedicated to politicians’ humour as a means of public positioning, deliberation, and eventually attack against political adversaries, while the second one involves political satire as realised in different genres: animation, impersonation, and cartoons. Last but not least, the third part shows how political humour can be manipulated in public debates or become an integral part of postmodern art.

This innovative book critically examines patriarchal hegemonies from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. It challenges the Anglo-American bias of much gender and language research to date by including rich new data and insights from scholars working in countries such as Colombia, Liberia, Kenya, Vietnam, Japan, Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sweden, Denmark and Poland. Within these different geographical contexts, a broadly defined notion of culture incorporates organizational cultures, subcultures of society, cultures of clans or tribes as well as national cultures, depending on the meanings ascribed to the notion by people in public and private spaces. The central question of the volume, which is addressed through a variety of data, different discourse analytical approaches and research methodologies, is: How is gender constructed in social life and in patriarchal systems through discourse in different parts of the world?

Interest in transcript-based research has grown significantly in recent years. Alongside this growth has been an increase in awareness of the empirical utility of naturalistic research on language use in interaction. However, a quick scan of the literature reveals that very few transcription books have been published in the past three decades. This is an astonishing fact given that there are perhaps hundreds of books published on spoken discourse analysis. This book aims to narrow this gap by providing an introduction to the theories and practices related to transcribing communication data. The book is intended for students with little to no knowledge of transcription work and/or instructors responsible for teaching introductory courses on transcript-based research. Readers who are learning or teaching discourse/conversation analysis or similar analytic methods of investigation will find this book particularly helpful.

Christopher Jenks has many years of experience teaching transcription work and analysis of communication data to postgraduate students and researchers. In addition to running workshops and giving presentations on similar topics at universities around the world, he has published widely in top international journals and has numerous other forthcoming publications.

Cyberpragmatics is an analysis of Internet-mediated communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. It addresses a whole range of interactions that can be found on the Net: the web page, chat rooms, instant messaging, social networking sites, 3D virtual worlds, blogs, videoconference, e-mail, Twitter, etc. Of special interest is the role of intentions and the quality of interpretations when these Internet-mediated interactions take place, which is often affected by the textual properties of the medium. The book also analyses the pragmatic implications of transferring offline discourses (e.g. printed paper, advertisements) to the screen-framed space of the Net. And although the main framework is cognitive pragmatics, the book also draws from other theories and models in order to build up a better picture of what really happens when people communicate on the Net. This book will interest analysts doing research on computer-mediated communication, university students and researchers undergoing post-graduate courses or writing a PhD thesis.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.

In the final chapter of this volume, the authors refer to the “pedagogical vantage points offered by narrative inquiry”, an apt comment that encapsulates the volume’s purpose and its spirit. As an increasing number of people throughout the world – and from a broad range of disciplines – are turning to narrative as a research methodology, this volume is timely in its focus on the learning and teaching of this approach. The contributors to the volume, all narrative scholars themselves, write about the creative and challenging pedagogical activities that they use in order to enable others to learn about and do narrative research. The volume will be of particular interest to those teaching narrative research methodologies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in the social sciences, medical sciences and the humanities. The contributions from Hong Kong, Israel, Europe and North America, all reflect critically on the rich complexities of using and teaching narrative in those contexts and attend closely to the diverse constituencies of their learning communities.

The context of mediation immediately highlights the importance of argumentation as a means to reasonably handle conflict. Argumentation in dispute mediation tackles this topic providing both theoretical insights and detailed empirical argumentative analysis. Its goal is twofold: to explore mediation as a real-life context of argumentation and to show how an increased argumentative awareness could improve conflict resolution.

Particular emphasis is accorded to mapping mediation through an interdisciplinary reasoned review of existing accounts. The outline of a conceptual framework of mediation constitutes a solid basis for the study of argumentation in mediation. The argumentative analysis of a corpus of mediation cases, based on the pragma-dialectical account and the Argumentum Model of Topics, shows the mediator’s moves which actually help conflicting parties discuss reasonably. The mediator’s topical potential plays a crucial role in this relation at the levels of issue selection, evoking of cultural-contextual premises and choice of argument schemes.

The ‘Mixed Game Model’ represents a holistic theory of dialogue which starts from human beings’ competence-in-performance and describes how language is integrated in a general theory of human action and behaviour. Human beings are able to adapt to changing conditions and to pursue their interests by the integrated use of various communicative means, mainly verbal, perceptual and cognitive. The core unit is the dialogic action game or ‘the mixed game’ with human beings at the centre acting and reacting in cultural surroundings. The key to opening up the complex whole is human beings’ nature. The Mixed Game Model demonstrates how the different disciplines of the natural and social sciences and the humanities are mutually interconnected. After a detailed overview of the state of the art, the fundamentals of the theory are laid down. They include a typology of action games which ranges from minimal games to complex institutional games. The description is illustrated by analyses of authentic games.

As of July 2024, this e-book is available as Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND license.

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and city council meetings, they often incorporate gesture, prosody, and the listener's behavior in the analysis of talk. While some approaches are grounded in a critique of the major schools of interaction analysis, others integrate the interactionist perspective with ideas from fields such as systemic-functional linguistics, distributed cognition, and the sociology of knowledge. Each chapter combines a statement of the terms and methods of analysis with an exemplary analysis of a moment of interaction. New Adventures in Language and Interaction gives an excellent overview of the novelty and diversity of interaction-focused perspectives on language and of the heterogeneity of approaches that have evolved from the pioneering work of Sacks and Schegloff, Gumperz, and their co-workers.