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

While ideology has been treated widely in CDA-literature, the role played by the interaction of text and image in multiplying meaning and furthering ideological stances has not so far received a lot of attention. Mediating Ideology in Text and Image offers a number of approaches to such analysis, offering students and academics valuable tools for identifying possible discrepancies between the world and the way it is represented through various mediational means. The authors’ common aim is one of assisting the audience in reading between the lines, thus offering a variety of approaches that may contribute to a better understanding of how ideologies possibly work and how they may be denaturalised from text and image. The articles in part I look at rhetorical strategies used in meaning construction processes unfolding in various kinds of mass media. Part II focuses on the re-semiotization of meaning and looks at how analysing the combination of text and image may contribute to a better understanding of ideological processes brought about by multimodal resources. Foreword by Ruth Wodak.

Telephone helplines have become one of the most pervasive sites of expert-lay interaction in modern societies throughout the world. Yet surprisingly little is known of the in situ, language-based processes of help-seeking and help-giving behavior that occurs within them. This collection of original studies by both internationally renowned and emerging scholars seeks to improve upon this state of affairs. It does so by offering some of the first systematic investigations of naturally-occurring spoken interaction in telephone helplines. Using the methods of Conversation Analysis, each of the contributors offers a detailed investigation into the skills and competencies that callers and call-takers routinely draw upon when engaging one another within a range of helplines. Helplines in the US, the UK, Australia, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, and Ireland, dealing with the provision of healthcare, emotional support and counselling, technical assistance and consumer rights, tourism and finance, make up the studies in the volume. Collectively and individually, the research provides fascinating insight into an under-researched area of modern living and demonstrates the relevance and potential of helplines for the growing field of institutional interaction.

This book will be of interest to students of communication, applied linguistics, discourse and conversation, sociology, counselling, technology and work, social psychology and anthropology.

This book offers an HPSG-based discourse grammar for a controlled language (Air Traffic Control) that allows the identification of well-formed discourse patterns. A formalisation of discourse theoretical structures that occur especially in crisis situations that involve potential aviation disasters is introduced. Of particular importance in this context are discourse sequences that help secure uptake among the crew and between crew and tower in order to coordinate actions that might result in avoiding a potential disaster. In order to describe the relevant phenomena, an extended HPSG formalism is used. The extension concerns the capability of modelling speech acts as proposed by Searle & Vanderveken (1985). The grammar is modelled by employing XML as a denotational semantics and is applied to the corpus data. This work thus lays the foundation for the automatic recognition of discourse structures in aviation communication.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has established itself over the past two decades as an area of academic activity in which scholars and students from many different disciplines are involved. It is a field that draws on social theory and aspects of linguistics in order to understand and challenge the discourses of our day. It is time for A New Agenda in the field. The present book is essential for anyone working broadly in the field of discourse analysis in the social sciences. The book includes often critical re-assessments of CDA's assumptions and methods, while proposing new route-maps for innovation. Practical analyses of major issues in discourse analysis are part of this agenda-setting volume.

This book aims to appraise sociolinguistic work devoted to the form and function of storytelling and to examine in detail the ways in which narrative constitutes a fundamental discursive resource across a range of contexts. The chapters presented here bring together some of the most recent work in the theory and practice of narrative analysis from a broad sociolinguistic perspective. They address some of the questions left implicit whenever stories are brought within the analytic frame of sociolinguistics: What exactly do we mean by 'story'?; what kind of social and contextual variations can determine the production and shape of situated stories, and what are the core elements of narrative as a discursive unit and interactional resource?; how is the relationship between narrative discourse and social context articulated in the construction of cultural identities? The data come both from institutional settings such as workplaces, courtrooms, schools, and the media, as well as from informal everyday settings.

Sverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.

This volume sign posts several paths of multimodality research and theory-building today. The chapters represent a cross-section of current perspectives on multimodal discourse with a special focus on theoretical and methodological issues (mode hierarchies, modelling semiotic resources as multiple semiotic systems, multimodal corpus annotation). In addition, it discusses a wide range of applications for multimodal description in fields like mathematics, entertainment, education, museum design, medicine and translation.

This book introduces a unique model of medical discourse that identifies the forms of talk – voices – that doctors and patients use during the consultation, and studies the dynamic interaction as it unfolds particularly in follow-up visits. Natural recordings, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and ethnographic observations provide the data for the research, which was carried out in an Outpatient Clinic in Santiago, Chile. Using an interactional sociolinguistic approach, analysis of the data identifies doctor–patient communication as a micro-performance of broader socio-cultural realities, in which social status, power, knowledge and personal beliefs and values all find expression in the consultative setting. Importantly, while both doctor and patient voices are shown to contribute to an essentially asymmetrical exchange, the study also identifies the holistic and empathic Fellow Human voice, which places doctors and patients on a more equal footing. In connection with this voice, the Spanish concept of simpatía is also discussed.While the model in this study was developed within a specific socio-cultural framework, it is hoped that it will be adapted and modified more widely and contribute to a better understanding between doctors and their patients.

Introduction to Discourse Studies follows on Jan Renkema’s successful Discourse Studies: An Introductory Textbook (1993), published in four languages. This new book deals with even more key concepts in discourse studies and approaches major issues in this field from the Anglo-American and European as well as the Australian traditions. It provides a ‘scientific toolkit’ for future courses on discourse studies and serves as a stepping stone to the independent study of professional literature.Introduction to Discourse Studies is the result of more than twenty-five years of experience gained in doing research and teaching students, professionals and academics at various universities. The book is organized in fifteen comprehensive chapters, each subdivided in modular sections that can be studied separately. It includes



• 400 references, from the most-cited contemporary publications to influential classic works;

• 500 index entries covering frequently used concepts in the field;

• more than 100 thought-provoking questions, all elaborately answered, which are ideal for teacher-supported self-education;

• nearly 100 assignments that provide ample material for teachers to focus on specific topics of their own preference in their lectures.



Jan Renkema is a member of the Department of Communication and Information Sciences at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is also editor of Discourse, of Course (2009) and author of The Texture of Discourse (2009). In 2009, a Chinese edition of Introduction to Discourse Studies was published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

The activity of parliaments is largely linguistic activity: they produce talk and they produce texts. Broadly speaking, the objectives that this discourse aims to satisfy are similar all over the world: to legitimate or contest legislation, to represent diverse interests, to scrutinise the activity of government, to influence opinion and to recruit and promote political actors. But the discourse of different national parliaments is subject to variation, at all linguistic levels, on the basis of history, cultural specificity, and political culture in particular. Through the use of various analytical tools of functional linguistics, this volume seeks to provide explanatory analyses of parliamentary discourse in different countries – Britain, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States – and to explore its peculiarities. Each chapter outlines a particular methodological framework and its application to instances of parliamentary discourse on important issues such as war, European integration, impeachment and immigration.