Profiling Discourse Participants
Profiling Discourse Participants

Author: Barbara De Cock

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 902727021X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages
Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

Author: Pekka Posio

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 3961104166

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally or impersonally. The use and emergence of new impersonal constructions, eventually also new (im)personal pronouns, as well as the variation found in the expression of human impersonality in different Ibero-Romance language varieties is another interesting research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addition to variable subject expression, similar methods and theoretical approaches have been applied to study the expression of objects. Finally, the reference to the addressee(s) using different address pronouns and other address forms is an important field of study that is closely connected to the variable expression of pronouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of reference to discourse participants. The volume contains contributions with a strong empirical background and various methods and both written and spoken corpus data from Ibero-Romance languages. The focus on discourse participants highlights the special properties of first and second person referents and the factors affecting them that are often different from the anaphoric third person. The chapters are organized into three thematic sections: (i) Variable expression of subjects and objects, (ii) Between personal and impersonal, and (iii) Reference to the addressee.

The Discourse of Public Participation Media
The Discourse of Public Participation Media

Author: Joanna Thornborrow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-20

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 131757995X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Discourse of Public Participation Media takes a fresh look at what ‘ordinary’ people are doing on air – what they say, and how and where they get to say it. Using techniques of discourse analysis to explore the construction of participant identities in a range of different public participation genres, Joanna Thornborrow argues that the role of the ‘ordinary’ person in these media environments is frequently anything but. Tracing the development of discourses of public participation media, the book focusses particularly on the 1990s onwards when broadcasting was expanding rapidly: the rise of the TV talk show, increasing formats for public participation in broadcast debate and discussion, and the explosion of reality TV in the first decade of the 21st century. During this period, traditional broadcasting has also had to move with the times and incorporate mobile and web-based communication technologies as new platforms for public access and participation - text and email as well as the telephone - and an audience that moves out of the studio and into the online spaces of chat rooms, comment forums and the ‘twitterverse’. This original study examines the shifting discourses of public engagement and participation resulting from these new forms of communication, making it an ideal companion for students of communication, media and cultural studies, media discourse, broadcast talk and social interaction.

Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis
Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis

Author: Camilla Vásquez

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-02-24

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1350166847

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Introducing the key questions and challenges faced by the researcher of digital discourse, this book provides an overview of the different methodological dimensions associated with this type of research. Bringing together a team of experts, chapters guide students and novice researchers through how to conduct rigorous, accurate, and ethical research with data from a wide range of online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and online dating apps. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis focuses on the key issues that any digital discourse analyst must consider, before tackling more specific topics and approaches, including how to work with multilingual or multimodal data. Emphasizing concrete, practical advice and illustrated with plentiful examples from research studies, each chapter introduces a new research dimension for consideration, briefly exploring how other discourse analysts have approached the topic before using an in-depth case study to highlight the main challenges and provide guidance on methodological decision-making. Supported by a range of pedagogical tools, including discussion questions and annotated further-reading lists, this book is an essential resource for students and any researcher new to analyzing digital discourse.

Controversy as News Discourse
Controversy as News Discourse

Author: Peter A. Cramer

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-06-17

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 940071288X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve controversies in philosophical dialogue or public debate settings, this orientation has tended to preempt questions about where controversy is located and how it is shaped. This project contributes to descriptive, ethnographic research about controversy, using discourse analysis to address a problem in argumentation.

Binominal Quantifiers in Spanish
Binominal Quantifiers in Spanish

Author: Katrien Dora Verveckken

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 311040673X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Quantification is central to human experience (cf. Aristotle’s Organon): the most basic aspects of human life and reasoning involve quantity assessment. This study sheds lights on a highly frequent way to express quantification in Spanish, viz. the binominal quantifier (e.g. un aluviónN1 de llamadasN2 ‘a flood of calls’) which assesses the quantity of N2 in terms of N1. This volume offers a corpus-based, cognitive-functional analysis of binominal quantifiers (BQ) in Spanish. The first part is dedicated to the development of BQs and starts from the assumption that BQs are cross-linguistically involved in grammaticalization. This monograph frames the history of BQs in Spanish in terms of constructional levels of change and highlights the complex interplay between analogical thinking and conceptual persistence. The second part motivates both the ample variation in the paradigm of quantifying nouns and their combinatorial pattern by the very same mechanism of conceptually-driven analogy. The study thus yields an innovative functional model of BQs in Spanish, in synchrony and in diachrony, with major implications for reference grammars and theory building.

Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages
Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages

Author: Konstanze Jungbluth

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-10-16

Total Pages: 790

ISBN-13: 3110317737

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Deixis as a field of research has generated increased interest in recent years. It is crucial for a number of different subdisciplines: pragmatics, semantics, cognitive and contrastive linguistics, to name just a few. The subject is of particular interest to experts and students, philosophers, teachers, philologists, and psychologists interested in the study of their language or in comparing linguistic structures. The different deictic structures – not only the items themselves, but also the oppositions between them – reflect the fact that neither the notions of space, time, person nor our use of them are identical cross-culturally. This diversity is not restricted to the difference between languages, but also appears among related dialects and language varieties. This volume will provide an overview of the field, focusing on Romance languages, but also reaching beyond this perspective. Chapters on diachronic developments (language change), comparisons with other (non-)European languages, and on interfaces with neighboring fields of interest are also included. The editors and authors hope that readers, regardless of their familiarity with Romance languages, will gain new insights into deixis in general, and into the similarities and differences among deictic structures used in the languages of the world.

Bilingualism and Deafness
Bilingualism and Deafness

Author: Carolina Plaza-Pust

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 1501504932

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book examines sociolinguistic, educational and psycholinguistic factors that shape the path to sign bilingualism in deaf individuals and contributes to a better understanding of the specific characteristics of a type of bilingualism that is neither territorial nor commonly the result of parent-to-child transmission. The evolution of sign bilingualism at the individual level is discussed from a developmental linguistics perspective on the basis of a longitudinal investigation of deaf learners' bilingual acquisition of German sign language (DGS) and German. The case studies included in this volume offer unique insights into bilingual deaf learners’ sign language and written language productions, and the sophisticated nature of the bilingual competence they attain. Commonalities and differences between sign bilingual language development in deaf learners and language development in other language acquisition scenarios are identified on the basis of a dynamic model of change in the evolution of (learner) language, with a focus on the role of language contact in the organisation of multilingual knowledge and the scope of inter- and intra-individual variation in learner grammars. In many respects, as becomes apparent throughout the chapters of this work, sign bilingualism represents not only a challenge but also a resource. Given this cross-disciplinary perspective, the insights on bilingualism and deafness in this volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and professionals.