Written by researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, this report explores the two most influential theoretical discourse traditions, namely Discourse Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. Based on numerous Swedish and Scandinavian case studies, this account reveals the usefulness of the study of discourse and exemplifies how the two discourse analytical perspectives can be combined to offer diverse and problem-oriented strategies in the study of politics, identity, and social change.
Discourse Theory (DT) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) are theoretical traditions that have gained intense research interest in recent decades. Both are concerned with critical studies of politics, identity, and social change with a focus on issues of power and language, yet the dialogue between DT and CDA scholars has been negligible until only recently. In this book twelve researchers explore the opportunities presented by an increased exchange of ideas between the two traditions. The authors examine what closer collaboration could offer, both theoretically and empirically, in an interdisciplinary context. The Scandinavian reception, development, and use of DT and CDA are presented for the first time in a concise way. The studies in Tracking Discourses are of pivotal interest to the practical application of theoretical concepts and the empirical analysis of specific discourses based on one or both of the analytical perspectives. The case studies presented are valuable sources for comparison with similar research undertaken in other countries and contexts.
Advances in Critical Discourse Studies collects ground-breaking scholarship and cutting-edge research which reflects significant shifts in Critical Discourse Studies, exploring the field from theoretical, analytic and methodological perspectives. Innovative chapters analyse a diverse range of discourses including journalism, mass media, political communication, policy documents, interviews, photographic archive and official bodies. The chapters in Part I explore Critical Discourse Studies from the point of view of history, memory, identity politics, and discourse, analysing salient examples of how memory and recollection of the past shapes understandings and narratives of the present, and visions of future societies. Part II explores problem-oriented analysis in Critical Discourse Studies and examines the roles that discourse plays in the formation, perpetuation and transformation of class relations. Finally, Part III explores a methodological issue by looking at the benefits of reinforcing fieldwork and ethnographic analysis in Critical Discourse Studies. The case studies throughout the book demonstrate that analytic research contributes significantly to the in-depth and in-situ research of a variety of increasingly complex social, historical, political and economic contexts. This book was originally published as three special issues of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.
Application of analytic discourse techniques to clinical practice is relatively recent. This book's contributors begin with the notion that systematic examination of discourse provides a rich source of data for describing the complex relationships among language, social context, and the cognitive processes that underlie discourse comprehension and production. Evidence is provided that when discourse is studied across different clinical populations, analysis yields an optimal opportunity for developing dynamic models of brain and language that more thoroughly account for the complexity of language use in social contexts. Accordingly, studies presented in this volume have a dual focus -- to examine the implications of discourse research on neurolinguistic theories and to evaluate the contribution of discourse analysis to understanding the clinical status of patients with brain damage. As such, this volume reports patterns of preserved and impaired discourse behavior in normal adults and in different adult clinical populations. It also describes numerous tasks designed to elicit a variety of discourse genres and a host of techniques created to describe how subjects order information and relate ideas across sentences. In addition, it includes numerous abstract units and linguistic devices targeted to examine those aspects of discourse that govern cohesion, organization, and topic manipulation. This volume is unique because it presents both theoretical and clinical papers that examine a variety of communication pathologies. Clinicians often report dissatisfaction with formal test batteries in that results are often at variance with clinical observation of performance in real life situations. To address this concern, this work proposes methods for examining discourse that move the examiner closer to naturalistic sampling. The research presented demonstrates that discourse analysis provides clinically significant information that contributes to the understanding of the cognitive, linguistic, and social status of people with communication disorders. These studies also offer a framework to support continuously evolving diagnostic and treatment paradigms for adults with neurological communication pathologies.
Zusammenfassung: This book explores the discursive dimension of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It analyzes how political leaders, mass media, social media, and ordinary people in Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France discuss the war. War propaganda and counterpropaganda structure discourses about the invasion, strengthening post-truth conditions. The book highlights the consequences of the growing distrust in the institutional truth-teller, mass media. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the first social media war. Social media became the principal source of information about the invasion. The rise of digital media did not change the tendency of the discourses about war to be territorially segregated according to national boundaries. Nationalization of discourses about war continues to prevail over their globalization. The corpora containing more than 180 million words in four languages inform the analysis. The data was collected during the first year and a half of Russia's all-out war in Ukraine. Dr. Anton Oleinik is a professor of sociology who taught in Canada (Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's), Kazakstan (Academy of Public Administration, Astana), Mongolia (National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar) and Russia (Smolny College, St. Petersburg). His areas of expertise are political sociology, social data science, text-as-data, content analysis and mixed methods research. He previously authored Building Ukraine from Within: A Sociological, Institutional and Economic Analysis of a Nation-State in the Making, The Invisible Hand of Power: An Economic Theory of Gatekeeping, Market as a Weapon: The Socio-Economic Machinery of Dominance in Russia and Organized Crime, Prison and Post-Soviet Societies
The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis highlights the diversity, breadth, and depth of corpus approaches to discourse analysis, compiling new and original research from notable scholars across the globe. Chapters showcase recent developments influenced by the exponential growth in linguistic computing, advances in corpus design and compilation, and the applications of sound quantitative and interpretive techniques in analyzing text and discourse patterns. Key discourse domains covered by 35 empirical chapters include: • Research contexts and methodological considerations; • Naturally occurring spoken, professional, and academic discourse; • Corpus approaches to conversational discourse, media discourse, and professional and academic writing. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis is key reading for both experienced and novice researchers working at the intersection of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as anyone undertaking study in these areas, as well as anyone interested in related fields and adjacent research approaches.
This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.
This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality, and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that referential expressions should be understood as choices made by speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees. Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the typology of referential devices, including referring expressions per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential aspects of gesticulation and signed languages. This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the operations of working memory in linguistic communication.
Discourse studies, the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts, is a fast-moving and increasingly diverse field. With contributions from leading and upcoming scholars from across the world, and covering cutting-edge research, this Handbook offers an up-to-date survey of Discourse Studies. It is organized according to perspectives and areas of engagement, with each chapter providing an overview of the historical development of its topic, the main current issues, debates and synergies, and future directions. The Handbook presents new perspectives on well-established themes such as narrative, conversation-analytic and cognitive approaches to discourse, while also embracing a range of up-to-the-minute topics from post-humanism to digital surveillance, recent methodological orientations such as linguistic landscapes and multimodal discourse analysis, and new fields of engagement such as discourses on race, religion and money.
A text usually provides more information than a random sequence of clauses: It combines sentence-level information to larger units which are glued together by coherence relations that may induce a hierarchical discourse structure. Since linguists have begun to investigate texts as more complex units of linguistic communication, it has been controversially discussed what the appropriate level of analysis of discourse structure ought to be and what the criteria to identify (minimal) discourse units are. Linguistic structure–and more precisely, the extraction and integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information–is shown to be at the center of text processing and discourse comprehension. However, its role in the establishment of basic building blocks for a coherent discourse is still a subject of debate. This collection addresses these issues using various methodological approaches. It presents current results in theoretical, diachronic, experimental as well as computational research on structuring information in discourse.
