Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities

Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities

Author: Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 9027270244

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which diasporic children and young people acquire the ‘Chinese’ language. The chapters present a variety of research-based studies on Chinese heritage language education and bilingual education drawing on detailed investigations of formal and informal educational input including language socialization in families, community heritage language schools and government sponsored educational institutions. Exploring the many pathways of learning ‘Chinese’ and being ‘Chinese’, this volume also examines the complex nature of language acquisition and development, involving language attitudes and ideologies as well as linguistic practices and identity formation. Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities is intended for researchers, teacher-educators, students and practitioners in the fields of Chinese language education and bilingual education and more broadly those concerned with language policy studies and sociolinguistics.


Contemporary Discourses of Hate and Radicalism across Space and Genres

Contemporary Discourses of Hate and Radicalism across Space and Genres

Author: Monika Kopytowska

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 9027264988

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This unique volume brings together various academic voices and critical reflections on discursive manifestations of hate and radicalism in contemporary public discourses. The authors venture into an array of socio-political contexts and public spaces, providing a compelling overview of similarities and divergences, continuities and discontinuities, outward hatred and the “politics of denial”, the use of collective symbols and construction of individual identities. Multiple genres are taken under scrutiny, including blogs, forums, internet websites and newspaper coverage, political speeches and debates, news reports and broadcast interactions, with a view to capturing the themes and pragma-rhetorical strategies within texts abundant with radical and hateful messages. In addition to examining discourse dynamics and the underlying logic of such texts, the contributors to this monograph explore the ideological motivations and the consequences they might have for social actions on both an individual and collective level. Highly relevant in the contemporary world, divided by conflicts, power and resource struggles, right-wing extremism, and crusades against the imaginary Other, the book presents state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research that should be of interest to specialists in pragmatics, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, as well as media and communication studies. Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3:1 (2015).


Discourse and Crisis

Discourse and Crisis

Author: Antoon De Rycker

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2013-12-15

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9027270929

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives brings together an exciting collection of studies into crisis as text and context, as unfolding process and unresolved problem. Crisis is viewed as a complex phenomenon that – in its prevalence, disruptiveness and (appearance of) inevitability – is both socially produced and discursively constituted. The book offers multiple critical perspectives: in-depth linguistically informed analyses of the discourses of power and collaboration implicated in crisis construal and recovery; detailed examination of the critical role that language plays during the crisis life-cycle; and further problematization of the semiotic-material complexity of crisis and its usefulness as an analytical concept. The research focus is on the discursive and interactive mediation of crisis in organizational, political and media texts. The volume contains contributions from across the world, offering a polyphonic overview of ‘discourse and crisis’ research. This impressive volume will be useful to researchers and academics working on the intersection of crisis, language and communication. It is also of interest to practitioners in organizational management, politics and policy, and media.


Unpacking Creativity

Unpacking Creativity

Author: Paula Pérez Sobrino

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-02

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1108473539

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Using evidence-based research, this book shows how to maximise the benefits of creative metaphor and metonymy in global advertising.


Status and Power in Verbal Interaction

Status and Power in Verbal Interaction

Author: Julie Diamond

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 9027250529

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Status and Power in Verbal Interaction is a sociolinguistic study of conversation in a social context. Using an ethnographic methodology and a network analysis of the social roles and relationships in a particular language community, the book explores how speakers negotiate status, relationship, and ultimately contest power through discourse. Of chief concern to the study is how speakers manage to negotiate relationship roles — which here consists of institutional status as well as the more variable social standing — using conversation. Discourse is seen to be not only what people say, but how they say it — how speakers take the floor, bring new topic to the floor, interrupt each other, and become a resource person in a conversation. The study revolves around the idea that power, while intricately tied to social standing and institutional status, is more than the sum of one's institutional standing, age, education, race and gender. Though these factors convey rank, conversants nonetheless use discourse to jockey for position and contest their relational role vis-a-vis their discourse partners. While institutional standing may be more or less fixed, power of relational roles fluctuates greatly because, as the study shows, power is accorded through a process of ratifying the positive self-image of a speaker. Thus, one's standing in a group is a community negotiation. By investigating power in community at a micro-level of analysis, this study adds a new dimension to existing understandings of power.


Identity in Narrative

Identity in Narrative

Author: Anna De Fina

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2003-10-27

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 902729612X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume presents both an analysis of how identities are built, represented and negotiated in narrative, as well as a theoretical reflection on the links between narrative discourse and identity construction. The data for the book are Mexican immigrants' personal experience narratives and chronicles of their border crossings into the United States. Embracing a view of identity as a construct firmly grounded in discourse and interaction, the author examines and illustrates the multiple threads that connect the local expression and negotiation of identity to the wider social contexts that frame the experience of migration, from material conditions of life in the United States to mainstream discourses about race and color. The analysis reveals how identities emerge in discourse through the interplay of different levels of expression, from implicit adherence to narrative styles and ways of telling, to explicit negotiation of membership categories.


There Is a Tribe of Kids

There Is a Tribe of Kids

Author: Lane Smith

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 1626727562

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal When a young boy embarks on a journey alone . . . he trails a colony of penguins, undulates in a smack of jellyfish, clasps hands with a constellation of stars, naps for a night in a bed of clams, and follows a trail of shells, home to his tribe of friends. If Lane Smith's Caldecott Honor Book Grandpa Green was an homage to aging and the end of life, There Is a Tribe of Kids is a meditation on childhood and life's beginning. Smith's vibrant sponge-paint illustrations and use of unusual collective nouns such as smack and unkindness bring the book to life. Whimsical, expressive, and perfectly paced, this story plays with language as much as it embodies imagination, and was awarded the 2017 Kate Greenaway Medal. This title has Common Core connections.


Academic Writing

Academic Writing

Author: Eija Ventola

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1996-03-15

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9027285659

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume highlight the intercultural, generic and textual complexities of academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is given to native-English writers’ and non-native writers’ problems in different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching methods and ways of improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.


On the Discourse of Satire

On the Discourse of Satire

Author: Paul Simpson

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2003-11-30

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9027295999

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book advances a model for the analysis of contemporary satirical humour. Combining a range of theoretical frameworks in stylistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, Simpson examines both the methods of textual composition and the strategies of interpretation for satire. Verbal irony is central to the model, in respect of which Simpson isolates three principal “ironic phases” that shape the uptake of satirical humour. Throughout the book, consistent emphasis is placed on satire’s status as a culturally situated discursive practice, while the categories of the model proposed are amply illustrated with textual examples. A notable feature of the book is a chapter on the legal implications of using satirical humour as a weapon of attack in the public domain. A book where Jonathan Swift meets Private Eye magazine, this entertaining and thought-provoking study will interest those working in stylistics, humorology, pragmatics and discourse analysis. It also has relevance for forensic discourse analysis, and for media, literary and cultural studies.


Discourse on the Move

Discourse on the Move

Author: Douglas Biber

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2007-09-19

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 9027291918

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.