Bücher der Reihe Linguistic Insights

The book explores how recent forms of resistance to European integration have affected the way in which the EU discursively represents itself to the public as a legitimate political entity. It detects the longitudinal evolution of the discursive strategies enacted by the EU in the field of communication policy to encourage popular endorsement.

This volume comprises a selection of papers delivered at the Fourth ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC4). The eleven papers collected here pertain to different areas of linguistics as varied as diachronic linguistics, syntax, pragmatics or psycholinguistics.

This book examines media representation of migrant workers in China. Drawing on discourse analysis and sociolinguistic theories, it investigates how identities of and stances towards migrant workers were constructed and mediated in media with a view to exploring the interrelationship between media representation and social change in China.

This book brings together contributions by a number of distinguished scholars that shed new light on current developments in this dynamic area of discourse analysis, especially taking into account recent research and emerging insights on speech communities and communities of practice.

This book is a collection of papers dealing with the study of language varieties from a corpus linguistics perspective. They focus on the analysis of language in different communicative and professional settings, meeting current lines of research, such as teaching and learning, translation, domain-specific grammatical and textual phenomena, linguistic variation and gender.

This volume provides a shared context for surfacing deeply held beliefs and providing clearer pathways for closer understanding and adaptations to support integrated learning. The studies in each of the eight chapters are built on an in-depth critical review of research which enables the reader to carefully position the challenging questions posed.

The volume focuses on discourse-pragmatic studies on evidentiality, epistemic modality, and on deontic modality. It presents studies on the functions and discourse-pragmatic variation of evidential and modal expressions, applying corpus-based methodologies and addressing cross-linguistic issues in several European languages.

The aim of this volume is to give voice to the various perspectives in the investigation of tourism discourse in its written, spoken, and visual aspects. The chapters focus on the interaction between the participants involved in the tourism practices, that is the promoters of tourist destinations, tourists or prospective tourists.

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, bringing forth studies on the language of various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

The volume offers a collection of best practice European projects carried out in university contexts with the aim of highlighting the relevant role that Language Centres play in the field of language learning. A variety of project topics is described showing project coordinators' willingness of promoting cooperation which encourages a wide-angled multilingual and multicultural perspective.

This book analyses European media discourses using a variety of tools, including appraisal analysis, argumentation theory, multimodal approaches and corpus linguistics, with various theoretical approaches, including SFL and corpus-informed discourse studies, critical discourse analysis, semio-communicative approaches, and Bakhtinian perspectives.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at an international conference held in Bergamo (5-6 May 2000), which focussed on the semantic and pragmatic values of modality in specialized texts ¿ legal, economic, academic and medical. The assembled contributions give an overview of the range of scholarly approaches to modality. They convey the theoretical background and provide in-depth analyses of specialized texts on a synchronic as well as on a diachronic level.

A selection of the papers presented at the Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2), held at the University of Vigo in October 2009 and designed and organised by postgraduate students belonging to the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela.

Current Trends in LSP Research

This book contains a collection of original research articles on lexicography written by prominent international scholars within the field. It aims at describing the state-of-the-art in lexicography at the beginning of the 21 century and at making proposals for future theoretical and practical work in the field. Theoretical lexicography currently has two competing theories: a contemplative theory focusing on the description of existing dictionaries on the basis of linguistic principles, and a function-based, transformative theory focusing on the dictionary and the user in order to develop new principles for dictionary research and dictionary making. Research in lexicography has now reached a crossroads and it is time to take stock of the present situation and try to identify the theories and principles that will set the agenda and point the direction for future lexicographic research and the production of printed and electronic dictionaries.

Has the internet changed the nature of conducting controversies? This question cannot be answered easily as different forms of human interaction in an online environment exist and controversies in an online environment have not been analyzed from a linguistic point of view so far. On the other hand, there are many linguistic analyses of controversies in the Early Modern Period. First, this volume describes the communicative background of two online discussion forums dedicated to the study of historical arms and armor. Then, the volume analyzes the similarities and differences between Early Modern controversies and controversies in online internet discussion forums. Further, this book offers an accurate analysis of the strategies used in online discussion forums, analyzing two controversial threads taken from two online discussion forums and provides insights into the individual tactics and strategies applied in online controversies and highlights the similarities and differences of applied principles, norms, and rules. The book finally comments on stylistic choices used by participants in the controversies.

The focus of this volume is on the business letter genre, a seminal and widely used genre in business communication. Since the introduction of the Internet, interest in this genre has increased once again, because of the digital format of the letter. E-mail has partially taken over the multiple functions of the traditional business letter and bypassed, again partially, the fax. However, the letter has also survived in its written form. Since the 1990s, genre theory has been receiving a lot of attention, both in academic and pedagogical circles. Discourse analysts have increasingly discovered the importance of the genre concept for the understanding of discourse. Not only do we get a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics (register, lexico-grammatical features) of texts, but we also become aware of their macrostructures which appear to be organised according to genre expectations and conventions rooted in the socio-cultural context. This evolution is also reflected in the different research approaches to the business letter, as shown by the various chapters of this volume.

What does learning a language involve? Obviously, a rapid and definitive answer cannot be provided for this question since the aspects and situations affecting language learning are many and varied. From the role of culture to the use of new technologies in foreign language learning, this work aims to offer its readers some of the current research being carried out in different areas relevant to the topic. A long developing project has become reality thanks to the work of several researchers who are also experienced teaching professionals. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that most chapters of the book relate to different aspects of language learning within the classroom context which has resulted in realistic approaches to foreign language learning that can be of great help to those involved and/or interested in this field. Moreover, the clear division into sections allows readers to make their choice on how to proceed with the reading of the book depending on their thematic interests. Five sections make up this practical work: culture and language learning, human resources in language learning, language learning strategies, language learning software and language learning web resources.

The studies presented in this volume concentrate on aspects of Late Modern English correspondence in the usage of individuals belonging to different social classes, writing for different purposes, and finding themselves in different social contexts, both in Britain and in its colonies. As the growing body of research published in recent years has shown, analysing the language of letters presents both a challenge and an opportunity to obtain access to as full a range of styles as would be possible for a period for which we only have access to the language in its written form. It is an area of study in which all the contributors have considerable expertise, which affords them to present data findings while discussing important methodological issues. In addition, in most cases data derive from specially-designed ¿second-generation¿ corpora, reflecting state-of-the-art approaches to historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Theoretical issues concerning letters as a text type, their role in social network analysis, and their value in the identification of register or variety specific traits are highlighted, alongside issues concerning the (often less than easy) relationship between strictly codified norms and actual usage on the part of speakers whose level of education could vary considerably.

Provides insights into historical aspects of language, particularly items regularly deployed for politeness functions, and the social, particularly interpersonal, contexts with which it interacts. This title also sheds light on how meanings are dynamically constructed in situ, and probes various theoretical aspects of politeness.