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This volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics, exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms, from written to spoken to visual, in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis, to the macro-level structure of online interaction, all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types, the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies, highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research.Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies and digitally mediated communication.

Marking 30 years of contrastive corpus linguistics, this volume provides a state-of-the-art of the field, charting its development over time and expanding the boundaries of the discipline. Focusing on a diversity of methods and approaches to language comparison, it uses both comparable and translation corpora, and explores a broad range of language registers from newspaper reporting and spoken political discourse to film scripts and football match reports. Using English as the pivot language for each chapter, the volume offers contrastive bilingual and trilingual perspectives on a number of languages, including Czech, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, covering a typologically diverse field. By exploring the application of complex multi-genre multilingual data sets and expanding the horizons of contrastive studies, it demonstrates how a juxtaposition of cross-linguistic and register variation can deepen our insight into language variation and use.The volume is dedicated to two prominent contrastive corpus linguists: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, who have decisively shaped the discipline from its very beginnings. The book opens with a chapter by Aijmer, reflecting on the current breadth and future prospects of research in the area while pointing to emergent trends with an insight that only she can offer.

This book sheds light on the communication of social support, language use, and therapeutic effects in the context of online self-help groups for anxiety and depression. The book has two major purposes: the first is to enhance understanding of the phatic communication through a discourse-pragmatic perspective; and the second is to demonstrate the use of discourse analysis to discuss the potential therapeutic effects of the online self-help groups. Key concepts, including genre study, speech act theory, relational work and discourse analysis, are revisited and elucidated to show their applicability in health communication research. This book focuses on the topics of communication patterns, the communicative acts of self-disclosure and advice-giving, and relevant social theories in the communication of social support.This book is a useful reference guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students who are interested in discourse analysis, pragmatics and health communication. It is also a valuable resource that catches attention of researchers who conduct interdisciplinary research pertaining to communication, clinical linguistics and social work.

Social Media and Society brings together a range of scholars working at the intersection of discourse studies, digital media, and society. It is meant to respond to changes in discourse technologies, i.e. the techno-discursive dynamic of social media discourses. The book critically engages with the digital dynamics of representations around discourses of identity, politics, and culture. Other than its topical focus on highly pertinent discourses, the book aspires to offer some fresh insights into the theory, methods, and implementation of CDS in digital environments. The book can be viewed as part of the developing research framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies which seeks to integrate the impact of new mediation technologies on discursive meaning-making with its critical contextualisation. In addition to its strongly global outlook, the book incorporates a wide range of research perspectives including CDA, sociolinguistics, political discourse studies, media and technology, discourse theory, popular culture, feminism etc.

This book provides a first thorough analysis of internet humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, covering a wide range of discourses that are pervasive online and focusing especially on messaging interactions, social networking sites and memes. Its chapters describe the inferential strategies implemented to turn online coded discourses into meaningful interpretations, which in turn can be devised and manipulated for the sake of humour. Furthermore, and apart from the typical object of pragmatic research (humorous discourses), the book emphasises the importance of the interfaces'design and of the qualities of the users engaged in humorous interactions (called contextual constraints), additionally highlighting the parallel significance of the various effects, shaped as feelings and emotions, that stem from humorous communication on the internet. In sum, the book delivers a rich and detailed account of humorous internet discourses through dissecting their affordances as a medium,tracking the users'intentions, and predicting the audiences'interpretive strategies, with the goal of helping the reader obtain a better understanding of internet humour and its role in today's online interactions.

Conspiracy Theory Discourses addresses a crucial phenomenon in the current political and communicative context: conspiracy theories. The social impact of conspiracy theories is wide-ranging and their influence on the political life of many nations is increasing. Conspiracy Theory Discourses bridges an important gap by bringing discourse-based insights to existing knowledge about conspiracy theories, which has so far developed in research areas other than Linguistics and Discourse Studies. The chapters in this volume call attention to conspiracist discourses as deeply ingrained ways to interpret reality and construct social identities. They are based on multiple, partly overlapping analytical frameworks, including Critical Discourse Analysis, rhetoric, metaphor studies, multimodality, and corpus-based, quali-quantitative approaches. These approaches are an entry point to further explore the environments which enable the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the paramount role of discourse in furthering conspiracist interpretations of reality.