Nov 21
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Bernd Heine
EDITOR: Heiko Narrog
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis
SUBTITLE: Second Edition
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of South Africa
SUMMARY
When I was a teacher of linguistics, in the 1970s and 1980s, our students
would hear about transformational–generative grammar from the theoreticians,
about Michael Halliday’s systemic–functional grammar from the
language-teaching experts, and maybe about one or two other approaches.
Sometimes they would ask us to dispel their resulting confusion by providing
some kind of comparative guide to linguistic theories, perhaps a document
which showed how one or a few specimens of English would be treated by the
respective theories. I don’t think we ever did what they asked, and it seems
to me that we probably could not have compared the theories by reference to
common examples, because different theories tend to be interested in different
kinds of example. But, far too late for my own students, the book under
review could be seen as an attempt to satisfy that request. (Though, at more
than a thousand pages before the bibliography is reached, I doubt if the
students would have thanked us if we had been able to refer them to it.)
Linguistic theories have multiplied since the 1980s. After the editorial
introduction, the book contains 39 chapters each presenting a different
approach to language description and analysis. (In a few cases, two or three
chapters are devoted to separate aspects of one theory.)
This is a new edition of a book first published in 2010; it has been expanded
to include seven additional chapters. The new chapters are about topics such
as language acquisition, neurolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, and
semantics, whereas the chapters carried over from the first edition mainly
focus on the central linguistic topic of grammar. (There is no indication
that chapters which appeared in the first edition have been revised for this
edition.) Rather more than half of the contributors are based in North
America, most others in Europe, with a sprinkling from Australia, New Zealand,
and Japan. I shall not take the space to list every chapter, but references
to individual contributions as the review proceeds will give an impression of
the overall range of topics and theories covered.
As one might infer from the topics of the new chapters just mentioned, not all
contributions are concerned with rival theories of the same subject-matter.
Patrice Speeter Beddor’s “Experimental phonetics”, for instance, appears to be
entirely compatible with any particular theory about syntax. (Indeed,
although this chapter is a very informative and interesting one, it is not
obvious how it and some of the other new chapters belong in a book about
“linguistic analysis”. It may be that the editors decided that their new
edition should cover the language sciences more comprehensively than the first
edition but were reluctant to modify the book title to reflect that.) The
bulk of contributions, though, offer competing theories about the same or at
least largely overlapping topics. Some authors make this rivalry quite
explicit, for instance Vilmos Ágel and Klaus Fischer (“Dependency grammar and
valency theory”) discuss the question “Is D[ependency] G[rammar] the best of
the theories presented in this handbook?”
Contributions differ, too, in the extent to which they are partisan. Some are
not; for instance Eric Pederson (“Linguistic relativity”) is admirably
even-handed in discussing both arguments for and arguments against what is
often called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (a term which Pederson regards as a
misnomer). A larger number of contributors, though, see their chapters as
opportunities to put their pet theories in the shop window and win converts.
Some are more assertive about this than others. Many 21st-century linguists
may not be surprised to hear that the highest levels of self-confidence are
displayed by the generative grammarians. Cedric Boeckx (“Linguistic
minimalism”) makes no bones about telling us that “There is no question that
the minimalist program is the right strategy to account for properties of FL
[i.e. the language faculty]. Its conceptual/methodological legitimacy can
hardly be questioned …” Readers will no doubt make their own minds up about
that.
Another respect in which contributions vary is in terms of how much prior
knowledge they assume. Probably no-one would consult this kind of book unless
they had at least embarked on undergraduate study of linguistics, but many
contributions could be read by people with no deeper acquaintance with the
subject than that. Several contributions, though, seem to expect readers
already to know a fair amount of linguistic theory of the type relevant to the
respective chapter. Thus, Yan Huang (“Neo-Gricean pragmatic theory”) remarks
that “the constraints on Horn-scales … proposed by Levinson, successfully
rules [sic, for ‘rule’] out [a given symbol-sequence] as forming a genius
Horn-scale”. The term “Horn-scale” is eventually explained on a later page,
for the benefit of those like myself who have never read Levinson, but “genius
Horn-scale” appears nowhere else in the chapter, so far as I have seen, and I
am sure I am not the only linguist who will be baffled. Or again, Guglielmo
Cinque and Luigi Rizzi’s “Cartography of syntactic structures” chapter is
dense with references to journal literature, many of which are far from
self-explanatory. They write that
The very simplified structural representations often assumed in the
minimalist literature, expressed by the C-T-v-V system, are sometimes
taken
literally … but the structure of the arguments rarely implies a literal
interpretation, and often is compatible with an interpretation of C-T-v-V
as
a shorthand … with C, T, and v taken as ‘abbreviations’ standing for
complex
zones of the functional structure.
C, T, etc. seem to be explained nowhere in Cinque and Rizzi’s chapter; to me
their statement is totally opaque.
One “grammar” chapter, Martin Haspelmath’s “Framework-free grammatical
theory”, differs strikingly from others, in that it argues that linguists
should avoid allowing their descriptive metalanguage to embody assumptions
about universal features of human language. If there are such universals,
they should emerge from empirical descriptions of individual languages rather
than being imposed on them. Haspelmath notes that “outside the field of
linguistics, metalanguages do not seem to have the role of excluding
impossible phenomena”. (Balthasar Bickel’s “Distributional typology:
statistical inquiries into the dynamics of linguistic diversity” makes a
related point when Bickel writes “There is no need to formulate one’s
explanatory theory in a metalanguage that is full of notions that are unique
to linguistics … and totally insulated from the rest of the cognitive and
social sciences”.) Many other chapters concerned with grammar do appear to
take for granted that an aim of general linguistic theory should be to devise
a notation for grammatical description which permits only those languages
deemed to be learnable by humans to be defined.
One consequence is that these chapters bristle with diagrams and formalisms of
many different kinds: apart from familiar tree structures, various
contributors also use boxes linked by arrows of diverse sorts, algebraic
symbols, data-structure diagrams of the kind used in software engineering, and
other things. A prize for most complex diagrammatic notation should probably
go to Alice Caffarel-Cayron (“Systemic functional grammar and the study of
meaning”), for a diagram labelled “Register variation and instantiation” which
contains pairs of tangent circles, spreading rays, double-headed arrows in
different orientations, and a curly bracket. (Whether all these elements have
well-defined meanings in this author’s theory, or are intended just to suggest
relationships in a more intuitive, vaguer fashion, is not entirely clear.)
The editors write that they found it impossible to organize the contributions
into any logical thematic sequence, so they simply arranged them in
alphabetical order of the main word in the title. This has produced an odd
jumble of topics, for instance after the editors’ introduction the first two
chapters are Eve Clark’s “Linguistic units in language acquisition” and Talmy
Givón’s “Adaptive approach to grammar”, because “acquisition” and “adaptive”
both begin with A. (In fact this scheme is not carried out entirely
consistently. Francisco Yus’s “Relevance theory” is placed among neither the
Rs nor the Ts, but next to the thematically-related chapter by Yan Huang
mentioned above.)
EVALUATION
For anyone wanting to look into some current linguistic theory which he has
heard of but knows little about, this volume would be a good place to start.
It will show what issues seem important to advocates of the theory in
question, and in most cases will point the reader towards other publications
that allow him to go deeper than is possible in a single chapter.
Nevertheless, the book as a whole left me rather depressed. The overall
picture it presents of the current state of linguistics is probably an
accurate one, but it is not a pretty picture.
Linguistics is supposed to be a scientific discipline – a standard one-line
definition of the subject is “the scientific study of language”. Cedric
Boeckx justifies the linguistic theory he presents here in terms of how
natural sciences such as physics and chemistry work. But the evidence of this
book makes it hard to take the scientific pretensions of linguistics
seriously. It is normal and healthy, of course, for a science at any given
moment to contain plenty of disagreement and rival views. But alongside
differences about some issues, one expects to see progressive convergence
towards agreement in other areas. At least, surely, one expects a substantial
degree of agreement about the nature of the data to be accounted for, and
about what would count as acceptable explanations, if they should be
empirically supported. With this book, I have problems both with the
contributors’ concept of linguistic data, and with their ideas about what
count as good explanations of data. If I give specific examples, readers
should please believe that I have no wish to pillory the particular
contributors I quote; they happen to offer particularly clear examples of
tendencies which pervade the book, and pervade much of present-day linguistics
generally.
As an example of the data problem, Vilmos Ágel and Klaus Fischer claim that
one difference between Hungarian and English is that the English verb ‘lie’
(tell an untruth) cannot take a complement clause expressing the content of
the lie. Can it not? I googled ‘lied that’ and was offered “about 328,000
results”, beginning with ‘Have you ever lied that you had a boyfriend …’ and
‘Kelly Baker lied that a young member of her family had cancer …’ In what
sense should these examples not count as English? They look perfectly normal
to me. (A few of the Google examples were irrelevant because they used the
noun ‘lied’ meaning a type of song, but those cases were a small minority.)
At one time questionable claims about “starred sentences” could be refuted
only by reference to purpose-built electronic corpora to which many linguists
had no access, but nowadays Google supplies anyone with information like the
above in seconds. I realize that some linguists will want to say something
like “the ‘lied that’ construction may be frequent in performance but is not
part of native speakers’ true linguistic competence”. However, I just do not
see what sense to make of such a statement. It is like a statement “No true
Englishman fears death in battle”; it is mystical rather than scientific.
Turning to the issue of satisfactory explanation: Yan Huang remarks that “we
can say ‘They summered in Scotland’ [but] cannot say *‘They falled in Canada’
”, and he explains this via a linguistic principle of “pre-emption”: the fact
that ‘fall’ has the verb sense “drop down” blocks it from being used as a verb
similar to ‘summer’ meaning “spend the relevant season”. It is characteristic
of modern linguistics to posit abstract linguistic principles in order to
explain facts which can readily be explained without reference to linguistic
theory. In England we do not use ‘fall’ as the name of a season, we call that
season ‘autumn’ (a word which has no alternative sense), but we too would be
unlikely to say ‘They autumned in Canada’. (NB “unlikely”, not “cannot say” –
I have just said it, or rather written it.) The reason is that there are (or
at least have been) recognized, established social institutions, among those
whose circumstances allow(ed) it, of spending whole summers, or whole winters,
away from home in places with pleasanter weather; hence ‘to summer’ and ‘to
winter’. In spring and autumn the weather is not extreme, so there has been
no established custom of spending those seasons away. Consequently we do not
usually say ‘to spring’ or ‘to autumn’, and Americans do not usually say ‘to
fall’ (in that sense). But if a new custom should arise (presumably for some
non-climate-related reason) of spending whole autumns away from home, very
likely Englishmen would begin saying things like ‘They autumned in Wigan’, and
Americans would start using ‘falled’ the same way.
Noam Chomsky’s ‘Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’ (1965) posited a complex
system of linguistic “selection rules” and “subcategorization rules” in order
to enable his transformational grammars to disallow sentences like:
the boy may frighten sincerity
John amazed the injustice of that decision
the book dispersed
I am sure that the particular formalisms advocated by Chomsky and by other
linguistic theorists nowadays will be diverse, and different from those of
‘Aspects’. But few theorists ever seem to have realized that there was never
any need for such formalisms. The examples quoted are odd not because they
are “poor English”, but because they are good English and say, quite
explicitly and clearly, things that no-one is likely to want to say since they
are obviously untrue. (Sincerity and injustice are abstractions, and
abstractions do not feel emotions. To disperse means for a closely-packed set
of separate units to spread apart, but a book is not a set of separate units
and hence cannot disperse.) I would be surprised to encounter an English
sentence ‘The train climbed from Johannesburg to Pretoria’, but to me it would
be absurd to postulate grammatical machinery to disallow it. It is an odd
sentence because Pretoria is about 1700 feet lower in elevation than
Johannesburg, which is not a fact about the English language or about
Universal Grammar.
To my mind the whole idea of “starred sentences” is a highly questionable one,
though much modern linguistic theorizing takes it for granted. My wife and I
recently addressed the problem of one of our cats stealing the other’s food by
buying a new type of feeding-stations with lids that open and close
automatically under the control of the individual pet’s microchip. The
makers, Sureflap, are an English firm founded recently by a Cambridge
physicist, and the manual provided is well written. So I was initially
surprised to encounter a section headed “Learning your pet into the feeder”
and beginning “When learning your pet into the feeder, make sure all other
pets are kept away”. (It explains how to get the mechanism to respond to a
particular pet.) Surely these word-sequences are not English? – ‘learn’ does
not take an animate object, or an ‘into’ phrase. But the activity described
is novel, and the writer has used English in a novel way to refer to it. I
might have preferred to write “Teaching the feeder to recognize your pet” –
but that wouldn’t be quite right, because the change to the feeding-station is
instantaneous, brought about by a single press of a button, it is the cat
which has to be gradually taught to exploit its resulting behaviour. Perhaps
there would be some other form of words which would have been faithful to that
reality and yet deviated less from established usage; but the manual writer
chose the words I quoted, and he or she is doubtless as much an English native
speaker as I am, so who am I to say the wording is not English? It did not
seem so previously, because no English-speaker had found occasion to use
‘learn’ that way. But now someone has had a reason to use ‘learn’ with that
grammar, and I and other native speakers can certainly understand what is
intended. If Sureflap prospers, in years to come probably no-one will bat an
eyelid at this way of using ‘learn’.
Many theoretical linguists have a concept of “grammaticality” according to
which, at a given time, some fixed (though infinitely numerous) class of
word-sequences are “grammatical” in a given idiolect, though from time to time
the rules of the language or idiolect change so that new word-sequences become
grammatical. They would describe the ‘learn your pet’ usage as one that is
currently ungrammatical (for most speakers) but which may be destined to
become grammatical, under the influence of things such as the Sureflap manual.
To my mind this concept of “grammaticality” is a myth. Putting words
together in novel ways in order to express novel ideas is part of competent
language behaviour. The ‘learn your pet’ example may be a rather extreme case
which, in 2015, would make many English-speakers boggle, but less extreme
cases are normal. To quote John Taylor (2012: 285):
speakers are by no means restricted by the generalizations that they
(may) have made over the data. A robust finding from our investigation
is that speakers are happy to go beyond the generalizations and the
instances that they sanction. Speakers, in other words, are prone to
_innovate_ with respect to previous usage …
Anna Babarczy and I have argued, at length and by reference to concrete
statistical evidence (Sampson and Babarczy 2014), that the distinction between
“grammatical” and “ungrammatical” in natural languages is an unreal one. So
far as we are aware, no linguists before Chomsky’s ‘Syntactic Structures’ of
1957, not even formal linguists, ever used such a concept. But giving up that
conceptual distinction undermines a great deal of what theoretical linguists
believe they are doing. There are far fewer facts standing in need of
explanation by linguistics than linguists commonly suppose.
Another recurring feature of the volume reviewed which seems questionable for
a subject that regards itself as scientific is an undue deference to
intellectual authority, evinced by many (though certainly not all)
contributors. Even some who disagree with Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language
nevertheless quote his writings as somehow licensing their own enquiries,
rather like a mediaeval proto-scientist who felt bound to cite Aristotle
before launching into an investigation which might in fact have owed little to
Aristotle’s ideas. Defending a controversial idea about the cognitive
abilities of human babies and apes, for instance, Ray Jackendoff (“The
parallel architecture and its place in cognitive science”) writes “It is
possible to read certain passages of Chomsky as endorsing such a claim”. I am
not sure that this kind of deference to an influential individual is healthy
for any modern scientific discipline (and I certainly do not believe that
linguistics is exceptional in that respect – cf. Sampson 2015).
Conversely, some contributors ignore prior work which should not be ignored –
not because it is entitled to deference, but because it is so well established
that arguments for contrary points of view are unpersuasive if they do not
give explicit reasons for rejecting the established view. This problem is
particularly noticeable in the chapters on word meaning. Meaning in natural
languages was being discussed intensively by philosophers before linguists had
much to say about it; and if there was one thing that English-speaking
philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s agreed on, it was that words do not have
fixed, definable meanings. (As philosophers commonly put it, there is no
distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.) The idea was argued
at length by writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Morton White, and Willard
Quine, and when I first encountered professional philosophy in the 1960s it
was a leitmotiv of that discipline. Many linguists today, including several
contributors to this book, believe not only that word-meanings can be defined
but that they have promising ideas about how to do it. Yet they rarely even
mention that numerous leading members of a neighbouring discipline have given
reasons to believe that it is impossible. (That could be reasonable, if
linguists had already produced convincing refutations of the philosophers’
view – there is no obligation on a book like this to rehearse past errors of
other disciplines. But the truth is that they never have.)
According to Ray Jackendoff, “nearly universal[ly]” the word ‘ghost’ can be
defined as “a mind (or soul) lacking a physical body”. Jackendoff seems to
know more about ghosts even of an English-speaking variety than I do. (If the
Christian doctrine of the Second Coming is correct, are all the departed
appropriately referred to in the interim as ghosts, as Jackendoff implies?)
As for “nearly universal”, does Jackendoff really have evidence that most
current and past human cultures have had a concept neatly equivalent to
English ‘ghost’? That would surprise me. Cliff Goddard (“The natural
semantic metalanguage approach”) apparently believes that all word-meanings in
all languages can be defined in terms of 65 semantic atoms together with
associated grammatical properties. Thus, his definition of ‘something long’
runs:
when someone sees this thing, this someone can think about it like this:
“two parts of this thing are not like any other parts,
because one of these two parts is very far from the other”
if someone’s hands touch this thing everywhere on all sides,
this someone can think about it in the same way
(‘Hands’ would be further decomposable into atoms of meaning.) Does Goddard
believe that ‘long’ said of a stick or a cucumber is a different word from
‘long’ as in ‘a long way from the Earth to the Moon’ (which cannot be “touched
on all sides”)?
I found some of the “new” chapters in this volume more interesting than the
contributions carried over from the first edition. They discuss concrete
facts that are not well-known and which seem clearly relevant to understanding
how language works, whereas most of the “old” contributions discuss material
which in itself is familiar and trivial, and their only concern is how best to
organize that material into formal models of languages. Even when the
material does require to be accounted for within linguistics, which (as we
have seen) is often not so, it is easy to feel “well, we could describe the
facts this way, or we could use that model”, and hard to see what might hang
on the choice of theory.
If an educated but sceptical non-linguist tried to take the measure of
linguistics by reading this book, it strikes me that when he put the
questionable concept of grammaticality together with the lack of convergence
among different approaches, he could well come to suspect that “theoretical
linguistics” is little more than a self-perpetuating non-subject. He might
ask himself whether practitioners are repressing awareness of the flimsiness
of its foundations, simply because their livelihoods depend on the survival of
the discipline. That suggestion may be entirely mistaken. But I am sorry to
say that, on the evidence of the book reviewed, it is not obvious to me how
the sceptic should be answered.
It may seem that this review amounts to a seriously negative evaluation of the
book, but it is not. It is a negative evaluation of the current state of the
discipline of linguistics. The book reflects this accurately, I believe.
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. ’s-Gravenhage: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press.
Sampson, Geoffrey. 2015. Rigid strings and flaky snowflakes. To be in
Language and Cognition. Online at < www.grsampson.net/ARsy.pdf >.
Sampson, Geoffrey and Anna Babarczy. 2014. Grammar Without Grammaticality.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Taylor, John. 2012. The Mental Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson studied Chinese at Cambridge University and linguistics and computer science at Yale. He taught linguistics, and later computer science, at the LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex Universities, with sabbaticals at Swiss and South African universities and British research institutions. He has published on most areas of linguistics. Since becoming professor emeritus at Sussex he has been a research fellow at the University of South Africa.
Nov 21
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook publication
Title: Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics
Series Title: Benjamins Current Topics 78
Publication Year: 2015
Publisher: John Benjamins
http://www.benjamins.com/
Book URL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/bct.78
Editor: María Jesús Pinar Sanz
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027268013 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 90.00
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027268013 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 135.00
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027268013 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 76.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027242662 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 135.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027242662 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 76.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027242662 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 95.40
Abstract:
The aim of this volume is to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics. The innovative nature of the volume in relation to those existing in the field lies in the fact that it brings together contributions from three of the main approaches dealing with Multimodality – Cognitive Linguistics and multimodal metaphors (Forceville & Urios Aparisi, 2009), social semiotics and systemic functional grammar and multimodal interactional analysis (Jewitt, 2009) –highlighting the importance of multimodal resources, and showing the close relationship between this field of study and Cognitive Linguistics applied to a variety of genres –ranging from comics, films, cartoons, picturebooks or visuals in tapestry to name a few. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics Vol. 11:2 (2013).
Nov 19
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Ruqaiya Hasan: a Life in Linguistics
February 16-17, 2015
Macquarie University
At this symposium, hosted by the institution where Ruqaiya Hasan spent the most years of her career, and where she conducted some of her best known research, we will examine Hasan’s legacy, retrospectively and prospectively. Ruqaiya Hasan is one of our discipline’s most thoughtful and exciting scholars. Over a 60 year career, she showed the penetrating power of language. She understood that the reach of linguistics was “life-wide”, because this was also the central characteristic of language. She took her critical faculties to the examination of socialization, education, literary aesthetics, the making of mind in society, literacy and globalization, the intricacies of grammatical form, as well as the enormous scope of language, and what this means for the discipline of linguistics. She was a scholar who could think deeply, and range widely.
In her scholarship, she entered into dialogue with the ideas of the greatest thinkers on language in the 20th century: Saussure, Vygotsky, Vološinov, Bahktin, Firth, Mukařovský, Malinowki, Whorf, Labov, Bernstein, Halliday, Bourdieu, Derrida, Austin, Searle, Leech, and Levinson. And she showed herself to be at least their equal.
This two day event will begin with workshops on some of the key aspects of linguistic theory and application developed in Hasan’s work, including
- · the relations of language and context
- · language, ideology and semantic variation
- · language and verbal art
- · cohesion and cohesive harmony
- · theorising and analysing meaning
On the second day, we will host a series of talks which will examine the intellectual vistas of her career, and explore the new horizons she has opened up in her relentless inquiry into the nature of language as humans’ most powerful collective resource.
The two day symposium will be free-of-charge. Registration details will be shortly available. On the evening of 17th of February all participants are invited to attend a dinner where we will share our memories of Ruqaiya as a friend, a colleague and a mentor. We will circulate details of dinner venue and cost closer to the event.
Nov 19
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Marta Dynel
EDITOR: Jan Chovanec
TITLE: Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 256
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Martine van Driel, University of Birmingham
SUMMARY
(1) Preface: Researching interactional forms and participant structures in
public and social media, by Jan Chovanec and Marta Dynel
The preface focuses on an explanation of the origin of this volume, the
theoretical frameworks it is grounded in and an overview of the articles
contained inside. Chovanec and Dynel believe that with a changing media scape,
it is important that participation frameworks are altered to fit the new media
that audiences are getting involved in. They refer to Goffman’s (1981)
initial work, which came from a more sociological perspective, as well as to a
wide variety of linguistic scholars who used the framework to adopt it to the
more current diverse range of communication (among others: Hymes 1972; Bell
1984; Clark 1996).
They go on to explain their perspective on two different forms of interaction
in the participation frameworks: public media (e.g. TV) and social media; they
have included articles in both areas in this volume. Their main aim with this
volume is to address two topics: (1) “participation frameworks and
interactional phenomena in traditional public media discourses” and (2) “the
nature of participation and interaction in novel discourses arising in
computer-mediated and technology-mediated communication” (Chovanec & Dynel
2015: 10). They explain that they have ordered the articles by the authors’
approaches to participation frameworks (though they mention the articles could
also be grouped by theme: television and film discourse, news discourse and
social media), and they provide the reader with a short overview of each
chapter.
Part 1 – Reconsidering participation frameworks
Participation frameworks and participation in televised sitcom, candid camera
and stand-up comedy, by Alexander Brock
Brock’s article is focused on re-arranging existing participation frameworks
to account for the communication between TV characters (fictitious) as well as
the communication between the collective sender and the TV audience (real). He
shows how to add to existing frameworks by focusing on televised comedy,
specifically sitcoms, candid camera shows and stand-up comedy. Brock refers to
the real communication between the collective sender and the TV audience as
Communicative Level 1 (CL1) and to the fictitious communication between the
characters as Communicative Level 2 (CL2).
Brock considers many different situations in TV comedy which alter
participation frameworks, such as hecklers during a stand-up comedy show,
different camera perspectives (such as Point of View) and studio audiences
present during sitcoms. His use of CL1 and CL2 is helpful in these situations;
yet addressing such a wide variety of participation situations results in a
lack of depth in terms of how these participation frameworks change the
dynamics of audiences and producers, as well as how these participation
frameworks assist in the production of comedic moments. Both these issues are
alluded to by Brock, and he acknowledges that there is a “complexity of things
yet to discover” (45).
(2) Participation structures in Twitter interaction: Arguing for the
broadcaster role, by Fawn Draucker
Draucker’s paper focuses on Goffman’s (1981) theory of three different
production roles: (1) the animator as the participant who “produces the talk
in its physical form” (p 50), (2) the author who wrote the words and (3) the
principal whose ideas are expressed in the words. Draucker argues that when we
analyse Twitter, we should incorporate a fourth role: the broadcaster. She
defines this role as “a ‘followable’ party that makes talk available to
recipients” (p 63).
The role of broadcaster is different from any of the three other roles
described by Goffman (1981) as it can re-distribute previously written tweets
(with its own author, animator and principal) in the form of re-tweets. In
that case, the followable party or the broadcaster, is still considered an
active participant, Draucker argues, as they can be held accountable for the
content of what they re-tweet. The role of broadcaster is also applicable in
the case of company accounts, where one person in the company might be the
animator, author and principal, while the company as a whole will be the
distributor of the tweet through their Twitter account.
Draucker has also included previous research into computer-mediated discourse,
which forms the basis of her idea that the broadcaster is an active
participant in Twitter communication.
(3) Participant roles and embedded interactions in online sports broadcasts,
by Jan Chovanec
Chovanec builds his paper around “Goffman’s (1981) observation that much of
human talk contains embedded instances of prior talk” (p 68). He has taken
this observation and applied it to online sports broadcasts. In his analysis,
he employs frames of interaction based on Fetzer (2006) which reflect the
different levels of interaction. For example in a television broadcast of an
interviewer, the first frame will include the interviewer and interviewee as
well as the studio audience. The second frame is the audience watching at home
and will envelope that first frame. Chovanec’s analysis contains four frames:
(1) the football match, (2) the television broadcast studio, (3) the audience
at home and the online studio, (4) the online recipients. His analysis focuses
on how the interactions within each frame as well as across frames are
represented in the online commentary.
Chovanec’s analysis leads to two main conclusions: (1) embedding leads to a
one-way flow of communication, meaning the final at home audience cannot
interact with the interviewee on screen, but (2) with modern technology it is
possible that final recipients can temporarily enter into a production role,
through online commentary for example. According to Chocanec this reflects the
trend of “participatory journalism” which includes audiences in the production
of media communication.
Part 2 – Participation and interpersonal pragmatics
Troubles talk, (dis) affiliation and the participation order in
Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion boards, by Michael Haugh and Wei-Lin
Melody Chang
Haugh and Chang have analysed a Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion board on
‘mom talk’. Their interest lies in how participants on these forums understand
their roles in the participation order as well as the moral order. By looking
at how participants respond to ‘troubles talk’ which they define as “the
expression of some degree of dissatisfaction or discontent with a particular
situation (…) followed by (dis) affiliation with those troubles by a recipient
(Jefferson 1988)” (p 102). Haugh and Chang lay out three types of talk found
on online discussion boards with interlinked preferred responses: (1) troubles
talk, (2) soliciting advice and (3) complaining.
They explain that participants displaying troubles talk have a preferred
response of displaying emotional reciprocity but can sometimes encounter
dispreferred responses of giving advice (preferred response to soliciting
advice) or blaming or accusing (dispreferred response to complaining).
Their analysis shows that participants show emotional reciprocity through
“mutual encouragement”, “mutual bemoaning” and “empathic suggesting”; however
a small number of responses showed accusing and advising. Whereas in English
culture this can be seen as face threatening, in Chinese culture giving advice
is seen as a supportive response. This leads Huang and Chang to suggest that
more work needs to be done in non-Western computer-mediated communication
(CMC) in order to create the metalanguage to deal with these different
cultural responses appropriately.
(2) Humour in microblogging: Exploiting linguistic humour strategies for
identity construction in two Facebook focus groups, by Miriam A. Locher and
Brook Bolander
Locher and Bolander have analysed status updates on Facebook from two groups:
10 students and young professional living in Switzerland, and 10 UK students.
Their aim was to explore how these participants use humour and how that humour
is used to create their identity. Locher and Bolander start by reviewing
previous research on identity creation on (mainly) social media as well as
briefly investigating how to define humour. Though they never clearly state
their working definition of humour, they explain in their methodology that
they decided what was humorous based on “clear evidence through linguistic
means” and “background knowledge that warranted the status update to be taken
humorously” (p 143).
Through their analysis they identify ten types of humour. The most common
types being (1) appeal to shared knowledge, (2) irony, (3) word play and (4)
self-deprecation. Not all these uses of humour were responded to and used in
co-creating a group identity, but as Locher and Bolander state, since the
statuses are published on a semi-public domain (Facebook) they are intended
for an audience and therefore some form of identity creation. They also argue
for the importance of studying the use of humour over time as one humorous
status update will not lead to the creation of a humorous identity.
The researchers also identified five categories of identity creation: (1)
personality, (2) pastime, (3) humour, (4) work and (5) relationship claims.
Within each of the two groups (Swiss and UK) the individuals used these five
identity claims differently. Locher and Bolander conclude that though
differences could be found in their data, the technological advances that
Facebook has made since their data collection in 2008 make it necessary for
more research to be done.
(3) Impoliteness in the service of verisimilitude in film interaction by Marta
Dynel
Dynel’s paper is the first paper in this collection to take a more theoretical
approach, focusing on impoliteness in film interaction. She draws on the
participation framework to separate the two communicative levels of film: (1)
the inter-character level and (2) the recipient level. The inter-character
level follows similar communicative behaviours as nonfictional situations,
meaning that face threatening acts on this level can be considered impolite by
the hearer (on the same level), whereas the recipient (the TV audience) might
consider face threatening acts on the first level not as impoliteness but as a
form of entertainment depending on the “inferential path devised by the
collective sender” (p 159).
Through examples from the TV-series House, Dynel shows how the impoliteness of
House (the main character) is linked to his power, both his expert power (he
is the best diagnostician) and his legitimate power (he has subordinates) and
how his impoliteness has different responses on each communicative level. She
argues that even though on the inter-character level the impoliteness is
neutralised as part of House’s personality and on the recipient level the
impoliteness is classed as entertainment (this is first-order impoliteness),
researchers can still classify his behaviour as second-order impoliteness.
House’s impoliteness acts are not unmarked, she argues therefore are similar
to how even in close relationships, candor can be viewed as impoliteness.
(4) “That’s none of your business, Sy”: The pragmatics of vocatives in film
dialogue by Raffaele Zago
Zago’s paper continues on a topic similar to Dynel’s, as it looks at the
pragmatics of vocatives both on the inter-character level and on the recipient
level. He starts by giving an overview of English vocatives as well as the
pragmatics of vocatives in film dialogue. The latter details methodologies
used in the past as well as research outcomes. Zago then goes on to
investigate different pragmatic functions and positions of vocatives in
Sliding Doors (SD), One Hour Photo (OHP) and Erin Brockovich (EB). Zago
selected these three films because they contain a variety of interactions.
On the inter-character level, Zago found that the use of vocatives mimics
natural conversation. Vocatives are mainly used as “relational, attitudinal
and expressive” rather than “in their identifying role” (p 203). He also found
the use of vocatives particularly high in confrontational situations; these he
labelled “adversarial vocatives” (p 203). Finally, they also mimic natural
conversation when they are used in the final-position, thereby increasing the
illocutionary force of the sentence.
On the recipient level, Zago found four functions of vocatives: (1) they
simulate natural spoken discourse thereby increasing the viewer’s suspension
of disbelief, (2) they increase “conversation dynamicity”, (3) they foreground
certain segments of dialogue by drawing attention to whom each character is
speaking, and (4) they foreground whole scenes in cases where they are
overused.
Part 3 – Forms of participation
A participation perspective on television evening news in the age of immediacy
by Linda Lombardo
Lombardo’s paper is the first to focus on television news media in this
volume. TV news is still “among the most influential knowledge producing
institutions of our time” (Ekstrom 2002: 274) and is developing constantly to
grow along with the trend towards “communicating effectively” and with
“improvisation and conversation as preferred mode of delivery” (p 212).
Lombardo then compiled a corpus of BBC evening news programmes and is
analysing the reporter – news presenter exchanges through a participation
framework perspective. This dialogic exchange, she says, is performed on
behalf of the audience and includes a ‘liveness’ as it takes the form of a
conversation.
This ‘liveness’ in the reporter-news presenter exchanges is decreasing though
as Lombardo’s corpus shows. The exchanges are shortening with “less discourse
in a conversational mode” (p 229). This is replaced by a quick switches
between news items and the inclusion of live links and invitations to visit
the website and participate in the news through comments. Lombardo argues that
these changes could have a negative effect on the TV audience as there is less
chance for a full understanding of the news event.
She then draws again on Goffman’s (1981) participation framework, stating that
the TV audience is positioned as a “ratified hearer/observer” in the news
presenter – reporter exchanges and, with the directions to the website, is
more and more becoming a “full recipient who can take on a (limited) role in
producing language” (p 229).
(2) What I can (re)make out of it: Incoherence, non-cohesion, and
re-interpretation in YouTube video responses by Elisabetta Adami
Adami’s paper focuses on video responses on YouTube and how cohesion and
coherence are present in them. As YouTube videos allow participants to use a
variety of multimodal resources for response which can result in only loosely
related responses, Adami argues that a framework should be developed to
“account for marginally related exchanges” (p 234). She follows Kress’s
definition that “communication is always a response by one participant to a
prompt” (2010; p 235). Therefore even responses that are not explicitly
cohesive with the initial video can still be analysed as cohesive and coherent
in some way.
Adami analysed 613 video responses to one of YouTube ‘most responded to’
videos entitled ‘best video ever’. The responses, she argues, can be tracked
along “a relatedness continuum” (p 254) which ranges from “fully cohesive and
attuned responses” through four other categories to responses that display “no
explicit or implicit clues of relatedness with the initiating video” (p 254).
With such a wide range of responses, Adami states that the success of a video
does no longer depend on the author’s intended meaning, but instead on its
“prompting potential” (p 255).
Finally she argues that sign-making through the different copy-and-paste
methods participants use in their video responses is influencing what is
accepted as explicit and implicit cohesiveness and calls for further research.
This research will also need to take into account the changing, multimodal
form of online participation, which is creating more focus on
individualisation over community. Perhaps a redefinition of community is
necessary in further research.
(3) Enhancing citizen engagement: Political weblogs and participatory
democracy by Giorgia Riboni
Riboni’s paper investigates the difference between American political weblogs
run by political parties and those run by citizens. Weblogs have been able to
fill a gap in the market by favouring participation, helping to mobilise
opinions and helping to organise citizens’ activities (p 260). Blogs run by
citizens especially are subjective and mainly represent solely the viewpoint
of the author. This is in contrast with blogs run by political parties who
tend to represent the party as a whole rather than one individual. Riboni then
adopts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach to identify
these differences and how these different blogs represented the 2008 American
elections.
She collected data from 10 citizen political blogs selected by popularity and
from 10 party political blogs selected by their “political creed” (p 263).
With 10,000 tokens taken from each blog, Riboni’s corpus consisted of 200,000
tokens.
Riboni’s analysis focuses on the use of pronouns, both first person singular
and first person plural and finally the discursive construction of the
candidates through the blogs. She shows that citizens’ blogs use more first
person singular pronouns and represent their own ideology in their blogs.
Party blogs use some first person singular pronouns, for example when posts
are written by a member of congress who shares their experience in congress.
They mainly use first person plural pronouns though, as they are representing
the collective party and want to include the audience in that party. Riboni
concludes by showing that the citizen bloggers tended to represent Obama and
McCain (the two presidential candidates) through personal characteristics,
whereas party blogs focused on their political programmes.
EVALUATION
Dynel and Chovanec clearly set out the aims of this volume in the preface;
they are to investigate (1) “participation frameworks and interactional
phenomena in traditional public media discourses” and (2) “the nature of
participation and interaction in novel discourses arising in computer-mediated
and technology-mediated communication” (p 10). A quick answer to whether they
have achieved those aims is yes. In each of the three parts, they give an
opportunity to both scholars in traditional media and scholars in newer media
to adjust existing participation frameworks as well as to propose new ideas.
The traditional media discussed ranges from TV news to film, and while these
topics have been thoroughly discussed in other work, the papers in this volume
are able to give new insight into these media. They do this specifically by
focusing on under-explored parts of Goffman’s (1981) participation framework
(e.g. Brock in Chapter 2), or by focusing on the changes in the media due to
technological advances (e.g. Lombardo in Chapter 9).
The newer media discussed in this volume includes both commonly discussed
media such as Facebook and Twitter, and also less common media such as YouTube
video responses and political weblogs. Especially in the new media chapters,
the variety of methods is striking: corpus linguistics, critical discourse
analysis and multimodality to name a few. This use of a wide variety of
methodologies strengthens the book and its representation of current research
into new media.
Though the volume is coherent in its topic, Dynel’s own paper seems to not fit
as well as other chapters. Although all the articles are related to the topic,
Dynel’s paper is more theoretical than the others. Perhaps the addition of
another more theoretical paper would have made a difference and would at the
same time have added a new perspective on participation in both public and
social media. There is a lot of practical, analysis work in this field, and
more theoretical work like Dynel’s chapter would be a great addition.
I recommend this volume to researchers in both participation and media
research fields. Dynel and Chovanec have successfully integrated these two
research areas, including methodologies and theoretical background from both
fields. As interdisciplinary research is growing, this volume shows how well
different fields can work together.
REFERENCES
Bell, A. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13:
145-204.
Clark, H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ekstrom, M. 2002. Epistemologies of TV Journalism: A Theoretical Framework.
Journalism 3(3): 259-282.
Fetzer, A. 2006. ‘Minister, We will see How the Public Judges You’. Media
references in political interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 180-195.
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia
Press.
Hymes, D. 1972. Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In
Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John
Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 35-71. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Jefferson, G. 1988. On the Sequential Organisation of Troubles Talk in
Ordinary Conversation. Social Problems 35(4): 418-441.
Kress, G. 2010. Multimodality. A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary
Communication. London: Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Martine van Driel is a PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her PhD research focuses on new forms of news media and reader response. Other research interests include: political discourse, multimodality, speech and thought presentation and gender and identity research.
She is a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and has recently presented reader response data of readers of news live blogs at the annual PALA conference at the University of Kent (UK).
Aside her PhD, she is working on articles on multimodality, political tweets and radio interviews.
Nov 19
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Rodney H. Jones
EDITOR: Alice Chik
EDITOR: Christoph Hafner
TITLE: Discourse and Digital Practices
SUBTITLE: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Mariza Georgalou, Lancaster University
SUMMARY
Digital technologies afford miscellaneous ways for people to engage in new
discourse activities and practices, ones which they have not engaged in before
and which have not been possible before (Barton and Lee 2013). In this light,
a volume that addresses discourse and digital practices is a highly welcome
addition towards enhancing our knowledge of what people do with/through
digital discourse and how discourse analysts approach digital texts.
“Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age”
is a collection of 14 studies, first presented at “The Fifth International
Roundtable on Discourse Analysis: Discourse and Digital Practices” (23-25 May
2013, Hong Kong), with a two-pronged aim: i) to explore how discourse analysis
enables us to understand contemporary digital practices, and ii) to determine
how these practices challenge researchers to adjust traditional discourse
analytic tools and advance new theories. Zeroing in on different types of
digital media, examining different kinds of practices and integrating a wide
array of frameworks and approaches, this volume presents a nice panorama of
the current state of research.
In their introduction, which can function as an ideal point of departure for
courses on digital discourse, Rodney H. Jones, Alice Chik and Christoph A.
Hafner detail certain particularities of digitally mediated texts including
texture, intertextuality, dialogicity, multimodality, contexts, affordances,
interactional character, and the conveyance of ideologies.
The first study of the volume, “Discourse analysis of games”, by James Paul
Gee, considers how games can have syntax, semantics and situated meanings
determined by context and socio-cultural knowledge paving the way for the
creation of a field of discourse analysis applied to video games. Taking the
2D indie puzzle platformer video game “Thomas was Alone” as a case in point,
Gee evinces that when we play a video game, we are having interactive,
responsive, turn-based conversations on the basis of the affordances at our
disposal.
The next contribution, Rodney H. Jones’s “Discourse, cybernetics, and the
entextualisation of the self”, analyses 25 of the most highly rated
self-tracking apps available on Apple’s App Store, relying upon his own
experience with these apps as well as those of other users’ as described in
online reviews, blog posts and two focus group interviews. Through a
combination of multimodal and mediated discourse analysis with insights from
cybernetics, media theory, and autoethnography, Jones shows that the texts
produced by self-tracking apps (in the form of analyses, exhortations,
reminders and narratives) “process” their writers and readers in terms of
resemiotisation, retemporalisation, and recontextualisation.
David Barton’s study, “Tagging on Flickr as a social practice”, sheds light on
people’s purposes when tagging on Flickr within the framework of a social
approach to language online, developed from literacy studies. Based on
observations of 30 Flickr users’ photo pages along with online interviews with
some of these users, Barton asserts that tags are not sheer metadata but can
play an instrumental role in meaning-making, enabling users to express
existing and/or new information, convey affective stances towards images, make
“asides”, narrate stories, invent new concepts, and exhibit linguistic
creativity.
In “Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in online reviews”, Camilla Vásquez
focuses on data from user-generated online consumer reviews with particular
reference to the websites TripAdvisor (hotels), Amazon (common consumer
goods), Yelp (restaurants and services), Netflix (films) and Epicurious
(recipes). Her analysis reveals that reviewers adopt a range of diverse forms
of intertextuality and interdiscursivity to ground their opinions, align or
disalign with the evaluations of other reviewers, lend authority to their
claims, educate readers, express tastes and preferences, and forge a sense of
virtual co-membership.
Phil Benson, in his study “YouTube as text: Spoken interaction analysis and
digital discourse”, treats the uploading of a video on YouTube as an
interactional turn, which starts a process of multimodal social interaction in
which users “respond” to the “initiation” of the video via a variety of
semiotic modes. His analysis of a series of YouTube videos entitled “Cantonese
Word of the Week” provides compelling evidence for the usability and
usefulness of the frameworks for analysing spoken interaction (Sinclair and
Coulthard 1975; Stenström and Stenström 1994) in the context of multimedia
digital discourse.
The next contribution, “Co-constructing identity in virtual worlds for
children”, comes from Christoph A. Hafner, who employs positioning theory
(Davies and Harré 1990) to investigate the virtual world of Moshi Monsters.
His discussion is informed by observations of his two children while they were
participating in Moshi Monsters as well as by stimulated recall sessions,
where the children viewed videos of their online activity and then provided a
guided account of it. Hafner concludes that identity in virtual worlds
constitutes a jointly negotiated, interactive process between designer and
user.
Commencing from the same theoretical premises with Hafner, Alice Chik, in her
paper “Recreational language learning and digital practices: Positioning and
repositioning”, takes a 4-week autoethnographic approach to examine the
positioning of language learners in the language learning social network sites
(LLSNSs) of Duolingo and Busuu. What she observes is that learners are
positioned, both textually and multimodally, by the websites to accept certain
conceptualisations of foreign language learning. She also points to the fact
that LLSNSs adopt discursive practices of infantilising learners (e.g. via
cartoonish background colours and figures) as a display of power relations.
In “Investigating digital sex-talk practices: A reflection on corpus-assisted
discourse analysis”, Brian King deals with the practice of “sex talk” in gay
chat rooms synthesising tools from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis
with insights from researcher observation. After working with data from 1,332
participants, emanating from the Queer Chatroom Corpus that he has compiled,
King finds that these chat rooms are mainly places to socialise rather than
places to participate in cyber-sex.
The paper “Apps, adults and young children: Researching digital literacy
practices in context” by Guy Merchant reports on the use of iPad apps to
access interactive stories in early education centres in England, anchoring
his research in the literature on gesture, touch and pointing, and haptics.
The main thrust of Merchant’s argument is that portable screens and apps
contribute significantly to the everyday experience and popular culture of
toddlers and young children, to the same degree as book sharing, television
and related media play. Hence, they should be seen as key ingredients of
educational provision both at home and in early year settings.
In a similar vein, Victoria Carrington, in “‘It’s changed my life’: iPhone as
technological artifact”, is interested in the interaction of a female
adolescent with her iPhone in the construction of everyday life. According to
Carrington’s sociomaterial analysis, an interesting synergy between new
literacy studies, the philosophy of technology, and object ethnography, the
iPhone (by means of its apps, the texts produced within it, and the ways in
which it comes through in the owner’s discourse) facilitates various forms of
communication, displays of identity, information gathering and sharing, and
socialising.
In “Digital discourse@public space: Flows of language online and offline”,
Carmen Lee is concerned with how “internet-specific” language is reconstructed
and recontextualised in offline physical spaces. Her dataset consists of
photographs of public spaces in Hong Kong where internet-specific language is
evident, field notes about the location of the text, and interviews with
passers-by. Situating her discussion within the paradigms of linguistic
landscape research, geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon 2003), literacy studies
and ethnography, Lee cogently argues that the presence of internet language in
offline spaces not only indicates public awareness of netspeak features but
also contributes to the enregisterment of internet language.
Jackie Marsh, in “The discourse of celebrity in the fanvid ecology of Club
Penguin machinima”, explores the social practices embedded in the production
and consumption of machinima (a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema” which
refers to films made by fans in virtual worlds and computer games using screen
capture and editing software), which are created by children and young people
who participate in the virtual world Club Penguin. To do so, she coalesces
Foucaultian discourse analysis with an ethnographic approach that involved
interviews with two key participants and observation of their YouTube channels
and Twitter streams. As she demonstrates, in these online worlds, discourses
of recognition, status and competition create celebrity-fan relationships that
replicate those met outside the peer-to-peer network.
The volume ends with two penetrating critiques on discourses about digital
practices where both authors engage with the theoretical concerns and
empirical calls voiced within critical discourse analysis. Ilana Snyder, in
her contribution “Discourse of ‘curation’ in digital times”, examines the
discourses and practices associated with curation in texts gleaned from the
realms of digital marketing, online communication, education online, and
digital literacy studies. In the context of digital technologies, Snyder
notices that curation comprises the processes of creating, editing,
aggregating, organising, culling, interpreting, producing, testing new
attitudes, rethinking and pushing boundaries. As she aptly points out,
curation is a social practice and as such “it is always ideological, always
rhetorical and often political” (p. 209).
Lastly, Neil Selwyn’s study, “The discursive construction of education in the
digital age”, clusters discourses of digital education into two categories: 1)
discourses of digital re-schooling (according to which digital technology
breaks down barriers between and within institutions, facilitates new ways of
participating and interacting, and allows participants to “bring in” their new
vernacular practices); and 2) discourses of digital de-schooling (according to
which digital technology completely usurps the educational institution placing
emphasis on the idea of “do-it-ourselves”). He concludes that both these sets
of discourses dictate the necessity for educational change.
EVALUATION
This is an intellectually fascinating volume essential for advanced students
and researchers within the areas of discourse analysis, literacy and
multimodality studies. It will also be of interest to those working with
digital media in the fields of education, media and communication studies, and
cultural studies. Previous training in discourse studies and familiarity with
the mechanics of digital communication are seen as a prerequisite for readers.
All contributions confirm the significance, robustness, plasticity and
malleability of the discourse analysis paradigm with reference to contemporary
digital environments. Following very different strands within the paradigm,
the authors succeed brilliantly in analysing a broad spectrum of interesting
topics and multimodal examples tackling at the same time useful concepts such
as “packaging” and “flow” (Gee), “servomechanism” (Jones), “deepened
subjectivity” (Ramsay 2003 in King), “polymedia” (Madianou and Miller 2013 in
Carrington), and “enregisterment” (Agha 2003 in Lee). What is more, nearly
every author provides their own conceptualisation of the term “affordance”
hinging on the enabling/constraining configurations of the digital media under
discussion.
One major strength of this volume is the practical advice given to discourse
analysts who (wish to) conduct research on digital media. Barton underscores
that online life is essentially social; hence the role of other people, both
online and offline, has major implications for the analysis. Vásquez proposes
a sustained period of participant observation of the site/community together
with interviews with contributors and readers so as to acquire additional
insider information and approach the given topic more holistically without
overlooking vital details. Hafner, on the other hand, gives handy tips on how
to prompt participants for comments without embedding assumptions about their
activity. In addition, King, Lee and Merchant touch on the role of digital
technology not just as an object of research but also as a research tool. King
provides a lucid account of ethics and digital research emphasising that “[t]o
treat digital data as inherently public and freely available, and to gather
data with impunity, is to risk ‘poisoning the well’ for future researchers”
(p. 134).
Another laudable feature of the book is its orientation towards taking a
critical approach to digital discourse. Jones cautions researchers that they
should not hallow digital services and apps as these are mainly driven by the
commercial and ideological agendas of internet companies and advertisers. On
the same wavelength, Hafner calls for the critical evaluation of consumerism
discourses represented in some texts within virtual worlds. From an
educational perspective, Selwyn suggests moving “beyond the celebratory nature
of much scholarly work on digital media” (p. 239) and endeavouring to
demonstrate the connection between different types of dominance and inequality
inherent in digital education. The authors also recommend circumspection in
claiming generalisability or representativeness of any findings. The global
potential of digital media and mobile devices does not necessarily entail that
they have global reach. Merchant sees iPads as “placed resources” (Prinsloo
2005) with their use always being infused with “the local as instantiated in
routines, relationships and day-to-day operations, as well as by the beliefs,
understandings and experiences of participants” (p. 147). Carrington, on the
other hand, reminds us that the social advantages accruing from technology are
distributed unevenly given that not all (young) people around the world are
iPhone/smartphone owners.
With the exception of Barton and Lee, the discussions included in this volume
revolve around Anglophone case studies. It would be nice to see examples from
more languages as this would considerably increase the potency of discourse
analysis tools in understanding digital practices. Moreover, the inclusion of
(auto)ethnographies on devices that run operating systems other than iOS would
constitute a valuable asset.
The volume displays a couple of bugs related to typos: “herteroglossic”
(bottom of p. 6) instead of “heteroglossic” and an inconsistency between
“complementarity” and “complimentarity” (top of p. 11).
In sum, the volume at hand is a substantial contribution to the burgeoning
field of digital discourse analysis, which can intrigue and inspire further
fruitful research.
REFERENCES
Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication
23(3–4): 231–273.
Barton, D. and Lee, C. (2013). Language online: Investigating digital texts
and practices. London: Routledge.
Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of
selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20(1): 43–63.
Madianou, M. and Miller, D. (2013). Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital
media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural
Studies 16(2): 169–187.
Prinsloo, M. (2005). The new literacies as placed resources. Perspectives in
education 23(4): 87–98.
Ramsay, S. (2003). Toward an algorithmic criticism. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 18(2): 167–174.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the
material world. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, J. M. and Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stenström, A. and Stenström, B. (1994). An introduction to spoken interaction.
London: Longman.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Mariza Georgalou has recently been awarded a PhD from Lancaster University’s Department of Linguistics and English Language, UK. Her research focuses on social media discourse analysis. She has forthcoming research articles in the journals Discourse & Communication, Discourse, Context & Media, and Social Media & Society. See also www.marizageorgalou.com.
Nov 14
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook publication
Title: Society in Language, Language in Society
Subtitle: Essays in Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan
Publication Year: 2015
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
http://www.palgrave.com
Book URL: http://bit.ly/1Le2bUB
Editor: Wendy Lee Bowcher
Editor: Jennifer Yameng Liang
Hardback: ISBN: 9781137402851 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 68.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9781137402851 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 105.00
Abstract:
Society in Language, Language in Society: Essays in Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan is the first collection dedicated to research directly influenced by the innovative and groundbreaking ideas of the eminent linguist Ruqaiya Hasan. The collection offers an insight into the breadth and depth of Hasan’s distinctive linguistic approaches and theoretical concerns. It includes original contributions by well-known scholars such as M.A.K. Halliday, Margaret Berry, David G. Butt, Donna R. Miller, Geoff Williams, Mary Schleppegrell, Annabelle Lukin, Alison Rotha Moore and Tom Bartlett, and covers a range of areas including verbal art, context of situation, semantic networks, cohesive harmony, text structure and literacy education. The volume also contains an interview with Ruqaiya Hasan by David Butt and Jennifer Yameng Liang, and a section in which the contributors describe their connection with Ruqaiya Hasan and her work.
This book is of particular value to scholars and students working in sociolinguistics, literary criticism, stylistics, functional linguistic theories, literacy pedagogy, social semiotics, multimodality and applied linguistics.
Nov 10
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook publication
Title: Address Practice As Social Action
Subtitle: European Perspectives
Publication Year: 2015
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
http://www.palgrave.com
Book URL: http://bit.ly/1iONS1R
Editor: Catrin Norrby
Editor: Camilla Wide
Hardback: ISBN: 9781137529916 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 45.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9781137529916 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 67.50
Abstract:
How we address one another – whether we use first names, or titles and surnames, for example – says a great deal about who we are, our social relationships and which groups in society we belong to. This edited volume examines address choices in a range of everyday interactions – from radio interviews and service encounters to commercials and internet forums – taking place in Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Italian and the two national varieties of Swedish, Finland Swedish and Sweden Swedish. By comparing local, national and cross-border address practices, this volume uncovers both commonalities and differences in the way social meaning is expressed and shaped through address. The chapters also highlight the importance of investigating the daily encounters that make up the social fabric of our lives. This book will be of great interest to researchers of intercultural and cross-cultural communication, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and pragmatics.
Nov 10
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook publication
Title: Corpora, Grammar and Discourse
Subtitle: In honour of Susan Hunston
Series Title: Studies in Corpus Linguistics 73
Publication Year: 2015
Publisher: John Benjamins
http://www.benjamins.com/
Book URL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.73
Editor: Nicholas Groom
Editor: Maggie Charles
Editor: Suganthi John
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027267900 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 95.00
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027267900 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 143.00
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027267900 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 80.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027210708 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 143.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027210708 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 80.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027210708 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 100.70
Abstract:
Corpus linguistics has had a revolutionary impact on grammar and discourse research. Not only has it opened up entirely new theoretical perspectives and methodological possibilities for both fields, but it has also to a considerable extent erased the boundaries that have traditionally been drawn between them. This book showcases a variety of current corpus-based approaches to the study of grammar and discourse, and makes a case for seeing grammar and discourse as fundamentally inter-related phenomena. The book features contributions from leading experts in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, critical discourse studies, genre and register analysis, phraseology, language learning and teaching, languages for specific purposes, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, systemic functional linguistics and text linguistics. An essential reference point for future research, Corpora, Grammar and Discourse has been edited in honour of Susan Hunston, whose own work has consistently pushed at the boundaries of corpus-based research on grammar and discourse for over three decades.
Nov 05
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Thomas Hestbaek Andersen
AUTHOR: Morten Boeriis
AUTHOR: Eva Maagerø
AUTHOR: Elise Seip Tonnessen
TITLE: Social Semiotics
SUBTITLE: Key Figures, New Directions
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Weimin Toh, National University of Singapore
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
This book is a collection of interviews conducted with five key figures in the
field of social semiotics. The five scholars interviewed are Christian M.I.M.
Matthiessen, Jim R. Martin, Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen and Jay Lemke.
These scholars have taken Halliday’s concept of social semiotics and developed
it further in various directions. Based on their background, research purpose
and research areas, they have created their own original contributions to
theory and practice. The book consolidates the thoughts of the five scholars
through their interviews and highlights the similarities and differences
between their perspectives and M.A.K. Halliday’s original concept of social
semiotics. The book is well structured into three main components. The first
component, which includes the introduction, serves as a framing chapter for
the book. The second component includes the interviews with the five scholars.
And the final component consists of the concluding chapter, which serves as a
cohesive link for the interviews through the discussion of the central themes
common to each of the interviews.
The book focuses on the qualitative instead of quantitative analysis of the
lived experiences of the interviewees and how their background informs their
various perspectives in social semiotics. Each chapter focuses on in-depth
interviews of one scholar. The chapters are presented using main headings such
as “background” and “language teaching” with specific interview questions
under each of the main headings. There are both common and distinctive
interview questions for the scholars. Common interview questions include, for
instance, asking the scholars for their definitions of key terms such as
“mode”, “meaning”, “context”, “multimodality” and so on. These interview
questions serve as a cohesive thread to not only bind the different interviews
together but also highlight the different perspectives that the scholars take
in social semiotics. There are also distinctive questions asked for each of
the scholars which highlight their unique contributions. For instance, some of
the interview questions for Jim R. Martin focus on appraisal whereas some
unique questions for Jay Lemke focus on the concept of “meta-redundancy” which
he brings from his science background.
In Chapter 1, “Introduction” provides the theoretical context for the
interviews conducted in the later chapters. The authors provide a concise
introduction to M.A.K. Halliday’s social semiotics. As the main aim of the
book is to present and discuss how the five scholars redefined and reshaped
several of Halliday’s original ideas, the theoretical introduction is no more
than a brief outline of the fundamentals of Halliday’s social semiotics. The
introduction also provides some biographical information for the scholars and
a brief outline of their contributions to social semiotics. The chapter ends
by providing an outline of the methodology, i.e. how the interviews were
conducted, gathered and edited.
In Chapter 2, “Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen”, the interview starts by asking
for the scholar’s background. The background of the scholar highlights how he
was introduced to systemics or social semiotics. The chapter then moves to
theoretical discussion with the scholar by asking for his views regarding the
difference between the terms social semiotics and systemic functional
linguistics (SFL). In the first main heading under “SFL and social semiotics”,
the scholar was also asked about the cognitive component in the theory; and
the first section concludes by highlighting the scholar’s emphasis on the
social component of the cognitive component in the theory. The second section
touches on a number of basic concepts such as communication, text and code.
The scholar was asked to define “text”, and indicate the place of the concept
of “code” in systemic functional linguistics. The third section proceeds to
discuss the scholar’s main areas of interest, which is language description.
One of the contributions language description made is the ability to do
text/discourse analysis in more communities operating with different
languages. The fourth section touches on the dialects of SFL, where the
scholar discusses the benefits of the Sydney grammar over the Cardiff grammar
and Chomsky’s generative linguistics. For instance, he indicates the great
value of the holistic thinking of Halliday’s SFL. He also mentions that a key
difference between the Cardiff grammar and the Sydney grammar is that the
Cardiff grammar is modular oriented, whereas Halliday’s grammar is
relational-dimensional. The fifth section discusses context and genre where
the scholar discusses the main difference between Martin and
Matthiessen/Halliday’s approach. For instance, he highlights that Martin was
exploring context and genre in terms of one dimension: the hierarchy of
stratification. In contrast, Matthiessen approaches context and genre in a
two-dimensional way where context was extended from the context of culture at
the potential pole of the cline to contexts of situation at the instance pole.
The remaining sections of the chapter involve the scholar’s discussion of
“meaning”, his definition of “mode” and his multi-semiotic work, SFL and
language teaching, and looking towards the future of SFL.
In Chapter 3, “Jim R. Martin”, the interview starts by discussion of the
scholar’s background to understand how he was introduced to social semiotics
and his inspiration and motivation from practice. The second section discusses
the basic theoretical concepts. It aims to understand how the scholar consider
the relation between SFL and other social semiotic directions, his views on
having a cognitive component in social semiotics and his definition of
“communication”. The third section highlights the scholar’s distinctive
concept, such as “stratification” and discusses his understanding of the
concept. This section also draws links to other scholars such as Jay Lemke in
relation to his concept of meta-redundancy and how the concept is a useful way
to interpret further what stratification really means when there is a
hierarchy of abstractions rising from the phonology. Martin next discusses his
context model, where he highlights the differences between Halliday’s model
and his. For instance, he mentions that his model has two strata which he
terms “genre” and “register” whereas Halliday has one strata which he calls
“context”. Martin also explains why he stratified context whereas Halliday did
not. He was influenced by Mitchell’s (1957) and Hasan’s (1979) work on buying
and selling encounters and he took the idea of staging (text structure) and
reconceived it in terms of a system/structure cycle, so that he had an axial
perspective on genre. He referred to text structure as schematic structure and
attempted to make connection to van Dijk and Walter Kintsch’s work on schema
or script theory. In the section on “semantics”, Martin highlights his
emphasis on the text as the unit of analysis and not the clause. The following
section “appraisal” discusses how Martin came to that concept, and also
multimodal appraisal. The remaining sections discuss Martin’s definition of
“mode”, his view on the differences between SFL dialects, SFL and education
and the future of systemic functional linguistics (SFL).
Chapter 4, “Gunther Kress”, discusses his background and how he first came to
engage in social semiotics. Next, he discusses how his form of semiotics
relates to other forms of semiotics, such as that of Ferdinand de Saussure,
Charles Sanders Pierce or Roland Barthes. He also discusses his view of the
relation between sign, semiotic resource and semiotic system and his emphasis
on the functional more than the systemic in SFL. In the next section, he
defines mode as a social category. In his discussion of “medium”, he indicates
the importance of distinguishing between mode as a representational resource
and medium as disseminated technology. Next, he explains the origin of the
concept of “affordances” and how he uses it. Under the section on “literacy”,
he indicates his avoidance of the term “literacy” because the term indicates
that they have obtained an answer which they have not. Under “text and
communication”, he uses the term text for any semiotic entity which is
internally coherent and framed so that he sees it as distinct from other
entities. Text is a material thing produced via communication which is
semiotic work. He relates “design” to resources that young people need in
order to function in relation to their own wishes in society. In
“applications”, he explains how concepts were applied in learning and
institutional contexts. In the final section “the future”, he highlights the
expansion of SFL as tools to allow social semioticians to do descriptions of
the semiotic beyond language.
Chapter 5, “Theo van Leeuwen”, starts by discussing how Leeuwen’s career
began. The second section discusses his view in relation to the differences
and connections he see between SFL and social semiotics and multimodality. It
also discusses his background as a film semiotician and how it influenced his
theory. This section concludes with van Leeuwen explaining his views on the
difference between his and Kress’s work compared to O’Toole’s work. For
instance, he mentions that O’Toole takes a slightly different approach,
foregrounding the idea of rank, and linking the ranks to specific systems but
without working on the systems in detail. In the next section, he mentions his
view on social semiotics in relation to other semiotic traditions such as
Roland Barthes’ (1973) Mythologies which is part of his overall framework. The
major strengths and weaknesses of the social semiotics approach are also
discussed where he indicates that the social in social semiotics is not always
sufficiently kept in focus. He also mentions his stance on maintaining the
“critical approach” to SFL in contrast to Gunther Kress who has moved in a
direction with less emphasis on a critical approach, and maybe more on a
strategic approach. In the section on “sign making”, he explains his view of
the concept of “sign” and “ motivated sign”. He defines “communication” as a
term for semiotic practices.” He also restricts “text” to actual “textual
artefacts”. More theoretical discussion continues where he explains the
difficulty in defining “multimodality” and “mode”. Then he provides the
definition of “mode” as essentially an immaterial semiotic resource which is
abstract enough to be applicable across different means of expression or
medium. Next, he defines “grammar” as a system that prescribes how language is
used and explains the relation of his notion of stratification to Halliday’s.
The remaining sections of the chapter discuss technology and meaning making,
theory building, linguistics in a multimodal world, his impact, and the future
of SFL.
Chapter 6, “Jay Lemke”, starts with discussion of Lemke’s background by
outlining how he started his academic life in the sciences and later moved to
social semiotics. In the section on “the sign”, Lemke explains his acceptance
of the Peircian concept of icon, index and symbol in contrast to Gunther
Kress. Next, he explains his distinctive concept of “meta-redundancy” drawn
from his science background. Under “metafunctions, communication, text and
genre, Lemke explains how he modified Halliday’s three metafunctions and gave
them new names: presentation, orientation and organisation. Under
“stratification and text”, he explains his introduction of the concept of text
scale, activity scale, and time scale where the fundamental model for his work
came indirectly from developmental biology. More conceptual discussion follows
in which he outlines his major theoretical contributions to the field of
multimodality, gives a brief definition of the term mode, describes how he
distinguishes between modes, and discusses affordances, literacy and
multimodal literacy and the development of a general social semiotics of all
modes. The latter half of this chapter discusses his SFL’s contribution to
science, the relationship between cognition, emotions and aesthetics, his
study of digital media such as computer games and social semiotics and SFL in
the United States. The chapter concludes with his views on SFL today and in
the future.
Chapter 7, “Central Themes”, starts off by providing an overview of the five
scholars interviewed in the book, highlighting their similarities and
differences from Halliday’s social semiotic. The remaining sections focus on
theoretical discussion of systems and concepts. Common threads in the previous
interview chapters are discussed using central themes such as “meaning”,
“sign”, “semiotic system”, “text”, “text analysis”, “context”,
“communication”, “Sydney grammar versus the Cardiff grammar”, “multimodality”,
“mode”, “social critique and design”, “analysis in relation to design”,
“functions and applications”, “education”, and “academia”. The final sections
of the chapter touch on future challenges, hopes and aspirations in relation
to refining theories and concepts and the idea of social semiotics as a grand
theory.
EVALUATION
An important merit of this book is that it enables the reader to see the
multiple perspectives of social semiotics. Through the interviews, the book
achieves its aim in showing how different scholars with different backgrounds
build on or change Halliday’s SFL for their own research purposes and research
areas. This consolidation of various scholar’s interviews is rare. In
consolidating the five scholar’s views, the book enables the reader to
understand their similarities and differences in approaching a theoretical
field. It also allows readers or scholars to understand how a framework is
modified, elaborated or expanded based on different understanding of an
original framework, which in this case is Halliday’s SFL. The authors open the
book with the chapter by providing the theoretical outline of SFL. This brief
outline of SFL is sufficient for linguistic students but non-linguistic
students may have to do more readings on their own to better understand the
other theoretical concepts discussed during the interviews. The brief
biographical background provided for the five scholars interviewed is useful
as it consolidates the key scholars’ background in social semiotics.
In Chapter 2, there is a section which discusses the relationship between
social semiotics and neuroscience. The interview highlights that Halliday and
Matthiessen attempt to explain the functioning of the brain through language
and they also tried to make contact with neuroscientists. Perhaps this part
can be elaborated with more information provided about the outcome of the
contact with the neuroscientists if it has been made. It would be interesting
to have more interdisciplinary insights about how language is related to
cognition.
In Chapter 3, Martin provides a brief overview of appraisal theory and how it
came about. There was the use of terminologies such as “feelings”, “AFFECT”,
“emotions”, “JUDGEMENT”, “ENGAGEMENT” and “APPRECIATION”. Perhaps the authors
could indicate the difference between “feelings” and “emotions” as the
distinction was not highlighted through the interview. Is “feeling” correlated
to “AFFECT” and “emotions” correlated to “JUDGEMENT” since these terms are
used in the same sentence? Or is “emotions” an overarching category that
applies to all the appraisal categories? The interview could also have
included discussion of the relationship between “aesthetic”, “evaluation” and
“emotions”. “Aesthetic” is a term or concept that is frequently seen to occur
with “evaluation” and including the term in the interview would have provided
more insights into Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework.
Another limitation of the study is related to the selection of the
participants for the interview. Five scholars were selected for the interview
and they are assumed to be the key figures in the field of social semiotics.
Perhaps more scholars, such as Peter White, could be included for the
interview to diversify the insights provided even more. Since Kress and van
Leeuwen were both included for the interview, it would be interesting to
include the pairing of Martin and White (2005) to compare their views in
social semiotics.
This book is generally an excellent piece of academic writing and suffers only
from very infrequent spelling and formatting errors. For instance, I have only
spotted one grammatical error (on page 168, “interviewed to this book” should
be “interviewed in this book”). Each chapter links to the next chapter
cohesively and complements each other very well. The framing introduction and
concluding central themes also serve as cohesive links for the interview
chapters. This book is meant for more advanced students and scholars of
linguistics, specifically social semioticians, discourse analysts, and
multimodal discourse analysts and presumes a certain level of familiarity with
social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis concepts. Overall, “Social
Semiotics – Key Figures, New Directions” provides insightful and detailed
interviews of key figures in social semiotic. The interviews are firmly
grounded in the methodology set out in the introduction chapter. Additionally,
Chapter 6 provides a good summary of the interviews conducted in the previous
chapters by structuring the insights into central themes. This systematic
structuring of the interview findings makes it a good and accessible source of
information and inspiration for future work to be conducted by scholars in
social semiotics.
REFERENCES
Barthes, R. 1973. Mythologies. St albans: Paladin.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1979. On the notion of text. In: Sandor J. Petofi (ed.), Text
vs Sentence: basic questions of textlinguistics (Papers in Textlinguistics
20.2) Hamburg: Helmet Buske, pp. 369 – 90.
Martin, Jim R. & Peter R.R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: appraisal
in English. London: Palgrave.
Mitchell, T.F. 1957. The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica: a
situational statement. Hespéris, Archives Berbères et Bulletin de l’Institut
des Hautes-Études Marocaines. Pp. 31 – 71.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Toh Weimin is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature in the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests include social semiotics, multimodality and the study of new technologies like offline and online gaming worlds. Besides his interest in researching gaming worlds, he is also interested in anime and film analysis using a multimodal discourse analysis approach. His current PhD research work involves the creation of a ludonarrative model for video games to understand the different relationships between narrative and gameplay in video games. This theoretical model is supported by the empirical study of players.
Nov 03
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook publication
Title: A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis
Publication Year: 2015
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
http://www.palgrave.com
Book URL: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/?k=9781137402882&loc=uk
Author: Sean Sutherland
Paperback: ISBN: 9781137402882 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 20.99
Abstract:
This practical textbook introduces the tools and techniques that explain how language is used in different situations, and it will be an indispensable resource that students will return to again and again during their course.
Author Sean Sutherland has years of experience in teaching the topic to his own undergraduate and graduate students, and the book is packed with colourful examples from novels, songs, newspaper articles and more that enrich students’ understanding and develop their confidence.
A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis:
• Assumes no prior knowledge of the subject
• Is filled with exercises and answers throughout, along with answers and commentary
• Contains supporting explanations of relevant grammar points
This is an indispensable resource for anybody doing discourse analysis as part of their studies.
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