Educational, Linguistic, and Media Discourses


Book Description

This book presents a collection of research papers from both experienced and emerging scholars, some of whom presented their work at the international conference ‘Language Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century: Linguistic, Educational and Intercultural Aspects’ held in June 2018 and organised by the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University, the FIPLV Nordic-Baltic Region, and the Language Teachers’ Association of Lithuania. The book consists of three parts, the first being devoted to language teaching and teacher education. The second section explores literary and cultural issues, while the third part encompasses linguistic and media discourse studies.




Analysing Media Discourses


Book Description

The continual growth in the significance of mass-mediated communication makes it essential that we are able to reflect upon and critically appreciate the semiotic processes that are involved in their impact upon social and cultural life. This edited collection showcases a range of diverse approaches to the analysis of various forms of mediated communications, including varying degrees of attention to their associated textual, discursive and social practices. Individual contributions are devoted to exploring, in analytical depth, multiple dimensions of each of the following media: newspaper articles, magazines (both historical advertising and contemporary editorial discourse), television (both situation comedy and "reality" TV programmes), books (covers and content in two genres), political leaflets, and a flight simulation computer game. The collection will be an important resource for scholars and students within disciplines including communication studies, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, discourse studies, and journalism studies. This book was published as a special issue of Social Semiotics.




Media and Politics


Book Description

Media and politics have always been mutually influential. The media plays an important political role of its own in promoting and discussing policies, as well as conveying representations of power and ideology. On the other hand, media outlets are themselves subject to political forces that have an impact on their editorial line. This mutual influence comes to light not only in journalistic practices, but also in how news is constructed and conveyed. This volume explores the relations between politics and various types of media as expressed in different areas of the world, namely Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. Such a complex landscape calls for a multiplicity of analytical tools and cannot ignore specific socio-political, geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts which may be overlooked when approached from a global perspective. In this volume, a combination of senior scholars and young experts from a wide range of disciplines, such as discourse analysis, international relations, and cultural studies, come together in a conversation which recognizes the media as a global phenomenon without neglecting its local specificities.




Media Discourses


Book Description

Some of the most important questions regarding the relationship between media and culture are about communication. How are the meanings which make up a culture shared in society? How is power performed in the media? What identities and relationships take shape there? Media Discourses introduces readers to discourse analysis to show how media communication works. Written in a lively style and drawing on examples from contemporary media, it discusses what precisely gets represented in mediatexts, who gets to do the talking, what knowledge people need toshare in order to understand the media and how power relations are reinforced or challenged. Each chapter discusses a particular media genre, including news, advertising, reality television and weblogs. At the same time, each chapter also introduces a range of approaches to media discourse, from analysis of linguistic details to the rules of conversation and the discursive construction of selfhood. A glossary explains key terms and suggestions for further reading are given at the end of each chapter. This is a key text for media studies, mass communication, communication studies, linguistics and journalism studies students.




Discourse, Media, and Conflict


Book Description

Bringing together contributions from a team of international scholars, this pioneering book applies theories and approaches from linguistics, such as discourse analysis and pragmatics, to analyse the media and online political discourses of both conflict and peace processes. By analysing case studies as globally diverse as Germany, the USA, Nigeria, Iraq, Korea and Libya, and across a range of genres such as TV news channels, online reporting and traditional newspapers, the chapters collectively show how news discourse can be powerful in mobilizing public support for war or violence, or for conflict resolution, through the linguistic representation of certain groups. It explores the consequences of this 'framing' effect, and shows how peace journalism can be achieved through a non-violent approach to reporting conflict. It will therefore serve as an essential resource for students, scholars and experts in media and communication studies, conflict and peace studies, international relations, linguistics and political science.




Migration and Media


Book Description

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.




Global Media Discourse


Book Description

Featuring a wide range of exercises, examples, and images, this textbook provides a practical way of analyzing the discourses of the global media industries. Building on a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of global media communication, specific case studies of lifestyle and entertainment media are explored with examples from films, global women's magazines, Vietnamese news reporting and computer war games. Finally, this book investigates how global media communication is produced, looking at the formats, languages and images used in creating media materials, both globally and in localized forms. At a time when the media is becoming increasingly global, often with the same films, news and television programmes shown all over the world; Global Media Discourse provides an accessible, lively introduction into how globalization is changing the language and communicative practices of the media. Integrating a range of approaches, including political economy, discourse analysis and ethnography, this book will be of particular interest to students of media and communication studies, applied linguistics, and (critical) discourse analysis.




Social Media Discourse, (Dis)identifications and Diversities


Book Description

This volume serves as an in-depth investigation of the diversity of means and practices that constitute (dis)identification and identity construction in social media. Given the increasing prevalence of social media in everyday life and the subsequent growing diversity in the types of participants and forms of participation, the book makes the case for a rigorous analysis of social media discourses and digital literacy practices to demonstrate the range of semiotic resources used in online communication that form the foundation of (dis)identification processes. Divided into two major sections, delineating between the (dis)identification of the self across various social categories and the (dis)identification of the self in relation to the "other", the book employs a discourse-ethnographic approach to highlight the value of this type of theoretical framework in providing nuanced descriptions of identity construction in social media and illuminating their larger, long-term societal and cultural implications. This volume is a key resource for researchers, and students in sociolinguistics, discourse studies, computer-mediated communication, and cultural studies.




Discourses of the Arab Revolutions in Media and Politics


Book Description

Drawing on approaches from critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, this book critically examines metaphorical language used in global media coverage and political statements on the events of the Arab Spring. The volume begins by summarising key events of the Arab Spring, tracing the development of protests from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and Syria as well as the wider impact on the region. Ullmann builds on this foundation to lay out the theoretical frameworks to be applied to an extensive corpus of natural language and actual discourse highlighting Western, Middle Eastern, and North African perspectives which integrate theoretical work on metaphor, blending theory, and semantic prosodies. Methodological considerations on corpus selection and different conceptualisations of politics and mass media, generally and across countries, are discussed, with the final chapters outlining the overarching themes across metaphors in the corpus and how these metaphors were ultimately framed in the mass media and political landscape. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in critical discourse analysis, language and politics, and corpus linguistics.




A Cross-Cultural Study of Commercial Media Discourses


Book Description

This book decodes commercial news discourses from the perspective of cognitive semantics. It attaches considerable importance to the bodily experientialism and linguistic embodiment advocated in discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics and explores the complex yet thought-provoking correlation between overt language and covert cognition by focusing on contrastive analyses of metaphors, image schemas, and stance markers in texts. On the basis of the analyses, the author discusses the linguistic applications, lexical devices and personal experiences, along with their embodied mechanisms, revealing the linguistic strategies, embodied cognitive linguistic actions and constructive thoughts used in media discourses on product promotion, human resources deployment, and commodity problem resolution. In turn, this sheds light on how linguistic selections and cognitive mechanisms are used in composing media news and on how public cognition on certain social and business issues might be framed. The combination of cognitive semantics and commercial discourse analysis offers comprehensive and rewarding insights into the cross-cultural research of both cognitive actions and linguistic behavior reflected in news reports and highlights the correlation between the use of wording and cognitive construction in discourses, which broadens the scope of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Further, the use of analytical measures and the effective integration of discourse analysis and cognitive semantics lend the book additional analytical authenticity, providing an empirical foundation for cross-cultural communication studies.