The contributors present a coherent collection of work on the functioning of metaphor in public discourse and related discourse areas from a broadly cognitive-linguistic background, providing a state-of-the-art overview of research on the discursive grounding of metaphor from a cognitive-linguistic perspective.
Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing
DESIGN DISCOURSE: COMPOSING AND REVISING PROGRAMS IN PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL WRITING addresses the complexities of developing professional and technical writing programs. The essays in the collection offer reflections on efforts to bridge two cultures - what the editors characterize as the "art and science of writing" - often by addressing explicitly the tensions between them. DESIGN DISCOURSE offers insights into the high-stakes decisions made by program designers as they seek to "function at the intersection of the practical and the abstract, the human and the technical."
Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lie in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's 1984, where they were oppressed by state control.
Genre theory in the past few years has contributed immensely to our understanding of the way discourse is used in academic, professional and institutional contexts. However, its development has been constrained by the nature and design of its applications, which have invariably focused on language teaching and learning, or communication training and consultation. This has led to the use of simplified and idealised genres. In contrast to this, the real world of discourse is complex, dynamic and unpredictable. This tension between the real world of written discourse and its representation in applied genre-based literature is the main theme of this book.
This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event.
