Digital Discourse offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by simply bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing current technologies like instant messaging, textmessaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, gaming, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, and French).
The analysis of discourse is probably one of the most complex problems of linguistics. It can be approached from many different directions, involving a large variety of different methods. This volume unites psycholinguistic studies, investigations of logical and computational models of discourse, corpus studies, and linguistic case studies of language-specific devices. This variety of approaches reflects the complexity of discourse production and understanding, and it also reflects the necessity of understanding the complex interplay of diverse parameters which influence these processes.
Technology-mediated communication cannot help but inform our literacies. This book is a reconceptualization of the role of language and pedagogy in what Kress (2003) has termed the new media age. At the heart of the volume is the notion of 'transformation' - a change in discourse practices, meaning making, technology and, as a result, literacy acquisition itself. The chapters look at language as positioned in a hugely multimodal world. Communication extends beyond the traditional realms of discourse, from the collaborative efforts of wikis to the hybrid speech and text of online messaging.
The Handbook of Discourse Analysis covers the major approaches to Discourse Analysis from Critical Discourse Analysis to Multimodal Discourse Analysis and their applications in key educational and institutional settings. The handbook is divided into six sections: Approaches to Discourse Analysis, Approaches to Spoken Discourse, Genres and Practices, Educational Applications, Institutional Applications, and Identity, Culture and Discourse.
In discourse, verbal messages are framed: speakers offer cues on the basis of which hearers are able to anchor the verbal message to the context. Furthermore, speakers cannot contribute to the discourse without at the same time showing their view on the subject matter of the discourse: the content of a discourse is necessarily ‘displayed’ from a certain perspective. Both the framing and perspectivising of verbal messages are not static, but subject to possible changes during the development of the discourse.
