The growing availability of large collections of language texts has expanded our horizons for language analysis, enabling the swift analysis of millions of words of data, aided by computational methods. This edited collection contains examples of such contemporary research which uses corpus linguistics to carry out discourse analysis. The book takes an inclusive view of the meaning of discourse, covering different text-types or modes of language, including discourse as both social practice and as ideology or representation.
The study describes a detailed and original piece of research work, investigating a very important genre of human communication, and that is conversation. It provides a definition of the genre of conversation by describing nine features of conversation, namely multiple sources, discourse coherence, language as doing, co-operation, unfolding, open-endedness, artifacts, inexplicitness and shared responsibility. These nine features of naturalness in conversation serve to distinguish conversation from specialized discourse types.
Irony and Humor: From pragmatics to discourse is a complete updated panorama of linguistic research on irony and humor, based on a variety of perspectives, corpora and theories. The book collects the most recent contributions from such diverse approaches as Relevance Theory, Cognitive Linguistics, General Theory of Verbal Humor, Neo-Gricean Pragmatics or Argumentation. The volume is organized in three parts referring to pragmatic perspectives, mediated discourse, and conversational interaction. This book will be highly relevant for anyone interested in pragmatics, discourse analysis as well as social sciences.
The volume promotes a pragmatic perspective to the analysis of political discourse as multilayered mediated discourse. The chapters cross the disciplinary and methodological boundaries of speech act theory, social positioning theory, and argumentation theory and rhetorics. They address the strategic use of address terms and irony, the form and function of questions, and the expression of certainty in the contexts of parliamentary discourse, interview, talkshow, phone-in programme and motion of support across different discourse domains. Different cultural contexts are represented, including Africa, the Middle East, different parts of Europe and the United States.
