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Denationalizing Identities
Denationalizing Identities explores the relationship between performance and ideology in the global Sinosphere. Wah Guan Lim's study of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan, Danny Yung Ning Tsun, and Kuo Pao Kun—shows the impact of theater on ideas of "Chineseness" across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. At the height of the Cold War, the "Bamboo Curtain" divided the "two Chinas" across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Hong Kong prepared for its handover to the People's Republic of China and Singapore rethought Chinese education. As geopolitical tensions imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, these four dramatists wove together local, foreign, and Chinese elements in their art, challenging mainland China's narrative of an inevitable communist outcome. By performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they debunked notions of a unified Chineseness. Denationalizing Identities highlights the key role theater and performance played in circulating people and ideas across the Chinese-speaking world, well before cross-strait relations began to thaw.
Email Hoaxes
How genres emerge and evolve on the Internet has become one of the central questions in studies of computer-mediated communication (CMC). This book addresses the issue of genrefication by giving an in-depth analysis of email hoaxes as a candidate for digital genre status. Email hoaxes are deceptive messages that spread in digital social networks; they are a fascinating object for discourse linguistics as they exemplify a major pragmatic tendency in CMC, namely deceptivity and a lowering of sincerity standards. This study examines formal and functional aspects of email hoaxes and provides ample evidence both from a systematized corpus and in situ data collected online. Besides a structural and microlinguistic analysis, it identifies key issues such as pragmatic duality, narrativity and textual variation and change in email hoaxes. In conclusion, a digital genre model is outlined that bridges both the old/new and the formal/functional gaps and may be applied to many other digital genre ecologies.
Confronting Metaphor in Use
It is timely for researchers to approach metaphor as social and situated, as a matter of language and discourse, and not just as a matter of thought. Over the last twenty five years, scholars have come to appreciate in depth the cognitive, motivated and embodied nature of metaphor, but have tended to background the linguistic form of metaphor and have largely ignored how this connects to its role in the discourses in which our lives are constructed and lived. This book brings language and social dimensions into the picture, offering snapshots of metaphor use in real language and in real lives across the very different cultures of Europe and Brazil and contributing to the theorizing of metaphor in discourse.
Communicating Gender in Context
The contributions to the book Communicating Gender in Context deal not only with grammatical gender, but also with discursive procedures for constructing gender as a relevant social category in text and context. Attention is directed to European cultures which till now have come up short in linguistic and discourse analytic gender studies, e.g., Austria, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Poland and Sweden. But also English speech communities and questions of English grammatical gender are dealt with.In accordance with recent sociolinguistic research the contributors refrain from generalizing theses about how men and women normally speak; no conversational style feature adheres so firmly to one sex as was thought in early feminism. The studies, however, show that even today the feminine gender is often staged in a way that leads to situative asymmetry to the advantage of men. The broader societal context of patriarchy does not determine all communicative encounters, but demands particular efforts from women and men to be subverted.
Instructional Writing in English
The history of English writing is, to a considerable extent, the history of instructional writing in English. This volume is the first collection of papers to focus on instructional writing throughout the history of the language. Spanning a millennium of English texts, the materials studied represent procedural and behavioural discourse in a variety of genres. The primary texts, from AElfric s homilies to medieval cooking recipes to seventeenth-century American conduct literature to present-day language textbooks, display a variety of linguistic devices typical of instruction. The materials nonetheless differ with respect to the explicitness of their instructive purpose. Bringing together a broad range of instructional writing from the Old, Middle and Modern English periods, this collection celebrates the sixtieth birthday of Risto Hiltunen, who has successfully combined discourse-linguistic approaches with the history of English in his research, and inspired the colleagues and former students contributing to this volume."
Request Strategies
This book investigates request strategies in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and is one of the first attempts to address cross-cultural strategies employed in the speech act of requests in two non-Western languages. The data, drawn from role-plays and naturally recorded conversations, complement each other in terms of exhaustiveness and authenticity. This study explores the similarities and differences of the request patterns that emerged in the Chinese and Korean data, and the intricate relation between request strategies and social factors (such as power and distance). The findings raise questions about the influence of methodology on data, and the applicability of so called universals to East Asian languages. They also offer new insights into generally held ideas of directness and requesting behaviours in Chinese and Korean, and the problems of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication.This research is suggestive for the disciplines of cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics and discourse analysis.
Pragmatics of Society
Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.
Variational Pragmatics
This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analys...
Toward a Motivation Model of Pragmatics
With the “discursive turn” has come a distrust – a complete rejection by some – of theories that seek deeper reasons for surface phenomena. Rong Chen argues that this distrust, with its accompanying overemphasis on specificity and fluidity of linguistic meaning and social values, is unwarranted and unhelpful. Drawing on insights from social theories and various strands of pragmatics, he proposes a motivation model of pragmatics (MMP), contending that language use can be adequately, coherently, and elegantly studied via the motivation behind it in its varied and dynamic contexts. The model, with its well-laid out components, is then applied to (im)politeness research, cross-cultural p...
