Reference And Identity In Public Discourses

This volume explores the concepts of reference and identity in public discourses. Its contributions study discourse-specific reference and labelling patterns, both from a historical and present-day perspective, and discuss their impact on self- and other-representation in the construction of identity. They combine multiple methodological approaches, including corpus-based quantitative as well as qualitative ones, and apply them to a range of text types that are or were (intended to be) public, such as letters, newspapers, parliamentary debates, and online communication in the form of reader comments, discussion pages, and tweets. In addition to English, the languages studied include Polish as well as European and Latin American Spanish. The volume is aimed at researchers from different research paradigms in linguistics and related disciplines, such as media communication or the social and cultural sciences, who are interested in the interplay of reference and identity.

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.

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.

Surveillance and Identity analyses the discourse of surveillance in the contemporary United Kingdom, drawing upon public language from central government, governmental agencies, activist movements, and from finance and banking. Examining the logics of these discourses and revealing the manner in which they construct problems of governance in the light of the insecurity of identity, this book shows how identity is fundamentally linked to surveillance, as governmental discourses privilege surveillance as a response to social problems. In drawing links between new technologies and national surveillance projects or concerns surrounding phenomena such as identity fraud, Surveillance and Identity presents a new understanding of identity - the model of 'surveillance identity' - demonstrating that this is often applied to individuals by powerful organisations at the same time as the concept is being actively contested in public language. The first comprehensive study of the discursive politics of surveillance in the UK, this book makes significant contributions to surveillance theory, governmentality theory, and to political and social identity theories. As such, it will be of interest to social scientists of all kinds working on questions of public discourse and political communication, identity, surveillance and the relationship between the individual and the state.

Queer linguistics has only recently developed as an area of study; however academic interest in this field is rapidly increasing. Despite its growing appeal, many books on ‘gay language’ focus on private conversation and small communities. As such, Public Discourses of Gay Men represents an important corrective, by investigating a variety of sources in the public domain. A broad range of material, including tabloid newspaper articles, political debates on homosexual law and erotic narratives are used in order to analyse the language surrounding homosexuality. Bringing together queer linguistics and corpus linguistics the text investigate how gay male identities are constructed in the public domain.

A look at the various cognitive, social, and linguistic aspects of how social identities are constructed, forgrounded and redefined in interaction. Concepts and methodologies are taken from studies in language variation and change, multilingualism, conversation analysis, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, as well as translation studies and applied linguistics.

Despite the fact that respectability is universally recognized as a feature of nineteenth-century society, it has seldom been studied as a subject in itself. In this path-breaking book, Woodruff D. Smith interprets respectability as a highly significant cultural phenomenon, incorporating both a moral imaginary or map and a distinctive discourse. Respectability was constructed in the public spheres of Europe and the Americas and eventually came to be an aspect of social life throughout the world. From its origins in the late eighteenth century, it was a conscious response to what were perceived as undesirable aspects of modernity. It became a central feature of concepts of "the modern" itself and an essential part of the processes that, in the twentieth century, came to be called modernization and cultural globalization. Respectability – though typically associated with the bourgeoisie – existed independently of any particular social class, and strongly affected modern constructions of class in general and of gender. Although not an ideology, respectability was overtly embedded in several political discourses, especially those of movements such as antislavery which claimed to transcend politics. While it may no longer be a coherent entity in culture and discourse, respectability continues to affect contemporary public life through a fragmentary legacy.

This collection focuses on the multi-layered links between international events and identity discourses. With a unique line-up of international scholars, this book offers a diverse range of exciting case studies, including sports competitions, music festivals, exhibitions, fashion shows and royal celebrations.