The Discursive Construction Of Identities On And Offline

This volume explores linguistic identity construction across online and offline contexts. The contributors focus on ‘clusivity’ as an overarching aspect and offer a multifaceted operationalisation of the linguistic processes of identity construction. The studies address three major strands of human identity, each of which can be thought of as an aggregative abstraction with its own complexities: personal identity, group identity and collective identity. The contributions pay special attention to the interplay between the public and private dimensions of the interactions and audiences, as well as the potential impact of social and technical affordances of different communicative settings and online and offline modes of identity construction. The volume is aimed at all researchers concerned with the complex notion of identity, both in linguistics and in neighbouring disciplines.

This book offers a close look at the discourse of and around three socially marginalised and vulnerable groups – Irish Travellers, Squatters and Homeless people – in order to understand more about how individuals within them position themselves vis-à-vis mainstream society. It investigates the groups' diverse and provisional relationship with space that challenges mainstream society's spatial logic. Given that the relationship between mobility, space and identity has been explored in migrant contexts, Roberta Piazza proposes a reconsideration of this relationship beyond people's movement from one place to another. Investigating the space-identity nexus among the three groups, she highlights how mobility is not solely a cross-country phenomenon, but a no-less crucial and dramatic reality within an individual nation. Based on close linguistic analysis of interviews collected over many years, Piazza investigates how the participants construct their social and personal identities when talking about themselves and the sites they inhabit, drawing on the concepts of 'heterotopia' and non-sexual desire.

The discursive construction of identity is often under the control of the dominant forces in society and frequently results in forms of manipulation and abuse. This awareness led to the celebration of the First International Conference on CDA (València 2004), where over three-hundred academics working in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis became actively engaged in this important issue. The seven studies included in this volume have been selected as representative of those areas of human experience that have been given most intellectual attention and considered to be in fact in need for critical unravelling. Ethnic categorization in multicultural classrooms, patriotic discourse construction in Chinese readers, the denial of Palestinian identity in schoolbooks, the diverse constructions of European identities, Arabs constructing themselves on the worldwide web, identity construction in sexual assault trials, the representations of a dangerous 'other' in cases of PLWHAs, are the contextual perspectives embraced in this book to account for forms of power abuse in the discursive construction of identities.

Weibo, a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, a popular microblogging service platform originated from China, has become one of the leading SNSs in Greater China Region. It features huge numbers of active users as well as verified high-profiled celebrity users and corporate users. Incorporating the insights from socio-psychology field to build an integrated framework of analysis for describing and explaining the processes and products of online identity construction by Chinese celebrities, the book represents an attempt to investigates how Chinese celebrities discursively construct their personal and social identities on Sina Weibo. The book can serve as a reference to the research on identity construction with its significant insights regarding the multi-faceted nature and relational dynamics of identity construction on social media and the uncovering of linguistic acts and features constituting relational identity. In addition, the insights from the study could be a reference to provide practical implications for personal branding and personal rapport management in the new Web 2.0 era.

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.

This collection calls for greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds. The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social affordances evoke placemaking as a collaborative endeavour which allows users to create and maintain a sense of community around place as shareable or collective experience. Taken together, the chapters argue for a greater emphasis on the ways in which users employ discourse to manage this physical-virtual interface in digital interactions and in turn, produce “remixed” cultural practices that draw on diverse digital semiotic resources and reflect their everyday experiences of place and location. The book explores a wide range of topics and contexts which embody these dynamics, including livestreaming platforms, mourning in the digital age, e-service encounters, and Internet forums. While the overlay of physical and virtual information on location-based media is not a new phenomenon, this volume argues that, in the face of its increasing pervasiveness, we can better understand its unfolding and future directions for research by accounting for the significance of place in today’s interactions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, digital communication, pragmatics, and media studies.

AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS The new eighth edition of An Introduction to Sociolinguistics brings this valuable, bestselling textbook up to date with the latest in sociolinguistic research and pedagogy, providing a broad overview of the study of language in social context with accessible coverage of major concepts, theories, methods, issues, and debates within the field. This leading text helps students develop a critical perspective on language in society as they explore the complex connections between societal norms and language use. The eighth edition contains new and updated coverage of such topics as the societal aspects of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), multilingual societies and discourse, gender and sexuality, ideologies and language attitudes, and the social meanings of linguistic forms. Organized in four sections, this text first covers traditional language issues such as the distinction between languages and dialects, identification of regional and social variation within languages, and the role of context in language use and interpretation. Subsequent chapters cover approaches to research in sociolinguistics—variationist sociolinguistics, ethnography, and discourse analytic research—and address both macro– and micro-sociolinguistic aspects of multilingualism in national, transnational, global, and digital contexts. The concluding section of the text looks at language in relation to gender and sexuality, education, and language planning and policy issues. Featuring examples from a variety of languages and cultures that illustrate topics such as social and regional dialects, multilingualism, and the linguistic construction of identity, this text provides perspectives on both new and foundational research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Eighth Edition, remains the ideal textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate course in sociolinguistics, language and society, linguistic anthropology, applied and theoretical linguistics, and education. The new edition has also been updated to support classroom application with a range of effective pedagogical tools, including end-of-chapter written exercises and an instructor website, as well as materials to support further learning such as reading suggestions, research ideas, and an updated companion student website containing a searchable glossary, a review guide, additional exercises and examples, and links to online resources.

Digital collaboration has been established in higher education for many years. But when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, digital learning and virtual mobility became of utmost importance for higher education. In the international project »Digital and International Virtual Academic Cooperation« (DIVA), scholars from Israel, Australia, and Germany focused on intercultural learning and online collaboration. Based on their findings, they show how digital arrangements can be used in higher education, how digital teaching can be theorized, and what potential can be gained for post-pandemic teaching.