Discourse In and Through the Media: Recontextualizing and Reconceptualizing Expert Discourse

This book is a result of the 2013 CLAVIER Conference held in Modena in November 2013, and includes a selection of the papers presented on that occasion. As the title suggests, this volume encourages cross-generic and cross-disciplinary investigations, in order to advocate integrated approaches to the study of media discourse regarding both theoretical background and practical applications.

Bringing together a wide range of case studies, the book fosters debate on a variety of aspects related to the representation of specialised discourse in and through the media, including, for example, voice and point of view, argumentative practices, knowledge construction, multimodality, the re-contextualization and re-conceptualization of knowledge, opinion formation and peer-to-peer communication, and popularization in and through traditional, digital and social media.

Taken together, the contributions to this volume provide extensive exemplification of the type of research currently being conducted on these issues. The variety of the questions posed and the wide array of methods used here therefore represent a substantial contribution to sharpening existing knowledge and furthering the ongoing debate among scholars in the field.

Marina Bondi is Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. She has been publishing for over thirty years, and her range of interests is varied. Her descriptive research has focused mainly on textual and pragmatic aspects of academic genres, on the characteristics of argumentative texts and on the analytic potential in quantitative and qualitative terms of small specialized corpora. Her approach combines attention to discourse analysis and to corpus linguistics, focusing on the notion and role of genre in language variation and on the importance of phraseology in language choice.

Silvia Cacchiani is Researcher in English Language and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her works have mainly dealt with semantic and pragmatic aspects of intensifiers, but she has also published in the areas of construction morphology, optimality theory, lexicology and lexicography, and testing. Her recent publications include “Standardised Language Testing: Contemporary Issues and Applications” (with Sian Morgan and Marc Silver) in Rivista Italiana di Linguistica Applicata (2012) and Understanding Written Practical Instructions: Studies in English and Italian Multiple Texts (2013).

Davide Mazzi is Research Fellow in English Language and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His research activities focus on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and argumentation studies, with a particular concentration on legal, academic and news discourse. His recent publications include ““Our reading would lead to…”: Corpus Perspectives on Pragmatic Argumentation in US Supreme Court Judgments” in Journal of Argumentation in Context (2014) and “Semantic sequences and the pragmatics of medical research article writing” in Insights into Medical Communication (2015).

"The inclusion of the final chapters which provide new methodology ... and massive data resources for further study are invaluable for the new researcher hoping to build multimodal literacy or for the seasoned researcher hoping to recontexualize their work to new venues, either in response to or for prevention of content collapse. This volume and its parent conference expertly engage a topic from a linguistic perspective which reaches beyond the bounds of our field, making the work catalogued here valuable to a variety of disciplines and professions. This furthers the perception of our discipline as a science—it recontextualizes our internal discourse in a way which highlights its inherent, external value. The essays in this volume also present an example of the diverse, yet cooperative nature of linguistics by showcasing complex syntactic data next to qualitative data bookended by theory. [...] I recommend this volume not only to any linguist, but also to anyone studying marketing, interpersonal communication, cognitive science, social networks (or social networking), genre studies, or broadcasting."

Kelly E Wright University of Kentucky LINGUIST List 27.4342

Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli

Alison Duguid

Jan Engberg

Gregory Furmaniak

Robert Gutounig

Susan Hunston

Morana Lukao

Stefanie M. Maci

Carmen Daniela Maier

Ilaria Moschini

Elsa Pic