The study of media, texts and culture(s) and especially the analysis of interdependent relationships between them has become a major concern in various academic fields, such as intercultural communication, contrastive textology, comparative cultural studies, historical and intercultural pragmatics. Starting from the observation that in contrastive studies of mass media communication not only the theoretical status of “culture” often remains unclear but also the interdependent relation between the theoretical conceptualization of “culture” and the methodological approach of text analysis, this volume brings together linguistic mass media studies with intercultural, diachronic, intermedia and interlingual perspectives. Apart from offering new empirical insights into the field, this volume’s aim is to advance and to broaden the methodological and theoretical discussions involved. Comparing such diverse formats and genres like newspapers, TV news shows, TV commercials, radio phone-ins, obituaries, fanzines and film subtitles, the contributions of this volume illustrate the complexity of the growing field of contrastive media analysis.

This is a book about comparison in linguistics in general, rather than 'contrastive analysis' as a distinct branch of linguistics. It addresses the question 'Does the analytical apparatus used by linguists allow comparisons to be made across languages?' Four major domains are considered in turn: derivational morphology, syntax, semantics & pragmatics, and discourse. Contributions cover a broad spectrum of linguistic disciplines, ranging from contrastive linguistics and linguistic typology to translation studies and historical linguistics.

This book is devoted to the analysis of cross-media and cross-cultural peculiarities of Russian, British and American media discourse from the intertextual perspective. The study of a complex variety of intertextual links which exist between texts and genres is a contemporary aspect in the theory of intertextuality. There are numerous theoretical approaches in the study of intertextuality, but there is a lack of an empirically profound framework for its analysis across many disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach to the study of intertextuality is a necessary step to investigate this phenomenon comprehensively. This book offers an alternative approach to the study of intertextuality, singling out intra-textual, textual and inter-genre levels on which this phenomenon comes to the fore.

Why is a raven like a writing-desk? The concept of similarity lies at the heart of this new book on contrastive analysis. Similarity judgements depend partly on properties of the objects being compared, and partly on what the person judging considers to be relevant to the assessment; similarity thus has both objective and subjective aspects. The author shows how contrastive analysis and translation theory make use of the concept in different ways, and explains how it relates to the problematic notions of equivalence and tertium comparationis. The book then develops a meaning-based contrastive methodology, and outlines one theory of semantic structure which can be used in this methodology. The approach is illustrated with four sample studies covering different kinds of phenomena in some European languages. The final part of the book proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to cover contrastive rhetoric: the aim is to suggest a unified approach linking aspects of semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric. Keywords: similarity, contrastive analysis, functional grammar, semantics, rhetoric, translation.

This volume will give readers insight into how genres are characterised by the patterns of frequency and distribution of linguistic features across a number of European languages. The material presented in this book will also stimulate further corpus-based contrastive research including more languages, more genres and different types of corpora. This is the first special issue of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, a publication that addresses the interface between the two disciplines and offers a platform to scholars who combine both methodologies to present rigorous and interdisciplinary findings about language in real use. Corpus linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific thought, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a meticulous methodology based on mathematics and statistics, while Pragmatics is characterized by its effort in the interpretation of intended meaning in real language.

Public information messages are an important means of state-citizen communication in today's societies. Using this genre, citizens are directed to “never ever drink and drive”, to “slow down” and to “learn to say no”. Yet, this book presents the first in-depth analysis of public information messages from a linguistic perspective, and indeed also from a cross-cultural perspective. Specifically, the study, adopting genre analysis, contrasts a corpus of state-run national public information campaigns in Germany and Ireland. A taxonomy of moves is developed inductively and the interactional features of the genre are analysed and related to the context of use. The comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, the in-depth analysis and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to researchers and students in (contrastive) discourse analysis, (cross-cultural) pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, advertising, social psychology, mass communication and media studies. Copy-writers will also profit from the insights gained, particularly within the context of an increase in Europe-wide public information campaigns.

This book decodes commercial news discourses from the perspective of cognitive semantics. It attaches considerable importance to the bodily experientialism and linguistic embodiment advocated in discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics and explores the complex yet thought-provoking correlation between overt language and covert cognition by focusing on contrastive analyses of metaphors, image schemas, and stance markers in texts. On the basis of the analyses, the author discusses the linguistic applications, lexical devices and personal experiences, along with their embodied mechanisms, revealing the linguistic strategies, embodied cognitive linguistic actions and constructive thoughts used in media discourses on product promotion, human resources deployment, and commodity problem resolution. In turn, this sheds light on how linguistic selections and cognitive mechanisms are used in composing media news and on how public cognition on certain social and business issues might be framed. The combination of cognitive semantics and commercial discourse analysis offers comprehensive and rewarding insights into the cross-cultural research of both cognitive actions and linguistic behavior reflected in news reports and highlights the correlation between the use of wording and cognitive construction in discourses, which broadens the scope of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Further, the use of analytical measures and the effective integration of discourse analysis and cognitive semantics lend the book additional analytical authenticity, providing an empirical foundation for cross-cultural communication studies.