In a world in which advanced communication technologies have made the reporting of disasters and conflicts (also in the form of breaking news) a familiar and 'normalised' activity, the information we present here about television news reporting of the 2003 war in Iraq has implications that go beyond this particular conflict. Evaluation and Stance in War News functions as a tool kit for the critical evaluation of language in the news, both as raw data in need of interpretation and as carefully packaged products of 'information management' in need of 'unpacking'. The chapters offer an array of theoretical and empirical instruments for revealing, identifying, sifting, weighing and connecting patterns of language use that construct messages. These messages carry with them world views and value systems that can either create an ever wider divide or serve to build bridges between peoples and countries.

The ownership and funding of media organisations inevitably affects what news we receive everyday. But is public or private ownership better? Looking at how news is constructed in different contexts under public and commercial models, this book uses global comparative examples to give a topical insight into the world of broadcasting today.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

The high-pressured, fast-paced environment of television production leaves little time for producers to reflect on how the potentialities of texts and images will be interpreted outside of the immediate broadcast imperatives. This volume brings together the producers and analysts of television in a formal and productive way.

Considerable progress has been made in the use of corpora for research purposes to describe language in use, and more recently, through a CADS (corpus assisted discourse studies) approach, to identify the discourse features of specific text genres. While the potential benefits of working with corpora in the classroom have been recognised, there has been a lag in the promulgation of guidelines for carrying out meaningful corpus work with language learners and teachers in mind. The papers in this volume aim to make a contribution toward filling that gap by providing an in-depth account of innovative corpus work, most of which has actually been carried out with real learners in the classroom. Authors provide valuable insights into ways of structuring corpus work for specific target learners, as well as suggestions for resolving problematic issues that have arisen and avoiding errors that have been made with learners and in their own research and experimentation. The transparency and honesty with which they present their methodology and results, along with the successful techniques they have developed, constitute a step forward in defining good (and bad) practice in the use of corpora in learning.

This volume illustrates the role of language in political action by analyzing the discourse of various British and US institutions on the war in Iraq. It combines quantitative methods, based on a sophisticated modular corpus in order to identify regularly occurring lexical and semantic patterns, and qualitative context-based discourse analysis.

In the last decade, the availability of corpora and the technological advancements of corpus tools have increased dramatically. Applied linguists have greater access to data from around the world and in a variety of languages through websites, blogs, and social networking sites, and there is a high level of interest among these scholars in applying corpora and corpus-based methods to other research areas, particularly sociolinguistics. This innovative guidebook presents a systematic, in-depth account of using corpora in sociolinguistics. It introduces and expands the application of corpora and corpus approaches and tools in sociolinguistic research, surveys the growing number of studies in corpus-based sociolinguistics, and provides instructions and options for designing and developing corpus-based studies. Readers will find practical information on such contemporary topics as workplace registers, megacorpora, and using the web as a corpus. Vignettes, case studies, discussion questions, and activities throughout further enhance students’ involvement with the material and provide opportunities for hands-on practice of the methods discussed. Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics is a comprehensive and accessible guide, a must-read for any student or scholar interested in exploring this popular and promising approach to sociolinguistic research.