This volume serves as a comprehensive introduction to Time Series Analysis (TSA), used commonly in financial and engineering sciences, to demonstrate its potential to complement qualitative approaches in discourse analysis research. The book begins by discussing how time has previously been conceptualized in the literature, drawing on studies from variationist sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. The volume then segues into a discussion of how TSA is applied in other contexts in which observed values are expected to be dependent on earlier values, such as stock markets and sales figures, and introduces a range of discourse-specific contexts to show how the technique might be extended to analyze trends or shed further light on relevant themes in discourse over time. Each successive chapter features a different discourse context as a case study, from psychotherapy sessions, university lectures, and news articles, and looks at how studying different variables over time in each context – metaphors, involvement markers, and keywords, respectively – can contribute to a greater understanding of both present and future discourse activity in these settings. Taken together, this book highlights the value of TSA as a complementary approach to meaning-based analysis in discourse, making this ideal reading for graduate students and scholars in discourse analysis looking to employ quantitative methods in their research practice.

Discourse permeates human life, manifesting itself in all kinds of speech acts, from conversations to clinical dialogues between a patient and practitioner. While discourse has been studied within specific disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychology, over the last few decades an autonomous approach, known as Discourse Analysis, has emerged to develop its own theoretical and research agendas aimed at penetrating the nature and role of discourse in human life. This collection of case studies in discourse aims to examine these agendas in specific situations, and thus to contribute to the growing significance of this exciting field of inquiry. It thus presents a composite picture of what discourse analysis is and what it allows us to do in the area of speech analysis. The chapters deal with the kinds of discourses that characterize medical communication, media and public discourse, conflict resolution and reconciliation, juridical communication, gastronomical language, text messaging, education, and others. Written by active researchers in the fields of discourse analysis proper and its correlative field of argumentation theory, both the expert and the neophyte will be able to glean from the various chapters how this new discipline is evolving and what it can achieve in shedding light on the complexities of human interaction.0.

Aside from self-defence, a UN Security Council authorisation under Chapter VII is the only exception to the prohibition on the use of force. Authorisation of the use of force requires the Security Council to first determine whether that situation constitutes a ‘threat to the peace’ under Article 39. The Charter has long been interpreted as placing few bounds around how the Security Council arrives at such determinations. As such commentators have argued that the phrase ‘threat to the peace’ is undefinable in nature and lacking in consistency. Through a critical discourse analysis of the justificatory discourse of the P5 surrounding individual decisions relating to ‘threat to the peace’ (found in the meeting transcripts), this book demonstrates that each P5 member has a consistent definition and understanding of what constitutes a ‘threat to the peace’.

This book focuses on the multifarious aspects of ‘fuzzy boundaries’ in the field of discourse studies, a field that is marked by complex boundary work and a great degree of fuzziness regarding theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and the use of linguistic categories. Discourse studies is characterised by a variety of theoretical frameworks and disciplinary fields, research methodologies, and lexico-grammatical categories. The contributions in this book explore some of the nuances and implications of the fuzzy boundaries in these areas, resulting in a wide-reaching volume which will be of interest to students and scholars of discourse studies in fields including sociology, linguistics, international relations, philosophy, literary criticism and anthropology.

Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.

This novel and important book brings together insights from cultural studies and critical discourse analysis to examine the fruitful links between the two. Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis shows that critical discourse analysis is able to provide the analytic context, skills and tools by which we can study how language constructs, constitutes and shapes the social world and demonstrates in detail how the methodological approach of critical discourse analysis can enhance cultural studies. In a richly argued discussion, the authors show how marrying the methodology of critical discourse analysis with cultural studies enlarges our understanding of gender and ethnicity.

In the early 1990s, false reports of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait allowing premature infants to die by removing them from their incubators helped to justify the Persian Gulf War, just as spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction later undergirded support for the Iraq War in 2003. In The Discourse of Propaganda, John Oddo examines these and other such cases to show how successful wartime propaganda functions as a discursive process. Oddo argues that propaganda is more than just misleading rhetoric generated by one person or group; it is an elaborate process that relies on recontextualization, ideally on a massive scale, to keep it alive and effective. In a series of case studies, he analyzes both textual and visual rhetoric as well as the social and material conditions that allow them to circulate, tracing how instances of propaganda are constructed, performed, and repeated in diverse contexts, such as speeches, news reports, and popular, everyday discourse. By revealing the agents, (inter)texts, and cultural practices involved in propaganda campaigns, The Discourse of Propaganda shines much-needed light on the topic and challenges its readers to consider the complicated processes that allow propaganda to flourish. This book will appeal not only to scholars of rhetoric and propaganda but also to those interested in unfolding the machinations motivating America’s recent military interventions.