This collection explores the discursive strategies and linguistic resources underpinning conflict and polarization, taking a multidisciplinary approach to examine the ways in which conflict is constructed across a diverse range of contexts. The volume is divided into two sections as a means of identifying two different dimensions to conflict construction and bridging the gap between different perspectives through a constructivist framework. The first part comprises chapters looking at sociopolitical conflicts across specific geographic contexts across the US, Europe and Latin America. The second half of the book unpacks sociocultural conflicts, those not defined by physical borders but shaped by ideological differences on core values, such as on religion, gender and the environment. Drawing on frameworks across such fields as linguistics, critical discourse analysis, rhetoric studies and cognitive studies, the book offers new insights into the discursive polarization that permeates contemporary communicative interactions and the ways in which a better understanding of conflict and its origins might serve as a mechanism for providing new ways forward. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in critical discourse analysis, linguistics, rhetoric studies and peace and conflict studies.

Metaphor studies is a vibrant and fascinating field. The present book brings together the work of influential researchers analyzing metaphor empirically from Critical Socio-Cognitive perspectives (CSCDA). The case studies focus on the role of metaphor as a powerful strategy for the creation of specific world views and ideological frames, as well as for their contestation in current crises.

Conflicts are inherent to human society, but most of them do not concern us directly as participants or eyewitnesses. How we see social conflicts depends on how they are presented to us. This volume gathers together writings by contemporary specialists in different fields, from different backgrounds, cultures and locations, but united by a common thread: the conviction that history and current affairs are constructed and presented, not according to the facts themselves, but according to media, culture, politics, gender, religion and other factors.

The Routledge Handbook of Descriptive Rhetorical Studies and World Languages offers a useful collection of papers that presents rhetorical analysis of the discoursal practice in different cultural settings. Covering issues from America to Europe and Asia, and topics from politics to media, education to science, agriculture to literature, and so on, the handbook describes how language can guide listeners’ interpretations, alter their perceptions and shape their worldviews. This book offers a solid foundation for rhetorical studies to become an essential discipline in arts and humanities, engendering innovative theory and applications in areas such as linguistics, literature, history, cultural studies, political science and sociology. This handbook will be crucial for students and researchers in areas such as literature and linguistics, communication studies, political science and arts and humanities in general. This book will also be useful to social science, education, business, law, science and engineering departments due to its coverage of rhetoric in a multidisciplinary and multilingual context. Chapter 16 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Natural language understanding systems require a knowledge base provided with formal representations reflecting the structure of human beings' cognitive system. Although surface semantics can be sufficient in some other systems, the construction of a robust knowledge base guarantees its use in most natural language processing applications, thus consolidating the concept of resource reuse. This conference deals with meaning and knowledge representation in the context of natural language understanding from the perspective of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, text analytics or linked data and semantic web technologies.

Political Discourse Analysis addresses the challenges facing political actors at all levels of society and across a range of regimes. It shows how discursive legitimisation strategies can vary on a continuum ranging from the stabilising effects of institutional discourse and the management of destabilising factors inherent in new types of media to the destabilising potential of rhetorical devices and deliberate de-legitimisation strategies used to attack opponents. The diverse approaches show how political actors strive to maintain control in the context of democratic deficit and crisis in developed societies while addressing growing global threats to stability in all regimes. While many actors seek legitimisation through the institutional structure, media or rhetoric, others may seek to weaken any opposition to them through de-legitimisation. In this collection Butler provides the reader with replicable methods that can be adapted to political contexts.

Bringing together trust research, rhetoric, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this book formulates an analytical program for conceptualizing and defining trustworthiness as an empirical research object in social interaction. Revisiting Trustworthiness in Social Interaction examines trustworthiness as a relational and dynamic concept. It reviews sociological and rhetorical approaches to the study of trustworthiness and respecifies it as an interactional phenomenon displayed, tested and negotiated by participants in social interaction. It identifies four participant orientations of trustworthiness that may be foregrounded in peoples’ dynamic identity projects, and it defines the phenomena 'character-bound displays' and 'sequential negotiation of character', both indicative of participants’ orientation to trustworthiness. In this way, the book turns the theoretical concept of trustworthiness into an empirical object of interaction analysis, pointing to a vast number of interactional indicators, which allow interaction analysts to explore if and how interactants orient to trustworthiness in an encounter. Exemplary cases from both mundane and institutional encounters are analyzed using ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis showing how trustworthiness is done, challenges, achived, negotiated and lost in interaction. The intended audiences are scholars of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, rhetoric and the social sciences, especially communication, organizational and leadership studies, and their students.