This volume assembles eleven articles addressing current concerns in discourse studies from an empirical perspective. Engaging with highly topical issues, they indicate the potential of an approach to the construction of discourse via corpus-based analysis, experimentation, or combined methodologies. The subject matters of the contributions, delivered by renowned scholars and dealing with either one or several languages, range from mechanisms through which information structure, connection and discourse organization are realized, to prosody as a determinant of hierarchy and specific functions of discourse markers, as well as innovative tools for visualizing discourse structure. The resulting volume addresses scholars working in a variety of topics, who either wish to incorporate empirical methods to their research or whose work is already empirically oriented and wish to gain insight into empirical evidence on state-of-the-art discursive phenomena.

Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction is the first book to provide a concise, straightforward guide for students and researchers who are interested in understanding and using discourse analysis. The authors reflect on the practice of analyzing discourse and the potential for revealing the processes of social construction that constitute social and organizational life. Addressed to graduate students, academics, and experienced researchers, this book is a comprehensive guide for those new to discourse analysis as well as for researchers in need of a complement to other modes of inquiry.

Unexpressed Subjects in English: An Empirical Analysis of Narrative and Conversational Discourse challenges previous assumptions of what is grammatically possible in English through an examination of contexts in which speakers omit subjects, demonstrating how language structure is influenced by communicative needs. Through corpus-based analysis of both interactive conversations and monologic narratives, Amy M. Lindstrom reveals how the discourse/pragmatic factors of accessibility and chronological ordering, the prosodic effect of linking, and the mechanical effect of priming intersect to provide a rigorous account of subject (un)expression in spoken American English. Higher degrees of linking, cohesion, and connection lead to more unexpressed subjects. Lindstrom also analyzes frequent constructions with unexpressed subjects vis-à-vis paths of grammaticalization. The author presents a measurement of discourse connectedness that shows how the intersection of prosody and pragmatics illustrates the powerful effect of spontaneous discourse in shaping grammar. This study adds to our understanding of language and cognition by contributing to our knowledge of the conceptualization, categorization, and representation of experience and memory.

This volume sets out to foreground the issues of youth identity in the context of current sociolinguistic and discourse research on identity construction. Based on detailed empirical analyses, the twelve chapters offer examinations of how youth identities from late childhood up to early twenties are locally constructed in text and talk. The settings and types of social organization investigated range from private letters to graffiti, from peer group talk to video clips, from schoolyard to prison. Comparably, a wide range of languages is brought into focus, including Danish, German, Greek, Japanese, and Turkish. Drawing on various discourse analytic paradigms (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis), the contributions examine and question notions with currency in the field, such as young people's linguistic creativity and resistance to mainstream norms. At the same time, they demonstrate the embeddedness of constructions of youth identities in local activities and communities of practice where they interact with other social identities and factors, in particular gender and ethnicity.

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.

A systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. Introduces three approaches and explains the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach.

This study deals with interactional processes in conversational discourse, and the way they may get 'syntacticized' into grammatical constructions. It investigates the link between discourse function and syntactic form, and the ways in which grammatical form is a reflection on communicative function, through examining the communicative functions of Left-Dislocation in English. The investigation is corpus-based, and focuses on spontaneous conversation, but other discourse types are also taken into account. The overall perspective is resolutely empirical, and preconceptions about the possible functions of Left-Dislocation are avoided. Contents 1. Theoretical preliminaries; 2. Referent-introduction (1): interaction; 3. Referent-introduction (2): recoverability; 4. Referent-introduction (3): topicality; 5. Other functions of LD; 6. Prosodic aspects of LD; 7. LD in other discourse types; 8. A broader perspecitive; 9. General conclusion; Notes, Appendices, References, Subject and author indices.