The papers in this volume focus on the application of systemic functional grammar to the analysis of texts, both highly-valued and everyday, both written and spoken. The texts are studied in terms of the linguistic resources that contribute to the realization of its meaning potential.

This book covers a broad range of issues in the studies of text and discourse. It combines a theoretical framework with empirical engagement, and brings together various approaches to these two phenomena from the structural, functional and cognitive perspectives. While this topic has been widely discussed in recent years, such studies have mostly focused on specific language and discourse types. This work, however, presents the analysis of texts from American, British, Azerbaijani, French and Russian discourses across various types and genres, and adopts an exclusive focus on pragmatic and cognitive aspects. The study of these two aspects can help reveal not only global and local (cultural) identities, but also the specific features of their discourse types and genres. As such, the book also pays extensive attention to the role the studies of text and discourse can play in exploring globalization and intercultural communication.

′This volume is the most comprehensive overview to date of sociologically orientated approaches to text and discourse analysis and is worth reading even for those who are interested only in purely linguistiv approaches to text and discourse. Its main merit, I think, is that it intorduces approaches which up to now have hardley been admitted into the universe of scientific discourse′ - Discourse Studies Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis provides the most comprehensive overview currently available of linguistic and sociological approaches to text and discourse analysis. Among the 10 linguistic and sociological models surveyed in this book some of the more important are Grounded Theory, Content Analysis, Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. The book presents each approach according to a standardised format, which allows for direct systematic comparisons. The fully annotated lists of sources provide readers with an additional means of evaluation of the competing analytical methods. Interdisciplinary and international in its aims, Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis suggests the benefits both linguists and sociologists will derive from a more intimate knowledge of each others′ methods and procedures.

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

Aimed at equipping a new generation of scholars and students with the essential tools for analyzing discourse, this handbook provides an overview of key research fields and an introduction to the various methodologies, concepts and areas of investigation in discourse.

In recent years, research in cognitive linguistics has expanded its interests to cover a variety of texts – spoken, written, or multimodal. Analytical tools such as conceptual metaphor, frame semantics, mental spaces and grammatical constructions have been productively applied in various discourse contexts. In this volume, originally published as a special issue of English Text Construction 3:2 (2010), the contributors, a mix of established and emerging authors in the field, analyse broadcast and print journalism, argumentative scientific discourse, radio lectures on music, and the main literary genres (the poetry of Szymborska and bpNichol, the drama of Shakespeare, the modernist prose of Virginia Woolf and recent fiction by John Banville). Collectively the findings suggest a need to broaden and refine the cognitive linguistic repertoire, while also uncovering new ways to interpret textual data. The book will appeal to researchers and graduate students with interests in cognitive poetics and linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and construction grammar.

This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.