In recent years, the use of Web-mediated digital technologies has constantly grown in importance, reshaping the communication landscape in all professional activities. Web 2.0 applications and platforms have evolved dramatically, exceeding all expectations, and have had an impact on all areas of activity, from personal and social to political and economic. A crucial role in this radical transformation has been played by social media, i.e. online resources enabling users to connect, interact, and share contents. They have changed social relations profoundly on an individual level, but also in their professional dimensions, transforming the dynamics of how professionals work, share knowledge and relate to each other and to their clients. This book explores online professional blogging and networking platforms, discussing methodological issues involved in analysing webmediated professional communication in a genre- and discourse- analytical perspective, with a focus on the structural and textual properties of genres on the Internet. The discursive objects investigated include professional weblogs, and in particular law blogs, professional groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, and LinkedIn job ads. Among the aspects examined are continuity with pre-existing traditional genres, generic integrity, and the debated status of social networking sites as platform users’ communities of practice.

Presenting the digital humanities as both a domain of practice and as a set of methodological approaches to be applied to corpus linguistics and translation, chapters in this volume provide a novel and original framework to triangulate research for pursuing both scientific and educational goals within the digital humanities. They also highlight more broadly the importance of data triangulation in corpus linguistics and translation studies. Putting forward practical applications for digging into data, this book is a detailed examination of how to integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches through case studies, sample analysis and practical examples.

Contemporary society has witnessed radical changes in the field of communications in terms of how messages and meanings are disseminated. Digitalization and the Internet have signalled an exponential rise in the circulation of multimodal texts in which different semiotic resources are orchestrated together to construct meaning in all areas of social life, across languages and cultures, and in diverse specialized discourse domains. This has foregrounded the need to examine the semiotic functions, affordances, and issues at stake in a range of multimodal discourse forms, while simultaneously highlighting the importance of critical multimodal literacy in audiences and learners. This volume develops and extends pioneering research on the intersection between multimodality and specialized discourse. Eight newly commissioned studies offer innovative perspectives on multimodal research methodologies and applications in a variety of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts for practitioners and scholars alike. The volume offers a glimpse at future directions in this dynamic and ever-evolving area of investigation focusing on the synergy between verbal and non-verbal modes of communication in the digital age. Each chapter explores an original area of application: academic, economic, scientific, marketing, legal, medical, political, and tourism. The contributors approach multimodality from a range of theoretical and methodological viewpoints including synchronic and diachronic corpus-based and corpus-aided studies, critical discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. Analytical tools such as multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, multimodal transcription, and multimodal annotation software capable of representing the interplay of different semiotic modes - speech, intonation, direction of gaze, facial expressions, gesturing, and spatial positioning of interlocutors - are employed. The diversity of research strands contained in the volume illustrates just some of the vast areas of multimodal knowledge dissemination that are still unmapped. As a cornerstone of communication, multimodality needs exploring in all its facets. These contributions aim to further that cause.

This book presents an overview of the wide variety of digital genres used by researchers to produce and communicate knowledge, perform new identities and evaluate research outputs. It explores the role of digital genres in the repertoires of genres used by local communities of researchers to communicate both locally and globally, both with experts and the interested public, and sheds light on the purposes for which researchers engage in digital communication and on the semiotic resources they deploy to achieve these purposes. The authors discuss the affordances of digital genres but also the challenges that they pose to researchers who engage in digital communication. The book explores what researchers can do with these genres, what meanings they can make, who they interact with, what identities they can construct and what new relations they establish, and, finally, what language(s) they deploy in carrying out all these practices.

Second-language Discourse in the Digital World illustrates a new, practice-driven approach to technology in second-language (L2) learning that begins with what L2 users do when they connect with others online. With its rich set of examples from a number of different languages and a variety of digital platforms, in and beyond the classroom, this book provides a structured account of L2 computer-mediated discourse. The book is divided into four sections. Section I considers how new media have changed language learning. Section II is about L2 participation in digital forms and practices in online communities. Sections III centers around L2 linguistic and other semiotic practices, including the use of multimodal and multilingual resources while section IV analyzes social practices to explore how networked L2 users build, maintain and challenge relationships. Written in accessible style, the volume will be an important read to anyone interested in L2 use and learning in Web 2.0.Finalist for the AAAL 2019 book award.

The use of corpora has conventionally been envisioned as being either corpus-based or corpus-driven. While the formal definition of the latter term has been widely accepted since it was established by Tognini-Bonelli (2001), it is often applied to studies that do not, in fact, fullfil the fundamental requirement of a theory-neutral starting point. This volume proposes the term pattern-driven as a more precise alternative. The chapters illustrate a variety of methods that fall under this broad methodology, such as the extraction of lexical bundles, POS-grams and semantic frames, and demonstrate how these approaches can uncover new understandings of both synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena.

Our everyday lives are increasingly being lived through electronic media, which are changing our interactions and our communications in ways that we are only beginning to understand. In Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, editors Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester team up with top scholars in the field to shed light on the ways language is being used in, and shaped by, these new media contexts. Topics explored include: how Web 2.0 can be conceptualized and theorized; the role of English on the worldwide web; how use of social media such as Facebook and texting shape communication with family and friends; electronic discourse and assessment in educational and other settings; multimodality and the "participatory spectacle" in Web 2.0; asynchronicity and turn-taking; ways that we engage with technology including reading on-screen and on paper; and how all of these processes interplay with meaning-making. Students, professionals, and individuals will discover that Discourse 2.0 offers a rich source of insight into these new forms of discourse that are pervasive in our lives.