This multi-faceted collection of research papers on Advice in Discourse focuses on advisory practices in different contexts. Data is drawn from academic, educational and training settings, health-related practices, and computer-mediated communication. The languages involved are Cantonese, English, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. The chapters treat professional and institutional practices, practices that contain peer interaction within an institutional framework, and non-institutional peer interaction, as well as solicited and non-solicited advice in written and spoken form. The work reported on clearly demonstrates the complexity of the advisory activity, which needs to be studied in its cultural framework and interactional context. The richness and diversity of this practice is studied from different methodological angles, covering qualitative and quantitative as well as theoretical and empirical analyses. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the research field, thought-provoking theoretical discussions and extensive references for future research. It is essential for linguists, advice-practitioners and for those who want to learn more about the discourse of advice.

This multi-faceted collection of research papers on Advice in Discourse focuses on advisory practices in different contexts. Data is drawn from academic, educational and training settings, health-related practices, and computer-mediated communication. The languages involved are Cantonese, English, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. The chapters treat professional and institutional practices, practices that contain peer interaction within an institutional framework, and non-institutional peer interaction, as well as solicited and non-solicited advice in written and spoken form. The work reported on clearly demonstrates the complexity of the advisory activity, which needs to be studied in its cultural framework and interactional context. The richness and diversity of this practice is studied from different methodological angles, covering qualitative and quantitative as well as theoretical and empirical analyses. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the research field, thought-provoking theoretical discussions and extensive references for future research. It is essential for linguists, advice-practitioners and for those who want to learn more about the discourse of advice.

Economic reasoning has thus far dominated the field of public policy analysis. This new introduction to the field posits that policy analysis should have both a broader interdisciplinary base—including criteria from such fields as political science, sociology, law, and philosophy, as well as economics—and also a broader audience in order to foster democratic debate. To achieve these goals, MacRae and Whittington have organized their textbook around the construction of decision matrices using multiple criteria, exploring the uses of the decision matrix formulation more fully than other texts. They describe how to set up the matrix, fill in cells and combine criteria, and use it as an aid for decision making. They show how ethical assessment of the affects that alternatives have on various parties differs from political analysis, and then they extend the use of the decision matrix to consider alternatives by affected parties, periods of time, or combined factors. The authors also thoughtfully address the role of expert advice in the policy process, widening the scope of the field to describe a complex system for the creation and use of knowledge in a democracy. An extended case study of HIV/AIDS policy follows each chapter (in installments), immediately illustrating the application of the material. The book also contains a glossary. Expert Advice for Policy Choice provides a new basis for graduate education in public policy analysis and can also serve as a text in planning, evaluation research, or public administration. In addition, it will be of interest to students and professionals wishing to aid policy choice who work in such fields as sociology, political science, psychology, public health, and social work.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

This collection explores the changing nature of health discourse in different digital environments. It offers sustained discourse analyses of a number of interactions generated through the affordances and constraints of these new social contexts, which are affecting health communication in subtle and profound ways.

The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.

The Discourse of Public Participation Media takes a fresh look at what ‘ordinary’ people are doing on air – what they say, and how and where they get to say it. Using techniques of discourse analysis to explore the construction of participant identities in a range of different public participation genres, Joanna Thornborrow argues that the role of the ‘ordinary’ person in these media environments is frequently anything but. Tracing the development of discourses of public participation media, the book focusses particularly on the 1990s onwards when broadcasting was expanding rapidly: the rise of the TV talk show, increasing formats for public participation in broadcast debate and discussion, and the explosion of reality TV in the first decade of the 21st century. During this period, traditional broadcasting has also had to move with the times and incorporate mobile and web-based communication technologies as new platforms for public access and participation - text and email as well as the telephone - and an audience that moves out of the studio and into the online spaces of chat rooms, comment forums and the ‘twitterverse’. This original study examines the shifting discourses of public engagement and participation resulting from these new forms of communication, making it an ideal companion for students of communication, media and cultural studies, media discourse, broadcast talk and social interaction.