This book is to date the first monograph-length study of the popular American political TV series House of Cards. It proposes an encompassing analysis of the first three seasons from the unusual angles of discourse and dialogue. The study of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the ruthless main protagonist, Frank Underwood, is completed by a pragmatic and cognitive approach exposing the main characters’ manipulative strategies to win over the other. Taking into account the socio-cultural context and the specificities of the TV medium, the volume focuses on the workings of interaction as well as the impact of the direct address to the viewer. The book critically uses the latest theories in pragmatics and stylistics in its attempt at providing a pragma-rhetorical theory of manipulation.

This book focuses on how readers can be 'manipulated' during their experience of reading fictional texts and how they are incited to perceive, process and interpret certain textual patterns. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry and novels, the book deciphers various linguistic, pragmatic and multimodal techniques. These are skilfully used by authors to achieve specific effects through a subtle manipulation of deixis, metalepsis, dialogue, metaphors, endings, inferences or rhetorical, narratorial and typographical control. Exploring contemporary texts such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin, chapters delve into how readers are pragmatically positioned or cognitively (mis)directed as the author guides their attention and influences their judgment. They also show how readers' responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation as readers challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.

This volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP’s, recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental, if not universal, category, whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance, personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis, and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position), as well as their pragmatic functions in an extensive range of genres such as advertising, TV series, charity appeals, mother/child interaction or computer-mediated communication. Moreover, one section is devoted to the pragmatics of antecedentless pronouns and so-called ‘impersonal’ personal forms. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and students interested in the pragmatics of functional words.

This volume brings together reflections on the relationship between politics and storytelling, especially within the democratic context. Examples are drawn from the ancient and modern worlds, from classical Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to television, science fiction, and comic books, in order to examine the relationship between the philosophical and the poetical. As a political phenomenon, storytelling is used to confirm the prejudices and uphold the principles that prevail within the culture that produces it, while also providing a means for sparking a criticism of that culture from within. What role should literature play in educating a population, especially as regards one’s civic responsibilities and relationship to the political regime, and how does it compete with or complement rational inquiry in providing that education? What observable effects does storytelling in fact tend to have, especially among democratic peoples, and what effects does it have on their political identities, viewpoints, commitments, and behavior? Which passions does it stoke: our hopes or our fears, our suspicions or our loyalties? Can storytelling in democratic times offer resistance to the logic and momentum of democratization or does it only reliably propel it further forward? Does democratic literature only cater to the satisfaction of personal appetites or can it ennoble people so that they are more apt to fulfill their responsibilities to each other as moral agents and fellow citizens? This volume takes diverse approaches to addressing questions like these.

Including examples from a broad range of sources, this book explores the pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' across time, genre and medium, to provide an encompassing theoretical framework for the second-person pronoun. With its unique inter-disciplinary perspective, it will interest students and scholars of both linguistics and literature.

This volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics, exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms, from written to spoken to visual, in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis, to the macro-level structure of online interaction, all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types, the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies, highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research. Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies and digitally mediated communication.