The concept of ‘Ruakh Ra‘ah’ (Evil Spirit), is extremely rare in the Tanach, but is found much more frequently in post-Biblical rabbinic literature and even more in publications by rabbis of the last two centuries. This study focuses on the quite neglected period of responsa literature after the Second World War until the present. This literature consist fo answers given to questions about religious rules. The notion of the 'evil spirit' is strongly connected to the ritual of washing hands in the morning, but also before a meal, in connection with sexual relations and with visiting a graveyard. The washing of hands is supposed to be necessary to ward off bad influences. This ritual can be understood in between mysticism, gender studies, magic and embodied religion. This book analyses the meaning and role of the ‘Ruakh Ra‘ah’ in a corpus of almost 200 rabbinic orthodox response from 1945-2000. What happens to the term Ruakh Ra‘ah in these modern responsa? Does the ritual persist without being associated with the Ruakh Ra‘ah, or does the term continue to be linked to the ritual, but reinterpreted in cause of the possible tension between the traditional rabbinic paradigm and the modern scientific knowledge paradigm. The connection between this ritual and the stratification of the (ultra) orthodox society and cosmological representations offers a clue to the rationale of this practice. Questions of identity, gender and community boundaries that divide insiders from outsiders (Jewish and non-Jewish) seem to be related to the discourse in the corpus on this ritual. As the Ruakh Ra‘ah stands at the intersection between magical perceptions, religion (ritual), and premodern science (medicine) it is suitable as a possible test case for the way in which modern rabbinic responsa deal with other archaic terms and concepts that are related or comparable to the Ruakh Raah. This book is relevant to the debate on the relation of religion to the modern world as it provides insights into the ways contemporary believers deal with the modern world, and the various mechanisms to deal with potential discrepancies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management, S-BPM ONE 2010, held in Karlsruhe, Germany in October 2010. The 10 revised full papers presented together with one invited keynote paper and three panel statements were carefully reviewed and selected from initially 17 submissions. The papers present innovative cross-disciplinary ideas, concepts, methods, tools and results in foundational and applied research as well as studies on the realization of such innovations in the real world - all based on the promising new paradigm of subject-oriented business process management.

'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.

This open access book deals with the role of written texts in an increasingly diverse and dynamic society, bringing together a series of studies anchored in the Scandinavian research tradition of sakprosa, which roughly translates as subject-oriented prose or professional communication. The authors examine the written texts capacity to transcend contextual boundaries, as a crucial factor in the importance of capturing and maintaining content as a manageable entity. The chapters each deal with a text type that manages complex content in a specialized way, including genre shifting in CSR reports, discourse networks in modern digital culture, digital and social media crisis communication, and epistemic positions in non-fiction. This book is relevant to fields such as text research, professional/digital communication, discourse analysis and literacy studies, and may also be of interest to disciplines such as history, rhetoric, organization studies, media studies/journalism, and linguistics. Catharina Nystrm Hg is Professor of Swedish at the Department for Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include plain language, genre and discourse analysis, organizational discourse, stylistics and text linguistics. Henrik Rahm is Associate Professor in Scandinavian Languages at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. Examples of previous research are diachronic journalistic discourse, legitimation strategies of registered nurses and clear language. His latest research includes language use in working life, discourses of state-owned enterprises, language of accounting and ritualization of corporate annual meetings. Gril Thomassen Hammerstad is Professor in Applied Linguistics and Head of the Centre for Academic and Professional Communication at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her research interests include language and communication across a variety of professional practices.

This study investigates prosody-syntax interactions from a functional perspective and based on authentic corpus data. Drawing on Halliday's well-known interpretation of the tone unit as an information unit, Halford's idea of a prosodically and syntactically defined talk unit and Esser's concept of abstract presentation structures, a modified talk unit model is developed. The talk unit is built up of one to many tone unit(s). The focus of both the quantitative and the functional analysis is on the interplay between prosodic status and syntactic status at tone unit boundaries by means of which talk units as parasyntactic units are established. The database is provided by a sample of about 50,000 words mainly taken from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English. The findings reveal that speakers have at their disposal and make use of prosody-syntax interactions in order to structure information effectively and to allow for or facilitate turn taking. This volume is not only of interest for corpus linguists, but for functionalists in general and intonationists in particular. In analysing the stylistic and pragmatic potential of talk units and applying corpus linguistic methodology, this study breaks new ground with regard to functional and empirical approaches to spoken English.