Crispin Thurlow

Adam Jaworski

Tourism Discourse offers new insights into the role of spoken, written and visual discourse in representating and producing tourism as a global cultural industry. With a view to the interplay between the symbolic and economic orders of global mobility, the book is grounded in empirically-based studies of key tourism genres.

Language and Global Mobility

Tourism Discourse

Christa Dürscheid

Federica Diémoz

The first dedicated volume of its kind, Visualizing Digital Discourse brings together sociolinguists and discourse analysts examining the role of visual communication in digital media. The volume showcases work from leading, established and emerging scholars from across Europe, covering a diverse range of digital media platforms such as messaging, video-chat, gaming and wikis; visual modalities such as emojis, video and layout; methodologies like discourse analysis, ethnography and conversation analysis; as well as data from different languages. With an opening chapter by Rodney Jones, the volume is organized into three parts: Besides Words and Writing, The Social Life of Images, and Designing Multimodal Texts. From the perspective of these broad domains, chapters tackle some of the major ideological, interactional and institutional implications of visuality for digital discourse studies. The first part, beginning with a co-authored chapter by Crispin Thurlow, focuses on micro-level visual practices and their macro-level framing – all with particular regard for emojis. The second part, beginning with a chapter from Sirpa Leppänen, examines the ways visual resources are used for managing personal relations, and the wider cultural politics of visual representation in these practices. The third part, beginning with a chapter by Hartmut Stöckl, considers organizational contexts where users deploy visual resources for more transactional, often commercial ends.

Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives

Visualizing Digital Discourse

Elite Discourse examines how language and communication – or just discourse – define, mediate and legitimize class privilege. It does so from the perspective of those people and places who often stand to gain most from inequality. Collectively, chapters consider language and communication that is elitist in its appeal to distinction, excellence and superiority; they also describe the ways in which various groups and institutions lay claim to ‘eliteness’ as a way to position themselves (or to be positioned by others) as elite or non-elite. As such, chapters are concerned as much with discourse about elite status as they are with the discourse of elites – those groups commonly defined by their material wealth, political control, or demographic rarity. Ultimately, Elite Discourse views ‘elite’ as something we do, rather than something we necessarily have or are. Indeed, elite status and eliteness point us to the rhetorical strategies by which many people differentiate themselves and by which they access symbolic-material resources for shoring up their status, privilege and power. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Semiotics.

The rhetorics of status, privilege and power

Elite Discourse

Kristine Mroczek

Digital Discourse offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by simply bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing current technologies like instant messaging, textmessaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, gaming, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, and French). The volume is organized around topics of primary interest to sociolinguists, including genre, style and stance. With commentaries from the two most internationally recognized scholars of new media discourse (Naomi Baron and Susan Herring) and essays by well-established scholars and new voices in sociolinguistics, the volume will be more current, more diverse, and more thematically unified than any other collection on the topic.

Crispin Thurlow

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