Language is like a slingshot, stretching for various communicative targets. This book reveals the art of purposive and powerful language stretching.

This innovative book examines the discourse of reality television, and the elasticity of language in the popular talent show The Voice from a cross-cultural perspective. Analysing how and why elastic language is used in persuasion and comforting, a comparison between Chinese and English is made, and the authors highlight the special role that elastic language plays in effective interactions and strategic communication. Through the lens of the language variance of two of the world’s most commonly spoken languages, the insights and resources provided by this book are expected to advance knowledge in the fields of contrastive pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, and inform strategies in bridging different cultures. This study highlights the need to give the elastic use of language the attention it deserves, and reveals how language is non-discrete and strategically stretchable. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students engaged in elastic/vague language studies, cross-cultural pragmatics, media linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

Based on Chinese and English online data, this book discusses elasticity in health communication from a cross-cultural perspective.

The transient response of a rigid spherical inclusion of arbitrary density embedded in an elastic medium due to an incident pulse is examined. The Fourier-integral method is used, and an exact solution of the response is obtained. It is found that the acceleration and velocity of the inclusion are substantially different from those of the medium. A slight difference in the time history of the displacement between the inclusion and the medium is also noted. (Author).

No. 19 with slip including the first series, no. 17-19, xvi p. at end.