This book provides an overview of a range of quantitative methods, presenting a thorough analytical toolbox which will be of practical use to researchers across the social sciences as they face the challenges raised by new technology-driven language practices. The book is driven by a reflexive mind-set which views quantifying methods as complementary rather than in opposition to qualitative methods, and the chapters analyse a multitude of different intra- and extra-textual context levels essential for the understanding of how meaning is (re-)constructed in society. Uniting contributions from a range of national and disciplinary traditions, the chapters in this volume bring together state-of-the-art research from British, Canadian, French, German and Swiss authors representing the fields of Political Science, Sociology, Linguistics, Computer Science and Statistics. It will be of particular interest to discourse analysts, but also to other scholars working in the digital humanities and with big data of any kind.

This handbook reviews efforts to increase the use of empirical methods in studies of the aesthetic and social effects of literary reading. The reviewed research is expansive, including extension of familiar theoretical models to novel domains (e.g., educational settings); enlarging empirical efforts within under-represented research areas (e.g., child development); and broadening the range of applicable quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g., computational stylistics; phenomenological methods). Especially challenging is articulation of the subtle aesthetic and social effects of literary artefacts (e.g., poetry, film). Increasingly, the complexity of these effects is addressed in multi-variate studies, including confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. While each chapter touches upon the historical background of a specific research topic, two chapters address the area’s historical background and guiding philosophical assumptions. Taken together, the material in this volume provides a systematic introduction to the area for early career professionals, while challenging active researchers to develop theoretical frameworks and empirical procedures that match the complexity of their research objectives.

In this thoroughly revised and updated second edition, William Allen and Carlos Vargas-Silva bring together a diverse range of experts to explore the latest research methods in migration studies, taking stock of major changes that have been salient for migration research—as well as the social sciences more broadly—in the last decade. Spanning a variety of different methodologies, this second edition of the Handbook of Research Methods in Migration provides practical guidance on designing, completing, and communicating migration research, considering diverse audiences including migrants themselves. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This book studies war narratives and their role in the political arenas of post-conflict societies, with a focus on the former Yugoslavia. How do politicians in postwar societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology, personal characteristics, or their record of combat service? The book answers these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and large corpora of parliamentary debates collected in three southeast European post-conflict societies (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia). Using the latest advances in computer science, the book explores patterns in the war discourse of the political elites of these countries and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Mapping over 20 years of parliamentary debates, the book presents a new perspective on the role of the legacies of war in public space and develops theoretical arguments about reconciliation in post-conflict societies. The wars of the 1990s and the breakup of Yugoslavia have created three totally different settings for remembering the past conflicts in these countries, despite their common history. It is a story of victorious battles (Croatia), past grievances (Bosnia-Herzegovina), and denial (Serbia), showing the different flavors of past wars in various national contexts that are symptomatic of many post-conflict societies in different parts of the world. This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, southeastern European politics, discourse analysis, and international relations.

This book explores how First World War commemoration events are presented, reported and mediated on the websites of mainstream daily newspapers from seven European countries. The book is the result of a research group – DIREPA-EUROPE (Discours, représentations, passé de l’Europe), part of Lemel research network – characterized by a shared interest in media discourse and online newspapers. It presents a fluid analysis chain on the commemoration discourse generated by the WWI Armistice Centenary in 2018, and will be of interest not only to scholars of discourse and media studies, but also of European history, cultural memory, journalism and conflict studies.

A collective project arising from a dynamic configuration of research concerned with systematic, critical and reflexive inquiry into the normative frames, institutional workings and lived realities of research, this dexterously-crafted Handbook acts as a working guide to the rapidly-evolving interdisciplinary field of meta-research. Bringing together cutting-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, it expertly outlines key domains including the public value, policy and governance of research, knowledge dynamics, and research cultures and careers. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

Language is a complex system that transfers ideas, feelings, experiences, beliefs, and cultures to others. One of the interactional resources that are utilised to make this transmission more coherent and effective is Discourse Markers (DMs). This monograph analyses these markers in doctoral supervisions but uses a multimodal approach to provide a deeper understanding of these DMs and uncovers potential hidden meanings that would escape a purely verbal analysis. Using a dataset consisting of a corpus of video-recorded doctoral supervision meetings, this book provides an innovative and cutting-edge approach to the analysis of DMs and sheds new light on the complexity and dynamicity of naturally occurring discourse where meaning-making rests on a close coordination of both verbal and embodied conducts. The book makes very useful reading for scholars in the fields of discourse markers, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics and multimodality. It could collaterally be appealing to anyone simply interested in the study of human communication.

Interviews are omnipresent in scholarship and public discourses. They play a crucial role in various spheres, from collecting research data to providing persons in the public eye a platform in print and online media. Interviews do not only capture a dialogue; they provide a framework in which dialogue gets staged. As such a framework, the interview protocols experiential knowledge and personal experience in certain ways, according interlocutors different degrees of authority to speak. The volume contributes state-of-the-art research on what conclusions can be drawn from these and further reflections for a general assessment of the interview as method and form; it offers fundamental conceptualizations of the interview as a structured and mediated site of knowledge production. Theoreticians and practitioners assembled here conceptualize the interview from perspectives in different fields of the humanities and social sciences such as linguistics, literary and cultural studies, musicology, psychology, and philosophy.

This collection explores the discursive strategies and linguistic resources underpinning conflict and polarization, taking a multidisciplinary approach to examine the ways in which conflict is constructed across a diverse range of contexts. The volume is divided into two sections as a means of identifying two different dimensions to conflict construction and bridging the gap between different perspectives through a constructivist framework. The first part comprises chapters looking at sociopolitical conflicts across specific geographic contexts across the US, Europe and Latin America. The second half of the book unpacks sociocultural conflicts, those not defined by physical borders but shaped by ideological differences on core values, such as on religion, gender and the environment. Drawing on frameworks across such fields as linguistics, critical discourse analysis, rhetoric studies and cognitive studies, the book offers new insights into the discursive polarization that permeates contemporary communicative interactions and the ways in which a better understanding of conflict and its origins might serve as a mechanism for providing new ways forward. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in critical discourse analysis, linguistics, rhetoric studies and peace and conflict studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion is the first ever comprehensive collection of research on religion and language, with over 35 authors from 15 countries, presenting a range of linguistic and discourse analytic research on religion and belief in different discourse contexts. The contributions show the importance of studying language and religion and for bringing together work in this area across sub-disciplines, languages, cultures, and geographical boundaries. The Handbook focuses on three major topics: Religious and Sacred Language, Institutional Discourse, and Religious Identity and Community. Scholars from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds investigate these topics using a range of linguistic perspectives including Cognitive Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, and Conversation Analysis. The data analysed in these chapters come from a variety of religious backgrounds and national contexts. Linguistic data from all the major world religions are included, with sacred texts, conversational data, and institutional texts included for analysis. The Handbook is intended to be useful for readers from different subdisciplines within linguistics, but also to researchers working in other disciplines including philosophy, theology, and sociology. Each chapter gives both a template for research approaches and suggestions for future research and will inspire readers at every stage of their career.