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This book contributes to the scholarly debate on the forms and patterns of interaction and discourse in modern digital communication by probing some of the social functions that online communication has for its users. An array of experts and scholars in the field address a range of forms of social interaction and discourses expressed by users on social networks and in public media. Social functions are reflected through linguistic and discursive practices that are either those of ‘convergence'or ‘controversy'in terms of how the discourse participants handle interpersonal relations or how they construct meanings in discourses. In this sense, the book elaborates on some very central concerns in the area of digital discourse analysis that have been reported within the last decade from various methodological perspectives ranging from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to corpus linguistics. This edited collection will be of particular interest to scholars and studentsin the fields of digital discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social media and communication, and media and cultural studies.

This book offers the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the most innovative online genres of modern news media. The study focuses on written sports commentaries in online newspapers that enable partial real-time audience involvement in the media text. Adopting an approach from interactional pragmatics, the book identifies the genre's characteristic micro-linguistic features as well as its unique narrative structure. Live text commentary is shown to be a hybrid and multimodal text format – an internally complex form of media communication that combines elements of live spoken broadcasting, blogging, informal conversation and online chat. It aims to inform as well as entertain the audience: by using humour, banter and real or staged dialogue it seeks to create a sense of community among its readers – sports fans. The book will be of interest to many scholars in linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis and social sciences, as well as to all others interested in modern online genres, news media and sports discourse.

This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The chapters analyze humor-related issues in such genres as spontaneous conversations, broadcast dialogues, storytelling, media blogs, bilingual conversations, stand-up comedy, TV documentaries, drama series, family sitcoms, Facebook posts, and internet memes. The individual authors trace how speakers collaboratively circulate, reconstruct, and (re)frame either personal or public accounts of reality, aiming –among other things– to produce and/or reproduce humor. Rather than being “finished” products with a “single” interpretation, humorous texts are thus approached as dynamic communicative events that give rise to diverse interpretations and meanings. The book draws on a variety of up-to-date approaches and methodologies, and will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography of communication, and social semiotics.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other'in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans'in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders'rather than ‘insiders', as ‘them'rather than ‘us'. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.

This book deals with participation frameworks in modern social and public media. It brings together several cutting-edge research studies that offer exciting new insights into the nature and formats of interpersonal communication in diverse technology-mediated contexts. Some papers introduce new theoretical extensions to participation formats, while others present case studies in various discourse domains spanning public and private genres. Adopting the perspective of the pragmatics of interaction, these contributions discuss data ranging from public, mass-mediated and quasi-authentic texts, fully staged and scripted textual productions, to authentic, non-scripted private messages and comments, both of a permanent and ephemeral nature. The analyses include news interviews, online sports reporting, sitcoms, comedy shows, stand-up comedies, drama series, institutional and personal blogs, tweets, follow-up YouTube video commentaries, and Facebook status updates. All the authors emphasize the role of context and pay attention to how meaning is constructed by participants in interactions in increasingly complex participation frameworks existing in traditional as well as novel technologically mediated interactions.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.

Language and Humour in the Media provides new insights into the interface between humour studies and media discourse analysis, connecting two areas of scholarly interest that have not been studied extensively before. The volume adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, concentrating on the various roles humour plays in print and audiovisual media, the forms it takes, the purposes it serves, the butts it targets, the implications it carries and the differences it may assume across cultures.The phenomena described range from conversational humour, canned jokes and wordplay to humour in translation and news satire. The individual studies draw their material for analysis from traditional print and broadcast media, such as magazines, sitcoms, films and spoof news, as well as electronic and internet-based media, such as emails, listserv messages, live blogs and online news.The volume will be of primary interest to a wide range of researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, intercultural studies, pragmatics, communication studies, and rhetoric but it will also appeal to scholars in the areas of media studies, psychology and crosscultural communication.