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Not long ago, the dinner table was the heart of everyday family life, a place where everyone gathered after work or school to share their day over food. Today, instant messaging has become a new kind of virtual dinner table. Families move, live apart, and span generations, yet family talk continues-online. This fascinating book explores how contemporary families, including families-in-law, gather and connect in family chatrooms. Through the lens of Interactional Sociolinguistics 2.0, it shows how family members use not just language but also everyday photos and videos to build family talk, manage familial relationships, and shape family identity. Offering a detailed sociolinguistic and cultural account, it highlights three key phenomena that define family group chats: text-image-participant relations, multimodal displays of power and solidarity, and the interplay of frames and chronotopes. Together, these insights reveal how family talk continues to thrive in the digital age, beyond the dinner table.
It is crucial to apply robust analytic methods to the study of discourses deemed 'ideological'. This book applies the Guidelines and Procedures for ideological research, as presented in Verschueren's Ideology in Language Use, to an exciting new area of study; discourses intended to improve humanity. It analyses the discourse of Amnesty International appeal letters, to show (contrary to what the field of critical discourse analysis often assumes) that ideological discourse can sometimes have a positive, rather than a negative, agenda. It explores how Amnesty's choice of words, sentence structures, speech acts, and other discourse elements, enact its ideological meanings, functions, frames of reference and interpretation, as well as the social, interactional, and ideological positioning of discourse participants in its reports, communications, and appeals. These findings have wider implications not only for the field of discourse analysis, but also for theories within pragmatics, such as speech act theory and (im)politeness.
How and why do words cause people to take offence online? This book explores the complex nature of offence, examining how the structure of language – from individual words to broader linguistic patterns – can be employed to construct offensive meanings. It demonstrates that offence is not a universal concept but a subjective experience shaped by the perspective of the target. Through a multi-layered analysis of words, meanings and context, the book offers a deeper understanding of how offence is creatively constructed, conveyed, understood and experienced on social media. By investigating the continuum between explicitly and implicitly offensive language, it reveals how even subtle language choices can have significant consequences. This work serves as a valuable resource for anyone interested in language, communication and the social dynamics of offence. It will appeal to scholars and students in linguistics, communication studies, the social sciences as well as law and computer science.