LINGUIST List 8.1105
Tue Jul 29 1997
Books: Discourse
Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <marty
linguistlist.org>
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Message 1: New Books: Discourse
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 15:48:29 -0400
From: Tony Schiavo <tonybenjamins.com>
Subject: New Books: Discourse
John Benjamins Publishing would like to call your attention to the
following new titles in the field of Discourse:
MANAGING LANGUAGE
THE DISCOURSE OF CORPORATE MEETINGS
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini & Sandra Harris
1997 viii, 308 pp. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 44
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 806 X Price: US$86.00
Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 5057 X Price: Hfl. 145,--
John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com
For further information via e-mail: servicebenjamins.com This book
attempts to answer the question: what do managers in multinational
companies really do during meetings? Following fieldwork in three
corporations in Britain and Italy, the picture that emerges is one
that challenges the widespread understanding of meetings as boring,
routine events in the life of an organisation. As the recordings
analysed in the book show, organisational meanings and relations come
into existence through verbal interaction; these are challenged and
manipulated in a constant process of sense-making in search of
coherence which engages managers in their daily work life. The
pragmatics of pronominalisation, metaphors and discourse markers, as
well as thematic development, reveal the dynamics of sense-making in
both English and Italian. The 'native' perspective adopted in Part One
of the book is complemented, in Part Two, by a contrastive study of
the structural and pragmatic properties of meetings in the corporate
and cultural contexts of the British and Italian multinationals,
respectively. Finally, the intercultural dimension of corporate
communication is vividly portrayed in the experience of managers of an
Anglo-Italian joint venture examined in the concluding chapter.
NARRATIVE PERFORMANCES
A STUDY OF MODERN GREEK STORYTELLING
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
1997 xvii, 282 pp. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 46
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 808 6 Price: US$85.00
Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 5059 6 Price: Hfl. 160,--
John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com
For further information via e-mail: servicebenjamins.com
Conversational narratives provide valuable resources for the
discursive construction and invoking of personal and sociocultural
identities. As such, their sociolinguistic and cultural analysis
constitute a high priority in the agenda of discourse studies. This
book contributes to the growing line of discourse-analytic research on
the dynamic relations between narrative forms and functions and their
immediate and wider communicative contexts. The volume draws on a
large corpus of spontaneous, conversational stories recorded in
Greece, where everyday stortytelling is a central mode of
communication in the community's interactional contexts and thus a
rich site for a meaningful enactment of social stances, roles, and
relations. The study brings to the fore the stories' text-constitutive
mechanisms and explores the ways in which they situate the narrated
experiences globally, by invoking sociocultural knowledge and
expectations, and locally, by making them sequentially and
interactionally relevant to the specific conversational contexts. The
stories' micro- and macro-level analysis, richly illustrated with
narrative transcripts throughout, leads to the uncovering of a global
mode of narrative performance which is based on a closed set of
recurrent devices. It is argued that the choice or avoidance of this
mode is at the heart of the stories' (re)constitution of a self, an
other and a sociocultural world. The numerous cases of
intergenerational narrative communication (adults-children) shed
additional light on the performance's contextualization aspects and
contribute to the cross-cultural understanding of the dynamics of oral
performances. Besides students and researchers of discourse analysis,
sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, narrative analysis and
Greek studies, this book will also appeal to all those interested in
communication and cultural studies.
COMMUNICATING GENDER IN CONTEXT
Helga Kotthoff & Ruth Wodak (eds.)
1997 xxvi, 424 pp. Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, 42
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 804 3 Price: US$114.00
Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 5055 3 Price: Hfl. 200,--
John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com
For further information via e-mail: servicebenjamins.com
The contributions to this book deal not only with grammatical gender,
but also with discursive procedures for constructing gender as a
relevant social category in text and context. Attention is directed to
European cultures which till now have come up short in linguistic and
discourse analytic gender studies, e.g., Austria, Spain, Turkey,
Germany, Poland and Sweden. But also English speech communities and
questions of English grammatical gender are dealt with. In accordance
with recent sociolinguistic research the contributors refrain from
generalizing theses about how men and women normally speak; no
conversational style feature adheres so firmly to one sex as was
thought in early feminism. The studies, however, show that even today
the feminine gender is often staged in a way that leads to situative
asymmetry to the advantage of men. The broader societal context of
patriarchy does not determine all communicative encounters, but
demands particular efforts from women and men to be subverted.
- ------------------------------------------------------------
Anthony P. Schiavo Jr Tel: (215) 836-1200
Publicity/Marketing Fax: (215) 836-1204
John Benjamins North America e-mail: tonybenjamins.com
PO Box 27519
Philadelphia PA 19118-0519
Check out the John Benjamins web site:
http://www.benjamins.com
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