For many people, newspapers are a key source of information on many topics, including issues related to gender and sexuality. Applying a broad range of corpus linguistic methods, Transgender Identities in the Press critically explores the linguistic cues and patterns used by the print media in their representation of trans people. Through close analysis of a corpus of articles collected from English-language newspapers from the UK and Canada, Angela Zottola focuses on the semantic categories of representation associated with transgender identities. Exploring a set of key terms, this book examines the semantic prosody and the language choices that each term is invested with, using Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how the way the press represents this topic influences readers and their understanding of the major debates. Using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, Transgender Identities in the Press casts light on the complex picture of press language during a period of social change and increasing awareness. Highlighting both efforts to represent this community in an inclusive and non-discriminatory way and areas where there is need for improvement, this book illustrates a variety of issues from a critical and social perspective.

Far from being objective and static pointers, place-names are dynamic tools of inscription used to (re)shape both our surroundings and our identities. This book examines the shifting tides in the complex relationship between places, identities, and toponyms to unveil the multilayered embeddedness of (re)naming practices. The volume presents original contributions to this rich field of enquiry, and fosters a multidisciplinary approach in exploring the broad theme of (re)naming and identity. Ranging from theoretical discussions to in-depth case studies, the chapters featured here investigate the often controversial, but ever-fascinating, relationship between toponyms and identity. As a privileged medium of expression, place-names constitute both an instrument and a vehicle for conveying identity, values, and visions of the world across space and time. The multifaceted geopolitical, historical, and linguistic issues tackled here make this volume a valuable resource to academics and postgraduate students from a broad spectrum of disciplines, including onomastics and linguistics, sociology, history, government planning and policy, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and media studies.

This volume draws together contributions containing original research on a number of linguistic and semiotic understandings of gender in the context of current debates about gender non-conforming people and diverse ways of ‘doing’ masculinities. It contests the constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry, possibly leading to social change. The book explores various gender non-conforming tropes as they apply either to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices or to other dimensions of gender non-normative experiences, such as weak or socially-perceived as unacceptable representations of manliness. The volume demonstrates that language matters in the everyday experience of gender diversity beyond traditional gender binarism. By modelling some of the approaches that are now being explored in linguistic and gender studies and by addressing language use over a range of diamesic, diastratic and diatopic contexts, all contributors here discuss cogent issues in language and gender.

Applying critical discourse analysis as their principal methodology, Frances Henry and Carol Tator investigate the way in which the media produce, reproduce, and disseminate racist thinking through language and discourse.

From the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Indigenous and settler cultures to the emergence of the first-ever state-funded Māori television network, New Zealand has been a hotbed of Indigenous concerns. Given its history of colonization, coping with biculturalism is central to New Zealand life. Much of this “bicultural drama” plays out in the media and is molded by an anxiety surrounding the ongoing struggle over citizenship rights that is seated within the politics of recognition. The Fourth Eye brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to provide a critical and comprehensive account of the intricate and complex relationship between the media and Māori culture. Examining the Indigenous mediascape, The Fourth Eye shows how Māori filmmakers, actors, and media producers have depicted conflicts over citizenship rights and negotiated the representation of Indigenous people. From nineteenth-century Māori-language newspapers to contemporary Māori film and television, the contributors explore a variety of media forms including magazine cover stories, print advertisements, commercial images, and current Māori-language newspapers to illustrate the construction, expression, and production of indigeneity through media. Focusing on New Zealand as a case study, the authors address the broader question: what is Indigenous media? While engaging with distinct themes such as the misrepresentation of Māori people in the media, access of Indigenous communities to media technologies, and the use of media for activism, the essays in this much-needed new collection articulate an Indigenous media landscape that converses with issues that reach far beyond New Zealand. Contributors: Sue Abel, U of Auckland; Joost de Bruin, Victoria U of Wellington; Suzanne Duncan, U of Otago; Kevin Fisher, U of Otago; Allen Meek, Massey U; Lachy Paterson, U of Otago; Chris Prentice, U of Otago; Jay Scherer, U of Alberta; Jo Smith, Victoria U of Wellington; April Strickland; Stephen Turner, U of Auckland.

First Published in 1990. This book presents a new, interdisciplinary theory of news in the press. Against the background of developments in discourse analysis, it is argued that news should be studied primarily as a form of public discourse. Whereas in much mass communication research, the economic, social, or cultural dimensions of news and news media are addressed, the present study emphasizes the importance of an explicit structural analysis of news reports. Such an analysis should provide a qualitative alternative to traditional methods of content analysis. Also, attention is paid to processes of news production by journalists and news comprehension by readers, in terms of the social cognitions of news participants. In this way news structures can also be explicitly linked to social practices and ideologies of news making and, indirectly, to the institutional and macro-sociological contexts of the news media.

This novel and important book brings together insights from cultural studies and critical discourse analysis to examine the fruitful links between the two. Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis shows that critical discourse analysis is able to provide the analytic context, skills and tools by which we can study how language constructs, constitutes and shapes the social world and demonstrates in detail how the methodological approach of critical discourse analysis can enhance cultural studies. In a richly argued discussion, the authors show how marrying the methodology of critical discourse analysis with cultural studies enlarges our understanding of gender and ethnicity.

In this timely and important study Martin Montgomery unpicks the inside workings of what must still be considered the dominant news medium: broadcast news. Drawing principally on linguistics, but multidisciplinary in its scope, The Discourse of Broadcast News demonstrates that news programmes are as much about showing as telling, as much about ordinary bystanders as about experts, and as much about personal testimony as calling politicians to account. Using close analysis of the discourse of television and radio news, the book reveals how important conventions for presenting news are changing, with significant consequences for the ways audiences understand its truthfulness. Fully illustrated with examples and including detailed examination of the high profile case of ex-BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, The Discourse of Broadcast News provides a comprehensive study which will challenge our current assumptions about the news. The Discourse of Broadcast News will be a key resource for anyone researching the news, whether they be students of language and linguistics, media studies or communication studies.

Adding a new introduction and two previously unpublished papers, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis brings together van Leeuwen's methodological work on discourse analysis of the last 15 years. Discourse, van Leeuwen argues, is a resource for representation, a knowledge about some aspect of reality which can be drawn upon when that aspect of reality has to be represented, a framework for making sense of things. And they are plural. There can be different discourses, different ways of making sense of the same aspect of reality that serve different interests and will therefore be used in different social contexts. However abstract some discourses are, discourses ultimately always represent doings, van Leeuwen argues. Doing is the foundation of knowing, and social practices are the foundation of discourses. Studying children's books, newspaper reports, brochures and other texts, as well as photographs and children's toys, van Leeuwen investigates what can happen when practices are transformed into discourses and provides analytical tools for reconstructing discourses from texts. Throughout the book, van Leeuwen makes connections between sociological and linguistic or semiotic concepts and methods to ensure the social and critical relevance of his analytical categories. van Leeuwen's work has already been widely used by critical discourse analysts across the world. This volume will be a welcome guide for anyone looking for a form of discourse analysis that is both explicit and methodical, and critically incisive.