In Chapter 2, I review the role of Donald Trump and the right-wing media punditry in cultivating public distrust for journalists, scholars, and other experts. That anti-intellectualism widely resonated with Trump’s base. I review Trump’s use of Twitter as a venue for constructing various meanings of fake news. Trump utilized Twitter to promote right-wing values, communicate with and cultivate support from his base, attack the media, and promote falsehoods. I explore how he worked to stigmatize, manage, and suppress the “fake news” media, while examining years of his Twitter content as president, to understand how he socially constructed meanings of the “fake news” media for his supporters. I identify main themes in his tweets targeting journalists, including lamentations about Russiagate, name-calling, charges of treason, claims about incivility, complaining about poor-quality reporting, charges of liberal bias, and allegations that journalists were not reporting on the allegedly miraculous Trump economy and polls that supposedly demonstrated Trump’s popularity with Americans. A review of national polling data documents how Trump’s Twitter attacks on the media resonated with his supporters, who hold negative views of journalists, support government censorship of the media, and balkanize themselves in a right-wing media echo chamber.

Chapter 1 reviews the meaning of fake news, post-truth, propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. It engages with theoretical questions related to social construction theory and propaganda. The chapter situates the book within a larger sociohistorical framework recognizing the history of American war propaganda pertaining to US official rhetoric, the news media, and public opinion, and how propaganda has been used to manipulate the public into supporting US foreign conflicts. It also examines the conditions under which people question war propaganda. The chapter reviews scholarly works covering post-truth, fake news, disinformation, and misinformation. It also discusses the rise of “new media” – particularly social media and the impact they have on rising public misinformation in American politics. A review of competing works discusses the potential of social media to empower and disempower the public. Social media are used to connect people to politics and each other and to help organize social movements. But they have also fueled a political culture of paranoia, conspiracies, and anti-intellectualism, which are perpetuated by rising disinformation embraced by both political parties – but primarily on the American right.

Chapter 9 illustrates how conventional grammatic categories such as a specific tense or auxiliary verb may be linked with interactional behaviour as it is described in this grammar. The chapter shows how formal grammatical items may be practised in interactional sequences in the classroom.

In this chapter we introduce the topic and aims of the book and define key terms such as anxiety, corpus linguistics and discourse. We provide the motivation for writing the book and outline other studies which have examined language in healthcare contexts, in particular focusing on studies which have looked at healthcare forums and/or mental health issues, as well as studies which have used corpus linguistics techniques for corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We then outline the research questions which drive the analysis in the book. We introduce the corpus that we worked with and discuss ethical issues in dealing with online data, as well as issues relating to data processing. We also provide a description of the tools and techniques that we used to carry out our analysis. We then reflect on our own position in relationship to the topic we are researching. Finally, we provide an outline of the remaining chapters of the book.

Here, we consider the interactive and online affordances of the forum by looking at the ways that posters respond to each other’s posts. What kind of language use characterises those which receive numerous responses vs those which receive none at all? We also ask, how do posters reach consensus and, considering the range of posts of people from different backgrounds, how is disagreement around understandings of anxiety negotiated? We code a sample of the forum posts using Egbert et al.’s (2021) coding scheme for functional discourse units. This is based on nine codes which indicate the particular purpose of a stretch of interactive text; for example, joking around, engaging in conflict or giving advice. Additionally, we look at uses of computer-mediated communication, including acronyms such as lol and emojis which are often used for affiliative purposes and disambiguation. This chapter uses corpus-based frequency approaches to identify longer stretches of interaction which are then examined qualitatively.

In Chapters 4 and 5, we focus on the smallest component of the interactional grammar: expressions. Chapter 4 presents a way of analysing and describing expressions which are meant to lubricate the flow of interaction. The acquisition of such expressions is very important for learners, who need to be made aware of their use. We define this category of expressions as Gambits. While it is a popular assumption that Gambits – often called ‘discourse markers’ in the literature – are devoid of meaning, we shall show that this is far from being the case.

Chapter 2 discusses the dilemma posed by the requirement that ‘communicative’ English be taught in a foreign language classroom – which is naturally different from real life – and suggest different ways out of this dilemma as general possibilities. The chapter therefore provides a practical applied linguistic background for the more theoretically motivated chapters that follow. We argue that many of the teaching dilemmas triggered by the setting of the foreign language classroom relate to the fact that the classroom provides its own ritual space, in which the conventions and practices and related rights and obligations holding for daily life are turned upside down.Thus, a key dilemma invariably facing the foreign language teacher is how to teach real-life language use in a non-real-life setting.

Our analysis begins with a focus on the word anxiety, using the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine to provide a detailed ‘Word Sketch’ of its use in the forum; for example, looking at its occurrence in different grammatical patterns. This analysis identified four clines in terms of how anxiety is discursively constructed: 1) catastrophisation vs minimisation (e.g., some patients refer to having terrible anxiety while others downplay their condition using phrases such as it’s just anxiety); 2) medicalisation vs non-medicalisation (e.g., use of medical terminology such as anxiety disorder vs colloquial expressions such as anxiety crap); 3) personalisation vs impersonalisation (e.g., some posters represent their anxiety as a conscious being with its own wants and grammatical agency, such as anxiety is playing mind games with them, while others represent anxiety as an abstract concept, such as as an illness); and 4) internalisation vs externalisation (e.g., some people claim their anxiety is part of themselves – my anxiety – while others refer to it as something separate – the anxiety monster).

Chapter 6 presents a key component of this interactional grammar: illocutionary acts. In this grammar, we use the expressions ‘illocutionary act’ and ‘speech act’ interchangeably. The chapter provides a systematic and replicable interactional typology of illocutionary acts. This typology is particularly suitable for analysing discourse and understanding the role of illocutionary acts in any types of data and any language.