In this chapter, I offer examples of ethnographic approaches to discourse, focusing in particular on how linguistic anthropologists have engaged with and expanded upon the concepts and theoretical tools offered by Goffman and Bakhtin. This includes attention to how Goffman unpacks interactional participant roles, how his concept of footing has been critical to recent interest in stance, and also how speakers linguistically shift in and out of registers. Drawing on Bakhtin, discourse analysts have turned to explore the productive concepts of genre, intertextuality, voicing and chronotopes. Ethnographic discourse analysis connects levels of discourse and context and relies on specific methodological strategies to capture the dynamic ethnographic and sociopolitical contexts within which language is located and to which it contributes and responds.

The concept of discourse has always been at the core of critical analysis in the field of discourse studies. To some extent this is explained by the connection between discourses, in a Foucauldian sense, and representations of, for instance, power relations, gender and social injustices – all in need of critical analysis. However, in research on organizational discourse, the object for critique can be the transformations of social actions within organizations rather than, for example, unequal representations (in texts). There is a well-established link between social actions and genres: genres are (or are at least part of) social actions. The overarching aim of this chapter is to discuss how genre-oriented analysis can complement other types of analysis in the broader field of critical discourse studies, and to offer critical understandings more directly related to social actions. The chapter gives an overview of two approaches to the critical analysis of genre: critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical genre analysis (CGA). From the perspective of methodology, the chapter responds to calls for a social and affordance-driven multimodal critical discourse studies by offering a number of qualitative concepts for analyzing the genre aspects of multimodal texts. Analytical examples come from interrelated genres such as “vision and values,” “core values” and “platforms and values” from state agencies and universities in, above all, Sweden and the United States. In the context of public authorities, these genres are to be considered as emerging genres, which allows for a specific type of critical inquiry: Which are the changing social actions that these genres are part of? Are they related to internal control or to external communication and market-oriented “branding” of the public authority?

This chapter argues for the importance of intersectionality as a heuristic framework through which to understand how identities and emotions are produced in discourse. The chapter begins with a historical overview of theoretical discussions around intersectionality. Particular focus is put on the ways in which intersectionality has been recently rediscovered in different strands of research on language in society. The chapter then moves on to showcase discourse analytical work that has operationalized intersectionality with the help of a variety of techniques such as conversation analysis, online ethnography and multimodal critical discourse analysis in order to understand the social and political life of three emotions: hate, desire and shame. The chapter closes with a few reflections about future avenues for further investigation such as the domain of hope and its potential for social justice and sociopolitical change.

Legal assessments of whether applicants qualify for political asylum in a country of refuge rely primarily on the applicants’ narratives and on their answers to questions posed by immigration officials during a face-to-face hearing. It is incumbent upon the applicants to attempt to persuade the officials of their credibility and of the merits of their case. In their assessments, the officials take into account the applicant’s demeanor, ability to recount a coherent narrative, and other often unarticulated measures of credibility. Lacking other evidence, or in the face of disputed identity documents, assessments of discourse are central to political asylum decisions. This chapter reviews what is now substantial research on the role of discourse in political asylum hearings and decisions. It considers how mistranslation and the failure to determine an applicant’s dialect have resulted in significant mistakes. It reviews the scholarship on demeanor and reported speech acts (e.g. bribery and threats). Our primary focus is on the dimensions of narrative in the political asylum process. We begin with the largest issues posed by the narration of trauma; the difficulties faced by people who have suffered atrocities are sometimes so beyond comprehension that they escape memory and narrative. In a close examination of narrative form and structure, we discuss how narrative fails in the asylum process, for example in misplaced orienting details, in the use of repetition, in attention to what the officials regard as extraneous information, in what is omitted (especially during accounts of rape) or in accounts that appear to be memorized or that contain stock elements that have become too familiar to the officials. Our discussion of narrative attends to the ways in which discourses are evaluated as too familiar or too strange. Finally, we consider the significant roles played by discourse analysts in the political asylum process.

This chapter provides practical and theoretical insights into corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), an increasingly popular framework for studying language-in-use. By drawing upon both discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, CADS combines methods of text analysis commonly perceived as qualitative and quantitative, respectively. Despite challenges, the main appeal lies in CADS’ ability to reconcile close linguistic analyses with the more broad-ranging analyses made possible by using corpus linguistic methods to analyse language. In addition to providing theoretical insights into CADS, this chapter examines what CADS involves from a practical point of view, e.g. by discussing specific corpus outputs, examples of ways in which qualitative and quantitative approaches to discourse analysis are synergized and triangulated, and the extent to which CADS differs from other kinds of discourse analysis relying on one or more non-corpus-informed approaches in discourse analysis. Interdisciplinary applications in CADS are also considered.

This chapter outlines an approach to critical discourse studies (CDS) based in cognitive linguistics. The approach (CL-CDS) investigates the conceptual representations associated with particular linguistic forms and considers the ideological and (de)legitimating functions that such representations may serve when cued in specific discursive contexts. A number of conceptual operations are identified as significant in this process of meaning-construction, including schematization, point of view and metaphor. Drawing on examples from various discourses, including media discourses of migration and political protest, I show how these conceptual processes are indexed in texts and consider the ideological and (de)legitimating potentials of the representations they yield, e.g. in inference, affect and attitude toward social actions. These qualitative analyses, grounded in cognitive linguistic theory, although psychologically plausible, remain empirically unverified. In this chapter, therefore, I further suggest that CDS and CL-CDS in particular can benefit from the incorporation of experimental methods as a form of triangulation. The chapter presents the methods and results from recent experimental studies in CL-CDS and discusses their implications for CDS more generally.

Researchers in linguistic anthropology and post-variationist sociolinguistics have over recent decades increasingly converged on a shared focus of attention: the unfolding real-time process of communicative activities that involve language – spoken/heard, written, digitally mediated – in concert with the other semiotic affordances that provide participants with the means to presume upon, and to (re)create, the very contexts in which forms of talk take place, with various effects in the here-and-now and beyond. Sociolinguists emerging from the confines of variationism have increasingly abandoned the operationalism and quasi-experimentalism of earlier work in favor of more ethnographically rich accounts that take note of the way that facts about sociophonetic variation not only reflect but also help to constitute identities also made manifest in other ways: through styles of dress, bodily practices, consumption patterns, etc. – a set of facts and interpretations often grouped by sociolinguists under the heading of “style.” Linguistic anthropologists, meanwhile, have been increasingly oriented to the way in which observed variation in language usage resolves itself into verbal (phonological, lexical, etc.) repertoires keyed to the interactional contours of recurring types of situation with recurring types of participant role – termed “registers.” Linguistic anthropologists have also been alert to the ways in which linguistic and semiotic resources that are by degrees regularized and presumed “normal” in some contexts (hence, “enregistered”) are, by that very fact, ripe for creative “recycling” and reuse in other contexts, with different effects. All of these disciplinary and transdisciplinary re-alignments, I argue, result from the introduction of a single centrally important analytic concept: indexicality. Introduced into modern linguistics by Jakobson and developed further by Jakobson’s student Silverstein, the concept of indexicality has enabled the recent co-alignment of erstwhile disciplinary forms of inquiry in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and seems to be the fulcrum for much of the work now emerging at the intersection of these and other fields, including applied linguistics.

While the financial crisis of 2007–8 has served to focus attention on the language of economics and the financial markets, discourse analysts have long been interested in the language of money. Indeed, because money is a social relation, the raw material available to analysts is almost too rich. I therefore draw attention to work that might not immediately look like “money talk.” I also describe the rich variety of work on metaphors of money, economics and finance of which there is an abundance. This research makes clear the ideological struggles around the representation of money and markets. In particular, it clearly shows the erasure of humans and human agency. These struggles are further illuminated by work informed by CDA and multimodal approaches, particularly in relation to the global financial crisis, austerity and poverty porn. It is important that the ideological baggage carried by contemporary understandings of money and debt are described. Research has gone further in its critique of the origins and effects of these ideologies. Finally, the contribution that applied linguists can make around money and debt is significant. However, in order to make positive interventions that emerge from considered critique, a clear set of values is required. Here, too, recent work in linguistics offers valuable perspectives as it focuses on real people in real pain.

Wellbeing is generally conceptualized as being essentially inner to an individual; discourse analysis would seem to have nothing to say here. In this chapter, we take the case of ageing and wellbeing as a case study for examining just what micro-analysis of interaction can offer us in terms of both understanding and researching states like wellbeing in later life. Drawing on the micro-analytic toolbox of conversation analysis, this chapter helps us see how wellbeing can be at least partly co-constructed in everyday interactions, specifically in quality interactions. The chapter examines some of the key findings of research into quality interaction among older populations in care settings and the links made to wellbeing. It then turns its attention to everyday settings in the community, still the majority experience for older people but the minority focus of interactionally orientated research studies. Discussions of such studies are interwoven with detailed analyses of naturally occurring audio-recorded interactions in a hair salon with older clients. Wellbeing, it is argued, is partly achieved through both the immediate fulfillment offered through talk – whether laughing together or telling troubles – and the positive identities that are afforded. The wider research implications are then discussed, in particular with respect to the ways in which interviews are used and the kinds of setting that need to be studied.

This chapter provides an overview of the recent theoretical, methodological and analytical trends in multimodal research, specifically focusing on how different approaches (e.g. critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, social semiotics, systemic functional linguistics and interaction analysis) have addressed the complex problems arising from studying the integration of language with other resources, such as images, gesture, movement, space and so forth. In doing so, the chapter discusses how traditional divisions in discourse studies have become somewhat blurred, given the evident need to account for resources other than language and the meaning that arises as choices combine in texts, interactions and events. The chapter also explores how various digital approaches have been developed to handle the multidimensional complexity of multimodal analysis, in particular for the analysis of dynamic media such as videos. This discussion includes the development of mixed methods approaches, purpose-built software, automated techniques and the latest trends in big data approaches to multimodal analysis.

Interest disrupts the idea that meanings are shared in communication – a common definition of communication as meaning-congruence, as shared understanding between participants, as the meeting of minds. This assumption frequently underlies theories of meaning that prioritize communication over representation and interpretation. However, as soon as representation and interpretation are brought into the picture, productive divergences in interest and conflicts of interest come into view.

Meanings sit in contexts, and contexts become part of meanings. This part of the book focuses on the ways in which context informs meaning.

Meanings are connected to context in the manner of their materialization; some are by likeness (for instance a spoken word that sounds like something, an image that looks like something), by directedness (for instance, a gesture that points to something, or the design of a space that directs wayfinders), or by abstraction (for instance, the arbitrary relation of written word to its referent, or a symbolic object).