The interactive construction of authority and expertise in online platforms around a topic (e.g., history, standard language, etc.) has challenged the way knowledge has been traditionally channeled through official institutions. The Internet has become a platform for recurrent consultation in relation to checking norms and rules or seeking advice or information through electronically mediated communication in which quasi-anonymous participants discuss, question, define, and re-construct knowledge. This chapter examines the competition between official institutions and these noninstitutional spaces for authority and legitimation in the creation of knowledge in a particular area or discipline. The chapter will explore the shift in the creation of knowledge, historically monopolized by institutional and official organizations and now facing significant challenges from online discussions. Further, it explores how institutional trust has been challenged and eroded due to the influence of digital communication and discourse. Discussions and debates such as these that have, paradoxically, fostered a more democratic exchange of information through participatory culture, are threatening the status, for instance, of democracy in countries with a long-stablished democratic tradition (US Capitol assault on January 6, 2021). This competition between official and unofficial discourses stands as a struggle for power and legitimacy in our current society.

Chapter 4 considers ethical issues in healthcare communication research through two case studies. The first case study looks at a relatively straightforward situation involving a study of the Pain Concern online forum. Data from the forum was provided by Health Unlocked, a company that runs a large number of online communities related to health. One advantage of using their service was that Health Unlocked took care of relevant legal requirements concerning ethics and only shared data from contributors to the forum who had agreed for their posts to be used for research purposes. The second case study relates to the study of dementia and brings into focus the difficulties of working with multiple datasets and a range of stakeholders. The data collection for this project involved public health communication in terms of news media and external communications from support services, including social media. As such, it presents scenarios that are common to studies of health communication and thereby offers instruction in how to navigate related ethical concerns.

This introductory chapter elucidates the profound impact of the Internet on our society and the complexities involved in its regulation. In a polarized political landscape, concerns about Internet safety for children appear to be the only bipartisan agreement across the ideological aisle. Recent legislative actions in the United States exemplify the urgent response to the dangers posed to minors by social media. This trend, also reflected internationally, underscores the paradox of restricting Internet access for youth, balancing the need for protection with the benefits of digital literacy. While the Internet poses risks, it is also a powerful tool for cognitive and social development, offering educational resources and fostering global awareness. This duality illustrates the complexity of navigating a safe digital environment without stifling free expression.

This chapter presents the content of a comprehensive exploration of digital communication’s impact on social, political, and cultural life, providing insights into the new paradigms that shape our contemporary world.

In this chapter we extend the role of asymmetric c-command still further, showing how it can derive the linear order of terminal nodes by the Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA). We start by looking at how X′-theory can be parametrised so as to provide an account of cross-linguistic word-order variation in terms of the Head Parameter, before moving on to the c-command-based theory of linear order based on the LCA. We then look at the consequences of LCA-based theory for the analysis of cross-linguistic word-order variation.

Here we first look carefully at how Featural Relativised Minimality applies to wh-movement. This leads to a discussion of the relation between phases and Featural Relativised Minimality. We consider whether it is possible or desirable to reduce phase-based locality to Relativised Minimality or vice versa.

Chapter 10 demonstrates how corpus approaches support the study of various social actors. We include two case studies. The first study investigates how representations of people with obesity in the UK press contribute to stigmatisation. The analysis orients around the naming strategies to collectively and individually refer to people with obesity, as well as the adjectives used to describe them and the activities that they are reported to be involved in. Furthermore, we show that people with obesity are regularly held up as figures of ridicule and obesity is discussed in the context of social deviance, foregrounded when reporting on perpetrators of crimes. The second study uses a tailor-made annotation system to discuss referential strategies, descriptions of traits and the capacity to carry out different kinds of actions in the context of voice-hearing, to critically consider the different degrees to which people who experience psychosis personify their voices. We track these representations in the reports of those with lived experience over time and consider the implications of a social actor model for therapeutic interventions to support those with chronic mental health issues.

This chapter explores the formation and dynamics of virtual communities, encompassing participant interaction, identity, and online knowledge-sharing. It examines how digital platforms facilitate community building and self-expression, as well as the convergence around diverse topics. The interplay between institutional and noninstitutional discourse, particularly concerning legitimacy and authority in knowledge dissemination, is also scrutinized. Various forms of online communities are explored, ranging from ephemeral affinity spaces to established communities of practice, illustrating the evolving nature of communication and expertise in digital contexts.

The discussion further examines participant behavior and identity formation online, driven by motivations such as self-expression and recognition. These behaviors shape online identities and community dynamics, with some users engaging in disruptive activities such as trolling. Moreover, the chapter examines the impact of AI technologies on identities and roles, often perpetuating societal biases in their outputs. For instance, MidJourney tends to generate images of businesspeople or successful individuals predominantly featuring white men, thereby underrepresenting women and minorities. This bias not only reflects but also reinforces existing societal prejudices, influencing users’ perceptions and learning experiences.

Chapter 8 is concerned with the use of historical corpora in the study of language relating to health. We present two case studies – one where an issue is well understood and discussed publicly, the other where there was a clear issue with the framing of a discussion. For the former study we explore the VicVaDis corpus, first introduced in chapter 1. We combine different corpus techniques to show the main anti-vaccination arguments in the corpus and to point out parallels with present-day anti-vaccination discourse. The second case study looks at the emergence of venereal disease in the seventeenth century using the Early English Books Online corpus. By examining collocates of the word pox, we are able to weed out relevant uses of the word (e.g., those which referred to venereal disease) as opposed to those which do not. Additionally, we show that through the investigation of one type of collocate (words referring to geographical locations) the analysis was taken in an unexpected but rewarding direction.

In this chapter we first look at the DP-hypothesis, the idea that nominals are DPs rather than NPs, and that NP is a complement of D. We then refine this idea, motivating a tripartite structure for the nominal, analogous to what we saw for the clause in the previous chapter. Next, we focus on the argument structure of nominals, comparing and contrasting with argument structure in the clause. Finally, we briefly describe the ways in which grammatical functions are marked in nominals, again contrasting this with the clause.

This chapter explores the nature of online participation as it pertains to political communication. The discussion uses the notion of the public sphere to help understand more about how this concept has changed and needs recalibration to account for a digital public sphere. Audiences are no longer simply passive recipients of information about politics; instead, they can simply and quickly become active participants. In explaining how this can occur, the chapter looks at three examples from recent research that highlights the power of participatory culture in the online space. The first area relates to Internet memes, which are multimodal artifacts capable of simply and economically communicating political expression and engagement. Research has shown that the simplicity of their creation and spread facilitates an avenue to political engagement that would have been absent in the past. The second area focuses on online activism and how online platforms help it proliferate. A final instance of political communication and participatory culture discussed emerged from Twitter/X as a form of “issue public,” where an online discourse community arose out of a satirical response to some particular political commentary. Taken together, these areas highlight the crucial role of social media in contemporary political communication.

Chapter 9 considers how the experience of illness is represented linguistically, focussing on two contexts. In the first case study, collocational patterns were examined in order to show how people represented the word anxiety. Different patterns around anxiety were grouped together in order to identify oppositional pairs of representation (e.g., medicalising/normalising). The second case study involved an examination of the ways in which cancer was constructed in a corpus of interviews with and online forum posts by people with cancer, family carers, and healthcare professionals. Using a combination of manual analysis and corpus searches, we considered how metaphors were used to convey a sense of empowerment or disempowerment in the experience of cancer. More specifically, the analysis of metaphors around cancer revealed insights into people’s identity construction and the relationships between doctors and patients.