Alexander Brock – författare

This volume reflects the discussion that emerged around the controversial concepts «communication form», «communicative practice», «medium» and «genre». It provides a comprehensive overview of the history and current state-of-affairs of these concepts, and combines theoretical contributions from various perspectives with thorough empirical studies of current communication forms, media, and practices. The contributions deal with fields ranging from public signage in cities, video games and self-tracking to historical accounts of changing communicative potentials and practices concerning the «National Geographic Magazine» and the personal blog. Due to its interdisciplinary character, the volume points out various new directions for future research.

This volume presents a range of academic approaches to genre emergence which is representative of the currently ongoing research, while retaining a common methodological core. The articles presented here use methods from text linguistics, conversation analysis, literary studies and media linguistics. Different driving forces of genre emergence are identified, e.g. function, communication form and culture. This book also aims to cover the emergence of many different genres: It includes chapters on newspaper and magazine genres, readers’ comments, print advertisements, TV news shows and sitcom series, Wutreden, shitstorms, weblogs and erotic romance novels.

In recent years, text and media linguistics have focused on genres in the new media. This is almost always accompanied by the question of the establishment and development of such content. Due to the diversity of genres and their dynamic development one can speak of an almost inexhaustible field of research. The book is located in this field of research. Its goal is to examine the origin and nature of readers’ comments by readers of French and English popular science magazines. Media content is dissected by using text linguistic tools. Transmedial cultures are explored across time, platforms, languages, and editing houses.

This volume focuses on the connection between participation constellations and identity construction as a specific, yet under-researched problem of text and media linguistics. It assembles empirical analyses of a wide range of corpora, ranging from naturally occurring talk-in-interaction over TV series and social media discourse to the linguistic landscapes of Namibia. In addition to insights into dynamic participation and identity constellations in the respective corpora, the articles develop new theoretical concepts and categories. This volume is of interest to advanced students and scholars in linguistics, media studies and sociology alike.

In linguistic morphology, competition is expected to be resolved, on the grounds that it is not economical for a system to keep two or more processes for one purpose. This volume researches overt suffixation and zero‑affixation for the nominalisation of the semantic categories action, agentive, instrument and state aiming at hints of resolution, diachronically and in present‑day English, using both lexicographic and corpus sources. Specifically, the book explores resolution in terms of specialisation regarding mode, register, and meaning. To this aim, (i) the frequency of use of each semantic category is computed for every competitor, (ii) statistical analysis is performed to test association between mode or register and word‑formation process and (iii) semantic specialisation is explored in individual groups of competition.The results enlarge on the claim that competition may take place to varying degrees and prove that it needs to be researched at the level of the semantic category.