Although the term implicitness is ubiquitous in the pragmatic scholarship, it has rarely constituted the focus of attention per se. This book aims to help crystallize the concept of implicitness by defining its linguistic boundaries, as well as specifying and exploring its different communicative manifestations. The contributions by leading specialists scrutinize the main conceptualizations, forms and occurrences of implicitness (such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, entailment, presupposition, etc.) at different levels of linguistic organization. The volume focuses on phrasal, sentential, and discursive phenomena, showcasing the richness and variety of implicit forms of communication, systematizing (where possible) the existing analytic perspectives, and identifying the most productive procedures for further exploration. Taken together, the chapters exhibit theoretical differences that hinder a consensus on the nature of implicitness, but they simultaneously reveal methodological points of contact and raise common questions, thereby signposting a future analytic agenda. The book will appeal to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars working within and across the disciplines of Pragmatics, Semantics, Language Philosophy, Discourse Analysis, and Communication Studies.

Featuring contributions by leading specialists in the field, the volume is a survey of cutting edge research in genres in political discourse. Since, as is demonstrated, “political genres” reveal many of the problems pertaining to the analysis of communicative genres in general, it is also a state-of-the-art addition to contemporary genre theory. The book offers new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights in both the long-established genres (speeches, interviews, policy documents, etc.), and the modern, rapidly-evolving generic forms, such as online political ads or weblogs. The chapters, which engage in timely issues of genre mediatization, hybridity, multimodality, and the mixing of discursive styles, come from a broad range of perspectives spanning Critical Discourse Studies, pragmatics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and media studies. As such, they constitute essential reading for anyone seeking an interdisciplinary yet coherent research agenda within the vast and complex territory of today’s forms of political communication.

This book proposes a new theory ("e;proximization theory"e;) in the area of political/public legitimization discourse. Located at the intersection of Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics and critical approaches, the theory holds that legitimization of broadly consequential political/public policies, such as pre-emptive interventionist campaigns, is best accomplished by forced construals of virtual external threats encroaching upon the speaker and her audience's home territory. The construals, which proceed along spatial, temporal and axiological lines, are forced by strategic deployment of lexico-grammatical choices drawn from the three domains. This proposal is illustrated primarily in the in-depth analysis of the 2001-2010 US discourse of the War-on-Terror, and secondarily in a number of pilot studies pointing to a wide range of further applications (environmental discourse, health communication, cyber-threat discourse, political party-representation). The theory and the empirical focus of the book will appeal to researchers working on interdisciplinary projects in Pragmatics, Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies, as well as Journalism and Media Studies.

Although the term implicitness is ubiquitous in the pragmatic scholarship, it has rarely constituted the focus of attention per se. This book aims to help crystallize the concept of implicitness by defining its linguistic boundaries, as well as specifying and exploring its different communicative manifestations. The contributions by leading specialists scrutinize the main conceptualizations, forms and occurrences of implicitness (such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, entailment, presupposition, etc.) at different levels of linguistic organization. The volume focuses on phrasal, sentential, and discursive phenomena, showcasing the richness and variety of implicit forms of communication, systematizing (where possible) the existing analytic perspectives, and identifying the most productive procedures for further exploration. Taken together, the chapters exhibit theoretical differences that hinder a consensus on the nature of implicitness, but they simultaneously reveal methodological points of contact and raise common questions, thereby signposting a future analytic agenda. The book will appeal to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars working within and across the disciplines of Pragmatics, Semantics, Language Philosophy, Discourse Analysis, and Communication Studies.

Featuring contributions by leading specialists in the field, the volume is a survey of cutting edge research in genres in political discourse. Since, as is demonstrated, “political genres” reveal many of the problems pertaining to the analysis of communicative genres in general, it is also a state-of-the-art addition to contemporary genre theory. The book offers new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights in both the long-established genres (speeches, interviews, policy documents, etc.), and the modern, rapidly-evolving generic forms, such as online political ads or weblogs. The chapters, which engage in timely issues of genre mediatization, hybridity, multimodality, and the mixing of discursive styles, come from a broad range of perspectives spanning Critical Discourse Studies, pragmatics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and media studies. As such, they constitute essential reading for anyone seeking an interdisciplinary yet coherent research agenda within the vast and complex territory of today’s forms of political communication.

This book proposes a new theory ("e;proximization theory"e;) in the area of political/public legitimization discourse. Located at the intersection of Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics and critical approaches, the theory holds that legitimization of broadly consequential political/public policies, such as pre-emptive interventionist campaigns, is best accomplished by forced construals of virtual external threats encroaching upon the speaker and her audience's home territory. The construals, which proceed along spatial, temporal and axiological lines, are forced by strategic deployment of lexico-grammatical choices drawn from the three domains. This proposal is illustrated primarily in the in-depth analysis of the 2001-2010 US discourse of the War-on-Terror, and secondarily in a number of pilot studies pointing to a wide range of further applications (environmental discourse, health communication, cyber-threat discourse, political party-representation). The theory and the empirical focus of the book will appeal to researchers working on interdisciplinary projects in Pragmatics, Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies, as well as Journalism and Media Studies.