This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to… read more
This volume explores changing norms and conventions in the English language, as displayed in a broad range of historical data from more than five centuries. The contributions discuss the interplay of sociocultural conditions, specific discourse traditions and structural aspects of language, paying… read more
Spanning the time from Old English to modern American English, this volume provides fresh perspectives on core issues and theories in the morphosyntactic history of English nominal, verbal and adverbial constructions. The contributions discuss the loss, rise and restructuring of morphonological… read more
Edited by Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández
This volume explores linguistic identity construction across online and offline contexts. The contributors focus on ‘clusivity’ as an overarching aspect and offer a multifaceted operationalisation of the linguistic processes of identity construction. The studies address three major strands of human… read more
This volume explores the dynamics of genre conventions in historical English news discourse. The contributions cover a wide spectrum of news writing and publication formats: from corantos to modern tabloids, from prototypical hard news stories and crime reports to more specialised genres such as… read more
This study takes a sociopragmatic perspective on processes of self- and other-positioning in eighteenth-century newspapers. A case study of the adversarial separation of Edward Topham and John Bell, the makers of the highly successful newspaper The World, will reveal the complexities of… read more
As alternative media, suffrage periodicals played an important role in women’s fight for universal suffrage, which marked a milestone on the road to democracy. Opening up a space for women in public discourse, these papers shaped and were shaped by processes of democratisation. This study… read more
This case study explores the dynamics of code choices in interactions involving bilingual people living with dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type (DAT) and their primary care partners, focusing on two narrative interviews held in private settings. Drawing on a combination of Communication… read more
This paper reinvestigates the polarizing effects of indeterminate first- and third-person plural pronouns and determiners (i.e. the we-set and the they-set) from a Digital Discourse perspective. Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and a cognitive-linguistic approach, it tackles the… read more
This study investigates a specialised corpus of prefatory metadiscourse, i.e. newsmakers’ comments published in the first editions of their newspapers which appeared on the market at the end of the seventeenth century and in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The material analysed… read more
This paper investigates six sets of key terms relating to the conceptualisation,
transmission and production, and the agents of news. Based on an analysis of
the Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC), which spans three centuries of news writing,
the quantitative and qualitative developments of these… read more
This study investigates the communicative practices in English and German online discussion fora as exemplified by two thematically related sample threads. Combining first- and second-order approaches to (im-)politeness, the paper focuses on the question of how participants use intergroup rudeness… read more
