This chapter explores the pervasive influence of a "white gaze" as it frames the collective action strategies K-12 urban teachers use to manage intercultural differences between themselves and their students, and how those strategies can operate to increase, maintain, or decrease relational distance with consequences for teachers’ cultural learning processes at work. It also discusses some key intrapsychic and interpersonal constraints on teachers’ cultural learning processes at work associated with the intergroup and group dynamics they share in urban schools.

This Introduction distinguishes three approaches to studying politics: political science, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. It identifies the last of these as the focus of the chapters in the collection. It then uses an example from Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Illinois US Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas to characterize literature’s relationship to politics. Finally, it distinguishes three approaches to literary history, which it labels poststructuralist discourse analysis, standpoint epistemology, and pragmatism. It treats pragmatism as the most suitable description of the mode of literary history practiced in the chapters in the collection.

In Chapter 2, we first discuss what we regard as three major pitfalls in the field: (1) following an ethnocentric view of one’s data, (2) uncritically associating values with political actors and entities, and (3) using one’s research to prove a pre-held conviction. We argue that these analytic traps are interrelated and reflect a typically top-down view of political language use. Second, we discuss the three key pragmatic units of expressions, speech acts and discourse in detail. In studying political language use with the aid of these units, it is recommended to look at conventional pragmatic patterns, which allow us to conduct replicable analyses. Further, we argue that political language use can be effectively interpreted if we look at its ritual manifestations. Ritualised political language use imposes a frame on the participants; that is, in many political contexts the rights and obligations of the participants are defined and language is generally used according to such rights and obligations. We finally discuss how our analytic units can be brought together with a contrastive view of language and politics.

This chapter explores the interaction between discourse structure, grammar, and prosody, on the example of insubordination, that is, the main clause use of formally subordinate clauses. After an overview of the forms and meanings of insubordinate constructions cross-linguistically, it focuses on a particular illustration of this phenomenon: contrastive insubordinate conditionals (CICC) in Spanish. First, it argues for the constructional status of the pattern and then it explores its discursive and prosodic features. The results of a corpus study show that CICC can occur in five different contexts, with a high preference for dispreferred responses. This is taken as evidence for proposing a network representation, with a schema representing the common form and meaning features of the construction and several instantiations in prototypical and peripheral contexts. Prosodically, the construction is combined with restricted prosodic patterns expressing similar pragmatic functions (focus and contrast). We can thus model prosodic patterns as pairings of a prosodic form and a pragmatic meaning and are inherited by sentence-level constructions expressing compatible pragmatic meanings.

We present an overview of constructional approaches to signed languages, beginning with a brief history and the pioneering work of William C. Stokoe. We then discuss construction morphology as an alternative to prior analyses of sign structure that posited a set of non-compositional lexical signs and a distinct set of classifier signs. Instead, signs are seen as composed of morphological schemas containing both specific and schematic aspects of form and meaning. Grammatical construction approaches are reviewed next, including the marking of argument structure on verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). Constructional approaches have been applied to the issue of the relation between sign and gesture across a variety of expressions. This work often concludes that signs and gesture interact in complex ways. In the final section, we present an extended discussion of several grammatical and discourse phenomena using a constructional analysis based on Cognitive Grammar. The data come from Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and includes pointing constructions, agreement constructions, antecedent-anaphor relations, and constructions presenting point of view in reported narrative.

After a long tradition of studying languages as isolated systems, researchers are increasingly aware of the fact that speakers of most of the world’s languages are multilingual. The coexistence of multiple languages within the brain can be a significant force shaping each. The recognition of constructions and their arrays of constructional properties provides a useful tool for understanding contact phenomena: much of what is transferred in contact situations are constructions or constructional features. Conversely, examination of what is replicated can enhance our understanding of the nature of linguistic knowledge. Here replicated constructions of varying sizes and degrees of schematicity are first described, from words through discourse structures, then the transfer of individual constructional features, including prosody, special connotations, various pragmatic effects, linguistic and extralinguistic contexts of use, and frequency are discussed, as well as the social situations under which they occur. The kinds of constructions and constructional properties replicated provide additional evidence that constructions are more than simple combinations of basic form and meaning.

Various factors affecting language learning are introduced, including demographic variables, and learners’ L1, cultural background and the context of language use, noting that the analysis of learner corpora can enable the exploration of language-learning processes during SLA and across different contexts. Practical challenges involved in building extensive learner corpora, especially spoken learner corpora, are discussed (e.g. variable constraints, scale of data, availability of data). The Trinity Lancaster Corpus (TLC), a spoken corpus based upon a language proficiency test, and two other corpora, are then introduced. The chapter then discusses MDA and its adaptation for short texts (short-text MDA). The chapter describes the challenges of analysing short texts within corpora and explains how short-text MDA may make it possible to explore discourse at both the micro-structural (turn) and macro-structural (discourse units) levels. The chapter concludes by noting that this exploration will lead to a deeper analysis of narrative structures as a result of the findings from the corpora studied in the book using short-text MDA.

This chapter establishes what it means to do discourse analysis. This is done by defining discourse analysis and providing examples of discourse. The chapter offers a practical overview of how the discourse in discourse analysis fits within the research process. The examples of discourse that are introduced in this chapter are grammar, actions and practices, identities, places and spaces, stories, ideologies, and social structures. After reading the chapter, readers will know what discourse analysis is; understand that there are many types of discourse; know that discourse is an object of study; and understand how an object of study fits within a research project.

This chapter reviews the perspectives and levels of an analysis that inform how an observation is made. This is done by demonstrating that there are two perspectives (language use and the human factor) and five levels (summation, description, interpretation, evaluation, and transformation) of analysis in discourse analysis. These perspectives and levels can be used to understand the frameworks of established methodologies, such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. After reading this chapter, readers will know that the analytic process can combine different perspectives and levels of analysis.

As stylistics developed, it became increasingly clear that a purely formalist approach to identifying elements of style would not be adequate for explicating the functions of particular textual choices. Consequently, stylisticians began to integrate insights from linguistics concerning the relationship between form and function, paying ever greater attention to the role of context in the interpretative process. This chapter traces the development of stylistics from its origins as an application of linguistics to (mainly literary) texts, informed by concepts from Russian formalism, to a fully formed subdiscipline of linguistics as it began to draw on these functional approaches to language description and developed more of its own theories and analytical frameworks.

The introductory chapter breaks down the main features of what a focus on language policy in action entails. I discuss what recent reconceptualisations of ‘language’ mean for how we understand language policy, arguing in particular for a need to focus on how the exercise of authority in language alters the balance of power in discourse. Language policy is presented as a form of sociocultural practice and broken down into five broad actions: constructing, debating, interpreting, enforcing, resisting. The foundations of the critical approach of the book are also presented.