This book presents a collection of sixteen papers that illustrate how the elusive notion of context is being treated in discourse analysis in the 2010s. According to the editor, John Flowerdew, this book is unique in that all of the chapters focus on ‘context from a specifically discourse analytic perspective’ (2). With that goal in mind, he asked the contributors, a group of well-known discourse analysts that represent different theories and methodologies, to explicitly state how context is understood in their study and to discuss the role of context in light of their findings. In chapter 1, John Flowerdew provides an extensive review of the different approaches and models, both foundational and contemporary, to the study of context in the field of linguistics. The rest of the chapters examine the role of context regarding the study of discourse in different spheres of communication, such as journalism, law, and business, among others.
Chapter 2, written by Paul Baker, analyzes a newspaper article by examining various ways that context determines the journalist's stance towards the sexual orientation of the protagonist of the news story, as well as considering alternative interpretations of the text. Monika Bednarek's chapter explores the use of wh-questions in a corpus of contemporary US television series by focusing on the communicative context of TV dialogue. In chapter 4, Janet Cotterill presents an analysis of the social setting of the British trail-by-jury system and how it constrains courtroom witness examination. In the next chapter, Britt-Louise Gunnarsson investigates the construction of a company image and its workplace culture by analyzing nine multinationals’ websites.
In chapter 6, Michael Handford examines how certain linguistic patterns are constrained by the context of business meetings as a professional genre. In chapter 7, Roxy Harris & Ben Rampton look at matters of ethnicity in contemporary Britain by analyzing a conversation from a linguistic ethnography perspective. Chapter 8 presents a cognitive perspective in the study of context as Christopher Hart investigates the representations of political protests in British newspapers and how certain grammatical choices create different image schemata. In chapter 9, Rick Iedema & Katherine Carroll describe an intervention in health-care communication through the use of video-reflexive ethnography.
Jackie Jia Lou's chapter deals with a geosemiotic approach to context that is applied to the analysis of an advertising campaign. In chapter 11, Anna Mauranen examines how two contextual parameters, namely, the social environment and the linguistic environment, affect linguistic choices in a lingua franca communicative event. In the next chapter, Kay L. O'Halloran, Sabine Tan, & Marissa K. L. E. analyze the coverage of business news by drawing on a multimodal semiotic approach. David Rose & J. R. Martin describe a genre-based literacy intervention in the Australian school system in chapter 13. In the next chapter, Hansun Zhang Waring explores turn-taking in a second-language classroom setting. Finally, in chapter 15, Ruth Wodak presents her four-level context model and its application to the analysis of political discourse.
The book is a vital source for scholarship as it provides comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in discourse analysis, and will appeal to students and researchers of discourse analysis, as well as conversation analysis, pragmatics, linguistics, and other related fields.
