Space, Place and the Discursive Construction of Identity

The authors of the various contributions are concerned here to tease out the relationships between how space and place are described and how these contribute to the construction of identity or rather how the interplay between language, spatial practices, dimensions of culture, the discursive construction of place and identity is achieved.

Over the last few years there has been a burgeoning interest in both space and place as linguistic phenomena. Some of this interest stemmed from studies on the situatedness of language and speech in time and space and how deixis anchors speech to a context. Both our frame of reference with respect to surrounding space and how we conceive and describe it are closely linked to the language we speak. This is why different cultures perceive spatial relations differently, with speakers of one language, for instance, encoding spatial relations with respect to absolute directions while speakers of a different language use egocentric terms. This book focuses on space, place and the discursive construction of identity in the present, globalized era, where technological developments are causing a change in the perception of spatial boundaries and geographical locations, and identities are experienced in hitherto unknown ways.

Auteur

Until her retirement Julia Bamford was Professor of English Language and Translation at Università degli Studi di Napoli, «l'Orientale». Her research interests include spoken discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, language for special purposes and translation of specialized discourse, repetition in discourse, academic discourse and the discourse of popularization. Franca Poppi is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia where she is also Director of the Master Course in Languages for Communicating in Businesses and International Organizations. She has published on various aspects of teacher-learner interaction, learner autonomy and advising in self-instruction. Her current research centers on English as an international lingua franca. Davide Mazzi is researcher in English Language and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His research activity has essentially focused on the following areas: discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and argumentation studies. In particular, his research interests and related publications have concentrated on legal, academic and news discourse.

Contenu

Contents: Greg Myers/Sofia Lampropoulou: Places in Social Research Interviews: Corpus and Conversation - Paul Tucker: Language, Space and Object Identity in Writing on Visual Art - Dacia Dressen-Hammouda: Place and Space as Shapers of Disciplinary Identity: The Role of Indexicality in the Emergence of Disciplinary Writing Expertise - Rosario Caballero: Language, Space and Body: Sensing and Construing Built Space through Metaphor - Nicholas Brownlees: The Constraints and Exploitation of Textual Space in the Seventeenth-Century Periodical Press - Charlotte Danino: Events as Spatial Constructions: The Case Study of CNN's Live Broadcast on 9/11 - Davide Mazzi: «Head home via the wine store next door ...»: Knowledge of Place and Other Representation in American and Italian News Articles - Silvia Cacchiani: Tourist Gaze, Tourist Destination Images and Extended Tourist Destination Experiences: Description and Point of View in Community Travelogs - Giorgia Riboni: Constructing (Cyber-)space on Twitter: A Study of Place Deixis in Tweets - Marina Dossena: Tales of the New World: The Linguistic Construction of Identity between Psychological Proximity and Geographical Distance - Federica Ferrari: At the Crossroads between Subject and Object of Research: Identity Negotiation in the Discourse of 'Psych. Doctors' - Anna Stermieri: «There is drama here...».Narrative Spaces in Blog Theatre Reviews - Geoffrey Williams: Identity Depends on Who You Are: A Corpus Perspective - Greg Lessard/Michael Levison: The Literary Representation of Space and Identity: A Model Based on Directed Acyclic Graphs.