Bøger af Lesley Jeffries

Building on Raymond Williams' iconic "Keywords" released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the 'New Labour' project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the 'Blair Years', and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat. Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.

How does language affect us? Critical Discourse Analysis provides a general theory of the impact that texts can have on readers. Stylistics provides detailed tools of analysis for understanding how texts work. This book combines these strengths to uncover the deep-seated ideologies of everyday texts.

Discovering language provides students with the basic knowledge they need for advanced study. Organized thematically, it can be used as a course text or help with specific aspects of language. Each section includes an introduction, worked examples, 'in context' sections relating the topic to real examples and suggestions for further reading.

This accessible and lively introduction to semantics and the multi-faceted nature of language guides the student and non-specialist through the major ways in which the English language makes meaning.