Text, Context and Construction of Identity

Text, Context and Construction of Identity PDF Author: Rajesh Kumar
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527533956
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Language is central to our existence and it happens to be the most sophisticated product of the human mind. It is inconceivable to think of ourselves, our societies, our ideas, cultures or identities without language. It is the primary means of socialization, and whatever we know is a result of it. It is the primary medium of construction and dissemination of knowledge, and structures our thought processes in important ways that constitute our identity. In very complex ways, it interacts with the social, political and economic power structures that remain significant in defining the identities of individuals and societies. The essays in this volume create an awareness and understanding about the role of linguistic context in negotiating identity. The book explains identity and the complex relations between language and several aspects of our society. It explores identity through text and context, and will serve to trigger a novel discourse around the centrality of identity in contemporary society.

Discourse and Identity

Discourse and Identity PDF Author: Anna De Fina
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107320607
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.

The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations

The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations PDF Author: Andrew D. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192561944
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 967

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Book Description
Conceived as the meanings that individuals attach to their selves, a substantial stockpile of theory related to identities accumulated across the arts, social sciences, and humanities over many decades continues to nourish contemporary research on self-identities in organizations. In times which are more reflexive, narcissistic, and fluid, the identities of participants in organizations are increasingly less fixed and less certain, making identity issues both more salient and more interesting. Particular attention has been given to processes of identity construction, often styled 'identity work'. Research has focused on how, why, and when such processes occur, and their implications for organizing and individual, group, and organizational outcomes. This has resulted in a burgeoning stream of research from discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic perspectives that most often casts individuals' efforts to fabricate identities as intentional, relational, and consequential. Seemingly intractable debates centred on the nature of identities - their relative stability or fluidity, whether they are best regarded as coherent or fractured, positive (or not), and how they are fabricated within relations of power - combined with other conceptual issues continue to invigorate the field. However, these debates have also led to some scepticism regarding the future potential of identities research. Yet as the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, there are considerable grounds for optimism that identity, as root metaphor, nexus concept, and means to bridge levels of analysis has significant potential to generate multiple compelling streams of theorizing in organization and management studies.

Literary Construction of Identity in the Ancient World

Literary Construction of Identity in the Ancient World PDF Author: Hanna Liss
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575066211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Encountering an ancient text not only as a historical source but also as a literary artifact entails an important paradigm shift, which in recent years has taken place in classical and Oriental philology. Biblical scholars, Egyptologists, and classical philologists have been pioneers in supplementing traditional historical-critical exegesis with more-literary approaches. This has led to a wealth of new insights. While the methodological consequences of this shift have been discussed within each discipline, until recently there has not been an attempt to discuss its validity and methodology on an interdisciplinary level. In 2006, the Faculty of Bible and Biblical Interpretation at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg, and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Heidelberg invited scholars from the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, and Germany to examine these issues. Under the title “Literary Fiction and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Literatures: Options and Limits of Modern Literary Approaches in the Exegesis of Ancient Texts,” experts in Egyptology, classical philology, ancient Near Eastern studies, biblical studies, Jewish studies, literary studies, and comparative religion came together to present current research and debate open questions. At this conference, each representative (from a total of 23 different disciplines) dealt with literary theory in regard to his or her area of research. The present volume organizes 17 of the resulting essays along 5 thematic lines that show how similar issues are dealt with in different disciplines: (1) Thinking of Ancient Texts as Literature, (2) The Identity of Authors and Readers, (3) Fiction and Fact, (4) Rereading Biblical Poetry, and (5) Modeling the Future by Reconstructing the Past.

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition PDF Author: Katie K. Drager
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234240
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style.

Identity Texts

Identity Texts PDF Author: Jim Cummins
Publisher: Trentham Books Limited
ISBN: 9781858564784
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Jim Cummins is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity

Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity PDF Author: Hannah V. Mattson
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789255961
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Objects of adornment have been a subject of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic study for well over a century. Within archaeology, personal ornaments have traditionally been viewed as decorative embellishments associated with status and wealth, materializations of power relations and social strategies, or markers of underlying social categories such as those related to gender, class, and ethnic affiliation. Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity seeks to understand these artefacts not as signals of steady, pre-existing cultural units and relations, but as important components in the active and contingent constitution of identities. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on materiality and relationality in archaeological and social theory, this book uses one genre of material culture - items of bodily adornment - to illustrate how humans and objects construct one another. Providing case studies spanning 10 countries, three continents, and more than 9,000 years of human history, the authors demonstrate the myriad and dynamic ways personal ornaments were intertwined with embodied practice and identity performativity, the creation and remaking of social memories, and relational collections of persons, materials, and practices in the past. The authors’ careful analyses of production methods and composition, curation/heirlooming and reworking, decorative attributes and iconography, position within assemblages, and depositional context illuminate the varied material and relational axes along which objects of adornment contained social value and meaning. When paired with the broad temporal and geographic scope collectively represented by these studies, we gain a deeper appreciation for the subtle but vital roles these items played in human lives.

Discoursal Construction of Academic Identity in Cyberspace

Discoursal Construction of Academic Identity in Cyberspace PDF Author: Małgorzata Sokół
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443834882
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The aim of this volume is to look into how academic identity is discoursally constructed in CMC (computer-mediated communication), using the example of an e-seminar. An e-seminar is an asynchronous type of CMC, where private, public and institutional domains merge, and therefore it provides an interesting context for exploring academic communication phenomena in cyberspace. The linguistic cues of academic identity can be identified on three levels of discourse organisation: the features of lexico-grammar, textual macrostructures and genres. In general, the analysis shows how these three levels of discourse organisation contribute towards how academics negotiate their identities relative to the aims and activities of their discourse communities and relative to their individual goals. The discoursal construction of academic identity in electronic discourse depends also on such factors as the medium’s defining properties and the lack of direct physical contact between interactants. An important finding is the confirmation of the individuating character of the medium: i.e. the authors’ self-presentation in an e-seminar is characterised by their distinctive voice and increased self-disclosure. Communication in this context enhances individuality, which bears important consequences for how academics negotiate their identity in electronic discourse, exploiting the possibilities offered by the new medium. The results of the analysis reveal how important it is for scholars to maintain a legitimate identity in an e-seminar. Virtual academic identity as constructed in this context is as an extension of academic identity constructed in the real world. The new communicative medium seems to have extended the repertoire of effective means of self-promotion, and the presentation of academic achievements and expertise. These aspects have become important for academic interaction in today’s world, which is characterised by such phenomena as the internationalisation and globalisation of scholarship, commodification of science and intensified competition. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, academic literacy, rhetoric and genre studies, and to all those concerned with the complexities of identity work in the context of computer-mediated communication.

Rethinking Contexts, Rereading Texts

Rethinking Contexts, Rereading Texts PDF Author: M. Daniel Carroll R.
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 184127058X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This volume brings together ten essays on the various contexts for texts that social-scientific approaches invoke. These contexts are: the cultural values that inform the writers of texts, the relationship between the text and the reader or community of readers, and the production of texts themselves as social artifacts. In the first, predominantly theoretical, section of the book, John Rogerson applies the perspective of Adorno to the reading of biblical texts; Mark Brett advocates methodological pluralism and deconstructs ethnicity in Genesis; and Gerald West explores the 'graininess' of texts. The second part contains both theory and application: Jonathan Dyck draws a 'map of ideology' for biblical critics and then applies an ideological critical analysis to Ezra 2. M. Daniel Carroll R. reexamines 'popular religion' and uses Amos as a test case; Stanley Porter considers dialect and register in the Greek of the New Testament, then applies it to Mark's Gospel. This is an original as well as wide-ranging exploration of important social-scientific issues and their application to a range of biblical materials.

Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel

Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel PDF Author: Samuel L. Boyd
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004448764
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
In Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel, Boyd addresses a long-standing critical issue in biblical scholarship: how does the production of the Bible relate to its larger historical, linguistic, and cultural settings in the ancient Near East? Using theoretical advances in the study of language contact, he examines in detail the sociolinguistic landscape during the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid periods. Boyd then places the language and literature of Ezekiel and Isaiah in this sociolinguistic landscape. Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel offers the first book-length incorporation of language contact theory with data from the Bible. As a result, it allows for a reexamination of the nature of contact between biblical authors and a series of Mesopotamian empires beginning with Assyria. The Harvard Semitic Monographs series publishes volumes from the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Other series offered by Brill that publish volumes from the Museum include Harvard Semitic Studies and Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, https://hmane.harvard.edu/publications.