Opposition In Discourse: The Construction of Oppositional Meaning

by Lesley Jeffries, Dan McIntyre, Brian Walker

Overview

Lesley Jeffries introduces a phenomenon which has not been given the attention it deserves - the contextual construction of oppositional meaning. These are opposites not recognisable as such out of context but that are clearly set up this way in the text concerned.



The significance of oppositional meaning is well-known, and has been discussed by scholars for millennia, from Philosophy to Politics. But the main emphasis has always been on the conventional opposite: the opposite recognised by lexical semantics.



Starting from socio-cultural viewpoints, moving to original research and then concluding with a new theoretical formulation, this book introduces and consolidates a significant new approach to the analysis of oppositional meaning. It closes with a discussion of the importance of constructed opposition in hegemonic practice and makes a case for the inclusion of opposition as a central tool of critical discourse analysis. It will be essential reading for researchers and graduates in stylistics, linguistics and language studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847065124
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/26/2010
Series:	Advances in Stylistics
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lesley Jeffries is Principal Lecturer in English at Huddersfield University, UK.

Daniel McIntyre is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Brian Walker is a Visiting Researcher at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His research interests are in stylistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics, especially applied to literary and political discourses. He has co-authored books on discourse analysis (Canning and Walker 2024), stylistics (Lugea and Walker 2023), corpus stylistics (McIntyre and Walker 2019) and socio-political keywords (Jeffries and Walker 2017). His other published research focuses on using corpus linguistic approaches to analyse poetry (McIntyre and Walker 2022), discourses of austerity (Jeffries and Walker 2019, 2020), and Early Modern English news pamphlets (Walker and McIntyre 2015).

Table of Contents

1. What are opposites?
2. How opposites are constructed in texts and what they mean
3. Textual/meaningful effects of textual opposition
4. The role of opposition-construction in discourse meanings

5. The significance of opposition in language and texts
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

[Jeffries'] analysis of a range of constructed opposites from literary and non-literary texts adds importantly to our understanding of this language device that is one technique being used to construct a worldview of opposites, of them and us.” —Helen de Silva Joyce, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, Discourse & Communication

From the Publisher