The Tools Factor is about to dominate what people write and read, know and believe to know. In this book, we explain how digital tools and agentive AI shape – and are shaped by – text production, ethics, and creativity in the newsroom. Based on thirty years of longitudinal ethnographies in research… read more
“She said that he said that they said…” – in this volume of the AILA Review, we investigate linguistic recycling from complementary angles. In particular, we discuss how and for whom language users – both as individuals and as communities – save resources and create value by quoting and… read more
Crossing boundaries between disciplines, research fields, and epistemologies has long been considered a promising way to get to grips with real-world problems. First formulated in the early 1960s in pedagogy and natural sciences, principles of transdisciplinarity have always been at the core of… read more
[AILA Review, 31] 2018. iii, 148 pp. | open access
The Linguistics of Newswriting focuses on text production in journalistic media as both a socially relevant field of language use and as a strategic field of applied linguistics. The book discusses and paves the way for scientific projects in the emerging field of linguistics of newswriting. From… read more
Repetitive language use in daily life and the professions has resulted in established practices (→2.1) and its analysis in empirically grounded typologies (→.2). From a temporal standpoint, activity types follow each other in patterns, characterized by phases in which certain activities dominate… read more
Our analyses suggest that, from a journalism perspective, understanding the unique value offered by humans has become key in AI-supported newsrooms. Such knowledge can help upskill people and co-create both tools and professional education. From a research perspective, it means widening the… read more
As humans, we can speak by using body-internal tools. By contrast, writing requires external tools, ranging from stone plates and chisels to databases and algorithms. How do such tools, in particular AI tools, interact with text production in the newsroom? As applied linguists (→1.1), we have… read more
With AI, the growing co-generative potential of text tools in the newsroom has become evident. We re-coded data from three decades of progression analyses, focusing on the activity field of handling tools environment (→5.1). Within this activity field, longitudinal analyses suggest… read more
Analyzing real-life phenomena such as the digital literacy shift requires multi-method approaches that grant access to all the relevant levels of language use — from social to individual patterns and reflection (→3.1). The methods combined can transgress research cultures and their… read more
This paper shows the value that transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by analyzing – through a postfoundational lens – how journalistic writing changed during the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have… read more
This chapter focuses on translingual quoting (TQ), i.e. the sub-process of news-writing by which utterances from sources are both quoted and translated. Analyses of journalists’ mental and material activities suggest conceptualizing TQ as a complex and dynamic activity in which journalists’… read more
This article explains how research “on” practitioners can be turned into research “for and with” practitioners (Cameron, Frazer, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992, p. 22) by including these practitioners in the research teams. Methodologically, it draws on two decades of multimethod research and… read more
Argumentation is generally conceived of as a dialogic activity between two or more participants. Nonetheless, it operates also at an intrapersonal level (Rocci 2005), in a soliloquy where protagonist and antagonist of the critical discussion are embodied in the same person. We argue this case by… read more
Translation is a situated activity that involves more than simply producing target texts from source texts. In order to understand what translators actually do when they translate, their psycho-biographies as well as the social setting of the workplace and the contextual resources must be… read more
Doing writing research in real-life settings means investigating individual, collaborative, and organizational writing and text production in complex and dynamic contexts. Methodological questions need to be clarified, such as: which method fits which problem and how should and can various… read more
Translation is a situated activity that involves more than simply producing target texts from source texts. In order to understand what translators actually do when they translate, their psycho-biographies as well as the social setting of the workplace and the contextual resources must be… read more
Drawing on a case study of newswriting, this article presents media linguistics as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics (AL), dealing with a distinctive field of language use. Language in the media is characterized by specific environments, functions, and structures. Medialinguistic research,… read more
