Discourse and Community

The aim of this collected volume is to demonstrate how the community may benefit from linguists' work in functional discourse analysis. Most of the authors share a concern for applying their linguistic expertise to 'real life' problems. How can language be used as evidence in court? Why are bureaucratic forms often hard to understand? How is language efficiently used in written guidelines and instructions? Why are so many translations insufficient? How are newspaper texts shaped by hidden ideologies? These and other questions are tackled by experienced linguists. Their analyses, though, will not only be instructive for their professional colleagues. Even non-expert readers may find helpful insights making them understand their own linguistic behaviour better and may be even improving their communicative skills.