Author: Jan Chovanec

Jan Chovanec is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He holds a PhD in English Linguistics and specializes in discourse analysis, stylistics and pragmatics, with a focus on mass media discourse and an interest in legal language. He has published on such issues as multimodality, humour, the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication, political rhetoric, the representation of social actors, and the interactivity of discourse in media contexts. He is currently working on a book on the dialogic nature of the novel genre of live text commentary. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Brno Studies in English.Isabel Ermida is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Minho in Portugal, where she is currently Head of the English Department. She holds a PhD on the Language of Humour and is the author of The Language of Comic Narratives (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). She has also authored Linguistic Ambiguity in “The Comedy of Errors” by William Shakespeare (1998) and Humour, Language and Narrative: Towards a Discourse Analysis of Literary Comedy (2003), both published in Portugal. Besides humour studies, her research interests include the linguistics/literature interface and the sociolinguistic expression of gender, age and ethnicity in media discourse.