Maurizio Gotti

Françoise Salager-Meyer

The focus of this volume is on medical discourse, a domain of language which deserves closer scrutiny by academics as well as practitioners, due to its increasing relevance and pervasiveness in modern society. Despite the wealth of publications dealing with specialized or academic discourse and its rhetoric, few of these are devoted specifically to medical discourse. This book seeks to redress the balance by bringing together a number of studies that bear witness to the widespread interest in medical texts shown by linguists and professional communities around the world. The volume is divided into two main parts: the first targets medical discourse in its spoken dimension, while the second contains various analyses of written texts. The theoretical perspectives and individual case studies presented here reflect the wide range of methodological approaches and theoretical issues that characterise current research in the field.

Oral and Written Contexts

Advances in Medical Discourse Analysis

Ruth Breeze

Carmen Sancho Guinda

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as &ltI>interpersonality. This construct offers ample terrain for new research, since it can be viewed using a range of diverse theoretical frameworks, employing a variety of analytical tools and social perspectives.&ltBR> Studies on the relationship between writer/reader and speaker/audience in the legal field are still scarce, dispersed, and limited to a narrow range of genres and a restricted notion of &ltI>interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. &ltBR> This volume is meant to help bridge this gap. Its chapters show the realisation and distribution of interpersonal features in specific legal genres. The aim is to achieve an expansion of the concept of &ltI>interpersonality, which besides modality, Grice's maxims and other traditionally interpersonal features, might comprise or relate to ideational and textual issues like narrative disclosure, typography, rhetorical variation, or Plain English, among others.

Interpersonality in Legal Genres

Christopher Candlin

This volume explores intercultural communication in specialist fields and its realisations in language for specific purposes. Special attention is given to legal, commercial, political and institutional discourse used in particular workplaces, analysed from an intercultural perspective. The contributions explore to what extent intercultural pressure leads to particular discourse patternings and lexico-grammatical / phonological realisations, and also the extent to which textual re-encoding and recontextualisation alter the pragmatic value of the texts taken into consideration.

Intercultural Aspects of Specialized Communication

Maurizio Gotti analyses the various features of specialized discourse in order to assess its degree of specificity and diversification, as compared to general language. Prior to any analysis of such traits, the notion of specialized discourse and its distinctive properties are clarified.

Investigating Specialized Discourse

Through Narrative Theory, the book offers an engaging panorama of the construction of specialised discourses and practices within academia and diverse professional communities. Its chapters investigate genres from various fields, such as aircraft accident reports, clinical cases and other scientific observations, academic conferences, academic blogs, climate-change reports, university decision-making in public meetings, patients' oral and written accounts of illness, corporate annual reports, journalistic obituaries, university websites, narratives of facts in legal cases, narrative processes in arbitration hearings, briefs, and witness examination accounts. In addition to exploring narration in this wide range of contexts, the volume uses narrative as a powerful tool to gain a methodological insight into professional and academic accounts, and thus it contributes to research into theoretical issues. Under the lens of Narratology, Discourse and Genre Analysis, fresh research windows are opened on the study of academic and professional interactions.

Narratives in Academic and Professional Genres

Richard Dury

Marina Dossena

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). Alongside studies of syntax, morphology, lexis and semantics, published in two sister volumes, many innovative contributions focused on geo-historical variation in English. A carefully peer-reviewed selection, including two plenary lectures, appears here in print for the first time, bearing witness to the increasing scholarly interest in varieties of English other than so-called 'standard' English. In all the contributions, well-established methods of historical dialectology combine with new theoretical approaches, in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. Perceptual dialectology is also taken into consideration, and state-of-the-art tools, such as electronic corpora and atlases, are employed consistently, ensuring the methodological homogeneity of the contributions.

Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21-25 August 2006

English Historical Linguistics 2006

Davide S. Giannoni

This volume brings together a selection of contributions presented at the 15th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes, held at the University of Bergamo (Italy) from 29 August to 2 September 2005. The conference title, «New Trends in Specialized Discourse», reflects the emphasis given to recent orientations in research, coming from established as well as new authors in the field. As suggested by the title of this volume, the analysis of specialized discourse calls for a specialized discourse analysis. When applied linguists deal with vocational discourses, they are faced with a double challenge: on the one hand, an understanding of textualisations often alien to the general language; on the other hand, the use of analytical tools designed specifically for their investigation. The studies presented in this volume position themselves somewhere along this continuum, focusing alternatively on converging/diverging features of texts and discourses.

New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis

The series features monographs and edited volumes on the topics of lexicography and meta-lexicography. Works from the broader domain of lexicology are also included if they strengthen the theoretical, methodological and empirical basis of lexicography and meta-lexicography. Thevolumes focus on aspects of lexicography such as micro- and macrostructure, typology, history of the discipline, and application-oriented lexicographical documentation.

17th and 18th Century Canting Lexicography in England

The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds

María Ángeles Orts Llopis

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, bringing forth studies on the language of various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

Providing Keys to the Rhetoric of Professional Communities

Power, Persuasion and Manipulation in Specialised Genres

This volume investigates identity traits in academic discourse. Its main purpose is to better understand how and to what extent language forms and functions are adapting to the globalisation of academic discourse. Key factors of verbal behaviour such as the affiliation of actors to one or more cultures have been found to interact, producing transversal identities that are independent of local traits, with a tendency to merge and hybridise in an intercultural sense. The volume consists of three main parts: The first deals with identity traits across languages and cultures, as the use of a given language affects the writing of a scholar, especially when it is not his/her native language. The second comprises investigations of identity features characterising specific disciplinary communities or marking a differentiation from other branches of knowledge. The third part of the volume deals with identity aspects emerging from genre and gender variation.

A Corpus-based Investigation

Academic Identity Traits

The object of the volume is the analysis of the main dictionaries and glossaries of the canting language (the particular jargon spoken by thieves and vagabonds) that appeared in the 17th and 18th centuries. The scholars' attention has mostly concentrated on the earliest publications - particulary those appearing in the Elizabethan period -, while relatively little research has investigated subsequent canting dictionaries and glossaries. The aim of the present volume is to fill this gap. The main works on canting published in the 17th and 18th centuries are analysed in chapters 3 to 10. The first two chapters provide a necessary introduction to the investigation carried out in the subsequent sections, examining the great increase in the numbers of vagabonds and criminals in England in that period from a sociohistorical perspective and reviewing the 16th-century English literature about the underworld. The subsequent eight chapters give a detailed analysis of the main works on canting which appeared in the second part of the 17th century and during the whole of the 18th century. The specific features of each publication are identified, as well as the method adopted by its author in the compilation of his dictionary/glossary and the most likely sources of its entries, in order to determine the degree of novelty and relevance that his contribution has brought to this field. The final chapter deals with the evolution in the meaning of the term 'cant' itself in the period taken into consideration.

Susan Šarčević

Susan Sarcevic

This volume focuses on specialist translation - one of the areas of translation in greatest demand in our age of globalization. The 16 chapters deal not only with the classical domains of science and technology, law, socio-politics and medicine but also with lesser researched areas such as archeology, geography, nutrigenomics and others. As a whole, the book achieves a blend of theory and practice. It addresses a variety of issues such as translation strategy based on text type and purpose, intercultural transfer and quality assessment, as well as textual and terminological issues in bilingual and multilingual settings, including international organizations and the European Union. Today translation competence presupposes multidisciplinary skills. Whereas some chapters analyze the linguistic features of special-purpose texts and their function in specialized communication, others show how specialized translation has changed as a result of globalization and how advances in technology have altered terminology research and translation processing.

Insights Into Specialized Translation

Michele Sala

Stefania Maria Maci

The aim of this volume is to give voice to the various and different perspectives in the investigation of tourism discourse in its written, spoken, and visual aspects. The chapters particularly focus on the interaction between the participants involved in the tourism practices, that is the promoters of tourist destinations, on the one hand, and tourists or prospective tourists on the other. In this dialogic interaction, tourism discourse, while representing and producing tourism as a global cultural industry, shows it to be on the move. Language movement in the tourism experience is here highlighted in the various methodological approaches and viewpoints offered by the investigations gathered in this volume.

Maurizio Gotti

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