Despite the undeniably impressive achievements of the EU, forms of resistance to the European integration process remain strong in numerous quarters. Drawing upon a theoretical framework centred on the dimension of discourse as social practice, this book takes the literature on EU discourse a step further by integrating insights from discourse studies with key models derived from the domain of political science. The aim is to explore how recent socio-political transformations have affected the way in which the EU discursively represents itself as a legitimate political entity. The idea behind this cross-disciplinary approach is that discourse theory can contribute to a critical renewal of EU studies by drawing attention to the rhetorical aspects that are constitutive of social structures and identities. The analytical parts of this corpus-assisted study explore the evolution of discursive practices in various EU genres at two disruptive moments in the recent history of European integration: the rejection of the draft EU Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands and the UK referendum on EU membership.

In today's knowledge-based society, exploring the dynamics of communicating specialised contents to the lay public is an undoubtedly topical issue. However, popularization still remains a rather unexplored territory and recent contributions to the field seem to lack a consistent methodological orientation, with hesitations in terms of shared and codified definitions. The contributions to this volume constitute a step forward in the field of popularization studies. New scenarios have been explored with a view to providing shared theoretical and descriptive models from a linguistic perspective and investigating the way popularization is characterised and instantiated, also taking into account its intercultural dimension. The research methods and tools draw upon the analytical framework of discourse analysis, pragmatics, corpus linguistics and genre analysis. In der heutigen Wissensgesellschaft sind die Mechanismen des Transfers von Fachwissen an Laien von grosser Relevanz. Dennoch bleibt Popularisierung ein linguistisch noch relativ unbestimmtes und unerforschtes Phanomen. Ziel des Bandes ist deshalb, neue Perspektiven zu eroeffnen und auf moegliche neue konsistente Modelle (sowohl theoretische als auch methodologische) hinzuweisen. Unterschiedliche Ansatze kommen dabei ins Spiel, u.a. Diskursanalyse, Rhetorik, Pragmatik, Korpuslinguistik und genre analysis.

Today's growing mobility in European urban regions results in a more widespread language diversity, which is increasingly challenging current language policies. Against this background, this volume deals with the interface between language policy, language planning and actual practices. The impact that prevailing language policies have on language practices is observed in a series of urban settings, leading to a reflection on the changes that need to be brought about to promote social inclusion and valorise linguistic diversity in a context of globalisation-affected and migration-related multilingualism. The topics of discussion draw on different theoretical perspectives and span the research fields of linguistics, education, (family) language policy and planning, language acquisition and sociology.