Normative texts are meant to be highly impersonal and decontextualised, yet at the same time they also deal with a range of human behaviour that is difficult to predict, which means they have to have a very high degree of determinacy on the one hand, and all-inclusiveness on the other. This poses a dilemma for the writer and interpreter of normative texts. The author of such texts must be determinate and vague at the same time, depending upon to what extent he or she can predict every conceivable contingency that may arise in the application of what he or she writes. The papers in this volume discuss important legal and linguistic aspects relating to the use of vagueness in legal drafting and demonstrate why such aspects are critical to our understanding of the way normative texts function.

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.

International business exchanges between and with Asian countries have increased enormously over the last few years. As a natural consequence, this has brought about an increasing number of trade disputes that are being resolved through arbitration as an effective alternative to more expensive litigation. This volume offers a variety of perspectives on this important international dispute resolution practice in Asia. Essentially interdisciplinary in approach, it brings together specialists in law, international commercial arbitration and discourse analysis. The contributing authors include practitioners as well as academics. Together they explore the interrelations between discourses and practices in the field of arbitration in Asia. The work also investigates the extent to which the 'integrity' of arbitration principles, typical of international commercial arbitration practice, is maintained in various Asian contexts. The authors focus particularly on arbitration norms and practices as they are influenced by local juridical, cultural and linguistic factors. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and practitioners working in the areas of arbitration and dispute resolution, as well as researchers with an interest in language, communication and discourse analysis.

Arbitration is the most widely used alternative method to resolve commercial disputes between parties. Since arbitration in international contexts is equally applicable to legal traditions across the world, there has been incessant effort on the part of all jurisdictions to harmonize principles and practices to establish a unified system of arbitration. As differences are difficult to reconcile, there has been quite a bit of interest and effort invested in the study of some of the key issues and challenges in the field. This volume reports on one such initiative undertaken by an interdisciplinary project, whose main objective is to investigate the norms and arbitral practices in some important Asian countries from the point of view of discursive practices prevalent in these jurisdictions. The project focuses on the documents used in arbitration in the main Asian countries and compares them with those employed in other continents. The investigated texts include not only norms and awards, but also interviews with professionals in the field so as to gain direct insights into the linguistic and textual choices employed in the drafting of these documents.

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as 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. 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 interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. 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 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.

There is hardly any aspect of verbal communication that has not been investigated using the analytical tools developed by corpus linguists. This is especially true in the case of English, which commands a vast international research community, and corpora are becoming increasingly specialised, as they account for areas of language use shaped by specific sociolectal (register, genre, variety) and speaker (gender, profession, status) variables. Corpus analysis is driven by a common interest in 'linguistic evidence', viewed as a source of insights into language phenomena or of lexical, semantic and contrastive data for subsequent applications. Among the latter, pedagogical settings are highly prominent, as corpora can be used to monitor classroom output, raise learner awareness and inform teaching materials. The eighteen chapters in this volume focus on contexts where English is employed by specialists in the professions or academia and debate some of the challenges arising from the complex relationship between linguistic theory, data-mining tools and statistical methods.

This book received the Enrique Alcaraz Research Award in 2015. 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.

This volume presents the latest research of an international group of scholars, engaged in the analysis of academic discourse from a genre-oriented perspective. The area covered by this volume is a central one, as in the last few years important developments in research on academic discourse have not only concerned the more traditional genres, but, as well, generic innovations promoted by the new technologies, employed both in the presentation of research results and in their dissemination to a wider community by means of popularising and teaching activities. These innovations have not only favoured important changes in existing genres and the creation of new ones to meet emerging needs of the academic community, but have also promoted a serious discussion about the construct of genre itself. The various investigations gathered in this volume provide several examples of the complexity and flexibility of genres, which have shown to be subject to a continuous tension between stability and change as well as between convention and innovation.

Investigating Specialized Discourse is a shortened and revised textbook edition of the monograph Specialized Discourse (2003). This book 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. The presence of such properties is accounted for not only in linguistic but also in pragmatic terms since the approach is interpretative rather than merely descriptive. Indeed, the complexity of this discourse calls for a multidimensional analysis, covering both lexis and morpho-syntax as well as textual patterning. Some lexical aspects, morpho-syntactic features and textual genres are also examined from a diachronic perspective, thus showing how various conventions concerning specialized discourse have developed over the last centuries.

This volume explores the relationship between shared disciplinary norms and individual traits in academic speech and writing. Despite the standardising pressure of cultural and language-related factors, academic communication remains in many ways a highly personal affair, with active participation in a disciplinary community requiring a multidimensional discourse that combines the professional, institutional, social and individual identities of its members. The first section of the volume deals with tensions involving individual/collective values and the analysis of collective vs. individual discoursal features in academic discourse. The second section comprises longitudinal investigations of the academic output of single scholars, so as to highlight the individuality in their choices and the reasons for not conforming with the commonality of conventions shared by their professional community. The third part deals with genres that are meant to impose commonality on the members of an academic community, not only in the drafting of specialized texts but also when these are reviewed or evaluated for possible publication.

The focus of this volume is on the business letter genre, a seminal and widely used genre in business communication. Since the introduction of the Internet, interest in this genre has increased once again, because of the digital format of the letter. E-mail has partially taken over the multiple functions of the traditional business letter and bypassed, again partially, the fax. However, the letter has also survived in its written form. Since the 1990s, genre theory has been receiving a lot of attention, both in academic and pedagogical circles. Discourse analysts have increasingly discovered the importance of the genre concept for the understanding of discourse. Not only do we get a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics (register, lexico-grammatical features) of texts, but we also become aware of their macrostructures which appear to be organised according to genre expectations and conventions rooted in the socio-cultural context. This evolution is also reflected in the different research approaches to the business letter, as shown by the various chapters of this volume.

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.

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.

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.

Genre analysis has become firmly established as one of the most popular frameworks for the study of specialized genres in academic, professional and institutional as well as other workplace contexts. In recent years, genre theory has also developed in the direction of a more comprehensive and powerful multi-dimensional and multi-perspectived framework to examine not only the text but also the context in a much more meaningful manner than had ever been done earlier. The theoretical perspectives and the individual case studies of this volume testify to the wide range of methodological tools made available by genre theory, enabling researchers to handle problems relating to the description of variations in language use. Moreover, the following relevant issues are addressed: how are specialized genres constructed, interpreted and exploited in the achievement of specific goals in highly specialized contexts?

This book reflects the vigorous interest in studies of business discourse(s) and culture(s) emerging from various Asian communities. It also records the diversity of methodological approaches, ontological perspectives and topics characterising a number of studies conducted by Asian and Western scholars on cultural and linguistic strategies and preferences identifiable in Asian or Asian-Western business interactions. The volume is structured in two parts, including chapters that address linguistic and textual issues (Part I) and cultural and pragmatic issues (Part II) of Asian business discourse(s). Even though the different domains identified--"linguistic, textual, pragmatic and cultural--"have been combined to provide useful organising labels, they remain strictly interrelated as their occurrence and variation have significant implications on one another.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the First International Conference on English Historical Dialectology (ICEHD), organized at the University of Bergamo in September 2003. It includes papers on fundamental aspects of English historical dialectology, from Old English to Late Modern English. The papers discuss points in two thematically distinct but related sections, 'Methods' and 'Data'. The volume also includes the transcript of a debate on methodological issues, in which the main themes are the principles of historical investigation of geographical varieties, the new approaches provided by corpus linguistics and computer technology, and the need for greater awareness of textual reliability.

Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., New York, Oxford, Wien. This book explores the property of co-reference within various texts as a possible means of distinguishing genre types. Based on observed rather than invented material, it supplies empirical data on co-reference as a cohesive mechanism within authentic English texts. Co-referential form and frequency are identified in nine texts representing three genres: academic journals, news magazine articles and fictional narrative texts. This study offers not only quantitative but also qualitative information regarding co-reference in three individual text types, thereby laying the foundation for a comparative study of the three different genres. Focusing on the property of co-reference in this way singles out differences in language use and allows for some pertinent statements to be made regarding modes of co-reference as an indicator of text variety. Contents: Study of one aspect of text cohesion: co-reference - Definition of co-reference - Study of the modes of co-reference - Co-reference as a text-distinguishing language feature - Genre characteristics - Co-reference linked to language use - Language variation - Use of anaphora versus cataphora - Definition and identification of referent types - Systemic-functional linguistic approach as applied to co-reference - Influence of register variables (field, mode, and tenor) on co-reference - Quantitative and qualitative similarities and differences concerning use of co-reference in different text types.

International business exchanges between and with Asian countries have increased enormously over the last few years. As a natural consequence, this has brought about an increasing number of trade disputes that are being resolved through arbitration as an effective alternative to more expensive litigation. This volume offers a variety of perspectives on this important international dispute resolution practice in Asia. Essentially interdisciplinary in approach, it brings together specialists in law, international commercial arbitration and discourse analysis. The contributing authors include practitioners as well as academics. Together they explore the interrelations between discourses and practices in the field of arbitration in Asia. The work also investigates the extent to which the 'integrity' of arbitration principles, typical of international commercial arbitration practice, is maintained in various Asian contexts. The authors focus particularly on arbitration norms and practices as they are influenced by local juridical, cultural and linguistic factors. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and practitioners working in the areas of arbitration and dispute resolution, as well as researchers with an interest in language, communication and discourse analysis.

Following the rationale that corpora have an important part to play in fostering language awareness, this monograph investigates the use of spoken corpora in the teaching of German as a foreign language. Corpus-based research has had an increasing influence on language teaching pedagogy, with regard to linguistic content as well as to teaching methodology. While the majority of studies reporting on corpus-based teaching approaches refer to English, only a small number of studies have discussed such an approach for German. In this study, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching materials which facilitate the comprehension of German modal particles, which pose numerous problems for learners of German as a foreign language. The approach is twofold: first, the frequency of those word forms which may function as modal particles is established. Secondly, concordance data of the more frequently occurring particles are analysed qualitatively. Teaching materials based on these analyses are developed referring to patterns of use which can be relayed to language learners in order to provide them with tools for the decoding of particle meaning.

This book contributes insights into second language (L2) students' learning of academic genres in English for academic purposes (EAP) writing classes by its focus on the current EAP practice in the context of higher education of China. It presents knowledge construction of genre learning research in L2 writing and English for specific purposes (ESP) genre studies, and reports an in-depth qualitative inquiry into three issues of instruction-based genre learning in an academic writing class: students' learning process of an academic genre in the community of an EAP writing class, students' individual factors in the learning process, and genre knowledge development through engagement in genre-focused writing instruction. The book has theoretical implications for learning English for academic purposes as well as for learning English as a foreign language in general. It also has pedagogical implications for genre teaching in EAP at Chinese universities and similar educational contexts.

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, to go further into the understanding of how they are constructed, interpreted, used and exploited in the achievement of specific goals. Such texts are here contemplated from the stance of genre theory, which starts from the premise that specialised communities have a high level of rhetorical sophistication, the keys to which are offered solely to their members. In particular, the book investigates the communicative devices that serve the need of such professions to exert power and manipulation, and to use persuasion. The perspective adopted in this work does not envisage power simply as a distant, alienated and alienating supremacy from above, but as an everyday, socialized and embodied phenomenon. To attain its goal, the volume brings forth studies on the language of several professions belonging to various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

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.

This book analyses the subject of medical communication from a range of innovative perspectives, covering a broad spectrum of approaches and procedures that are particularly significant in this field. In this volume, medical communication is analyzed from various viewpoints: not only from a merely linguistic angle, with a focus on the description of the genres used in medical and healthcare contexts, but also from a social and cultural standpoint, with an emphasis both on the doctor-patient relationship and on the social relevance of the other types of communicative links existing between the many communities involved in this type of interaction. The study of some of the main fields typical of medical communication has highlighted a considerable variety of themes, data and research methods which are clearly representative of the eclectic interest in this specific domain and of the wide range of approaches developed for its investigation. As the various chapters show, linguistic analysis proves to be highly applicable to textualizations involving multiple interactions and practices, and several kinds of participants, including different healthcare professionals, trainees and patients.