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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.
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 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.
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.
Lenguas y turismo: estudios en torno al discurso, la didactica y la
divulgacion recoge algunas contribuciones sobre los ultimos
trabajos rea-lizados en torno a la estructura del discurso
turistico, la didactica o la innovacion docente de la ensenanza de
materias linguisticas relacionadas con el turismo o las estrategias
de los medios de divulgacion y difusion de las actividades
turisticas. Con el afan de contribuir al crecimiento del numero de
investigaciones y al interes suscitado por el turismo, no solo en
las aulas y en el sector laboral, sino tambien en la esfera
cientifica, consideramos el monografico que aqui presentamos de
especial relevancia. En el, se reunen los resultados, las ideas y
los avances de 21 investigadores especializados en este ambito,
procedentes de distintas universidades espanolas y extranjeras
(entre las que se encuentran la Universidad de Cordoba, la
Universidad de Malaga, la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, la
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, la Universidad de Granada, la
Universidad Europea de Madrid, la Universidad del Pais Vasco, la
Universidad de Innsbruck, la Academia Norte-americana de la Lengua
Espanola y la Universidad de Sevilla), con los que se espera
iniciar debates y nuevas lineas de estudio, reforzar este tipo de
trabajos y posibilitar la apertura de discusiones cientificas que
contribuyan al afianzamiento de la investigacion en el campo del
turismo y de las lenguas.
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