The discourse of Olympic security 2012 : London 2012

This paper uses a combination of CDA and CL to investigate the discursive realization of the security operation for the 2012 London Olympic Games. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s (2008) conceptualisation of the ‘banopticon’, it address two questions: what distinctive linguistic features are used in documents relating to security for London 2012; and, how is Olympic security realized as a discursive practice in these documents? Findings suggest that the documents indeed realized key banoptic features of the banopticon: exceptionalism, exclusion and prediction, as well as what we call ‘pedagogisation’. Claims were made for the exceptional scale of the Olympic events; predictive technologies were proposed to assess the threat from terrorism; and documentary evidence suggests that access to Olympic venues was being constituted to resemble transit through national boundarie

Il design italiano e l’italianità nei nomi commerciali. Percorsi per la didattica dell’italiano L2

Italian design and Italianity in brand naming. Teaching activities in Italian as a second language. This paper examines the expression of Italian language and culture in brand naming for the Italian design sector, in order to identify linguistic and cultural elements to be integrated into teaching activities for the development of linguistic and intercultural competence in Italian as a second language. The research is based on the linguistic and semantic analysis of a corpus of brand names of Italian design companies and products, which has allowed us to consider the role of onomastic creativity in the spread of Italian language and culture in the world. The analysis is followed by some suggestions for planning teaching activities based on the use of Italian design brand names in the context of teaching and learning Italian as a second language

Generating a 3D Simulation of a Car Accident from a Written Description in Natural Language: the CarSim System

This paper describes a prototype system to visualize and animate 3D scenes from car accident reports, written in French. The problem of generating such a 3D simulation can be divided into two subtasks: the linguistic analysis and the virtual scene generation. As a means of communication between these two modules, we first designed a template formalism to represent a written accident report. The CarSim system first processes written reports, gathers relevant information, and converts it into a formal description. Then, it creates the corresponding 3D scene and animates the vehicles.Comment: 8 pages, ACL 2001, Workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processin