New biomedical practices and discourses: focus on surrogacy

This study, set in a discourse-analytical and constructionist framework, explores the impact of biomedical advances on language and discourse. The main focus is on surrogacy and on the websites of ten organizations promoting it, with headquarters in various countries where this practice is legal. The discursive representation of the different forms of surrogacy and related Assisted Reproduction Technologies is discussed, focusing in particular on the communicative strategies enacted to deal with the most sensitive and controversial aspects. The analysis provides evidence of an approach that represents surrogacy, the actors and the moral issues involved in absolutely positive terms, and at the same time disregards the most problematic and controversial aspects, making recourse to some recurrent discursive frames. A further aspect investigated is the representation and denomination of the various actors involved, in a context where the spread of new reproductive technologies has introduced the possibility of significantly altering the natural mechanisms presiding over the inception of human life, and has thus triggered a process of lexical innovation and adaptation of the basic vocabulary associated with reproduction and kinship roles

Job advertisements on LinkedIn: generic integrity and evolution

This paper focuses on job advertisements posted on LinkedIn, a Social Networking Site (SNS) tailored to the workplace environment. The job advertisement is a long-lived genre, which existed mainly in the daily/weekly press environment in the form of classified ad until it migrated to the Web. A further development came from the rise of SNSs: the job advert moved to an online community context, with all the social implications of this fact. The aim is to describe the peculiarities of the LinkedIn job advertisement as a sub-genre, identifying similarities with and differences from job ads posted on other online platforms, as well as from the traditional printed job ads published in newspapers. Findings provide evidence of a significant degree of generic integrity, with some changes due to the migration to the web environment, and even more meaningful changes due to the re-contextualization of the genre in a SNS

Rethinking metaphors in COVID-19 communication

This article discusses metaphors used in communication in English about COVID-19 in the light of the critical debate on war-related metaphors that has taken place both in the academia and in the press since the outbreak of the pandemic, as various scholars have argued that such metaphors may have counterproductive effects under various viewpoints. Proposals have also been put forward to replace them with alternative less potentially harmful metaphors (e.g. FOOTBALL, FIRE, STORM, TSUNAMI). In this paper the discussion is based on the analysis of a corpus of print and online news and opinion websites dealing with COVID-19, and aims at verifying the actual use and frequency of both war-based metaphors and non-war alternative metaphorical expressions. At the same time, it intends to evaluate the potential adverse effects of the former and the advantages of the latter as claimed by the scholars involved in the debate. It also shows that in articles and posts dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, WAR metaphors and their entailments are virtually still prevalent, indeed ubiquitous, while the alternative metaphors proposed by scholars appear far more sporadically, with only few instances for each of them or none at all. This high frequency of war-related metaphorical expressions, which is found also in various other domains and in spontaneous speech, mostly in recurrent (and therefore predictable) phraseological configurations, suggests that they have now become conventional and lost their resonance, thus reducing their potential impact

Scientific Knowledge and Legislative Drafting: Focus on Surrogacy Laws

This article discusses how sensitive bioethical issues are addressed in legislation, using as a starting point the analysis of a corpus of normative texts relating to Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ARTs), and in particular surrogacy, enacted in various English-speaking countries. In the investigation, special special attention is given to the re-elaboration and presentation of scientific knowledge in legal discourse with a view to detecting any possible slant or changes, and the reasons thereof. Another important object of investigation is the redefinition of certain well established categories of kinship because of the disruptive effects of biomediacal advances, and ARTs in particular, on family-based social relations. The analysis will focus on legal definitions, which are crucial in this domain considering that advances in the modern technosciences have brought about the need to categorize and name new medical practices and the situations they contribute to bringing about. The focus will be on how definitions are used in normative texts, functioning as initiators of a dynamic process generating discourses that acquire their meaning in the social and communicative contexts they are embedded in. Special attention will be devoted to the way in which specialised scientific, and especially medical, terminology and concepts, are dealt with in bioethically relevant legal discourse

Discursive Representations of Controversial Issues in Medicine and Health

This editorial is meant to introduce a thematic issue of LCM that addresses representations of controversial issues in medicine and health from the perspective of discourse analysis. Due to their high relevance in everybody’s lives, it comes as no surprise that such issues figure prominently in public debates. Some of the most controversial among them are abortion, medical use of marijuana, euthanasia and assisted suicide, end-of-life care, life support for the terminally ill, gene editing, genomic medicine, donor insemination, surrogacy, to name but a few, in a context where the production and the consumption of scientific information involve, affect and (dis)connect multiple actors, stakeholders and multiple publics, sub-publics as well as counter-publics. It is a picture of remarkable complexity where different values, opinions and beliefs are shaped by a multiplicity of social and cognitive factors. This editorial deals with a few general aspects, providing some background to the more specific studies presented in the articles included in the issues.3reservedmixedGiuliana Elena Garzone; Maria Cristina Paganoni; Martin ReisglGarzone, GIULIANA ELENA; Cristina Paganoni, Maria; Reisgl, Marti

Job advertisements on Linkedin. Generic integrity and evolution

This paper focuses on job advertisements posted on LinkedIn, a Social Networking Site (SNS) tailored to the workplace environment. The job advertisement is a long-lived genre, which existed mainly in the daily/weekly press environment in the form of classified ad until it migrated to the Web. A further development came from the rise of SNSs: the job advert moved to an online community context, with all the social implications of this fact. The aim is to describe the peculiarities of the LinkedIn job advertisement as a sub-genre, identifying similarities with and differences from job ads posted on other online platforms, as well as from the traditional printed job ads published in newspapers. Findings provide evidence of a significant degree of generic integrity, with some changes due to the migration to the web environment, and even more meaningful changes due to the re-contextualization of the genre in a SNS.  

La comunicazione professionale negli spazi virtuali: i blog giuridici

Il presente studio intende concentrarsi sui blog giuridici di tipo professionale come esempio di blog tematici propri di uno specifico settore specialistico, che mettono a disposizione della comunità degli studiosi e dei professionisti uno spazio discorsivo per lo scambio di informazioni e di opinioni e la condivisione di esperienze, offrendo inoltre un ambiente adatto alla pubblicazione istantanea di testi accademici da aprire al dibattito (Berman 2007; Kerr 2006; Solum 2006; Volokh 2006). In particolare, l’analisi sarà svolta su un corpus di testi scaricati da quattro diversi blog giuridici in lingua inglese gestiti da professionisti (giudici, avvocati) e mirerà a descrivere le strategie linguistiche e discorsive che caratterizzano questo tipo di testi. Attenzione verrà anche dedicata alle eventuali variazioni rilevabili in ciascuno dei quattro blog, correlando i risultati con diversi fattori contestuali. Sarà così possibile determinare se le realizzazioni discorsive esaminate presentano caratteristiche così divergenti da compromettere la possibilità di classificarle all’interno del macro-genere del blog, come proposto da alcuni autori di cui si è detto poc’anzi (Miller and Shepherd 2009; Mauranen 2013). Tra i tratti esaminati vi saranno l’organizzazione discorsiva complessiva, i contenuti, e la struttura interna dei blog. Verranno inoltre rilevate le autoreferenze la cui ricorrenza può costituire un indicatore fondamentale dell’incidenza della dimensione individualistica/esistenziale nella comunicazione, offrendo così una misura di quanto il blog giuridico professionale si sia allontanato dal modello originale di espressione diaristica a cavallo tra privato e pubblico. Gli elementi così rilevati consentiranno di affrontare le questioni relative alla concettualizzazione e alla evoluzione del macro-genere del blog e dei relativi sotto-generi, e di valutare l’assetto linguistico di questa forma di comunicazione in cui il linguaggio specialistico si ibrida e si disperde nel dialogo e nell’espressione individuale

Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore the complexities of domain-specific knowledge dissemination

This study focuses on the suitability of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for the investigation of various aspects of knowledge dissem-ination discourse in domain specific areas of communication. It is first argued that on account of its ability to lay bare ideological slant in discourse, CDA is especially useful in the analysis of the knowledge dissemination process as the transformation of special-ised knowledge into ‘lay’ knowledge and its re-contextualisation (Calsamiglia 2003; Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004; Garzone 2006) inev-itably leave scope for manipulation, bias, or alterations. Secondly, it is shown that because of its interest in the relationship between evo-lutions in discourse and social change, CDA can also be useful to describe how discourse evolves in time reflecting developments in specialised knowledge and at the same time it plays a role in trigger-ing and/or reinforcing associated social changes (Fairclough 1992: 4). It is concluded that the use of CDA in the analysis of knowledge dissemination discourse contributes to highlighting the social inter-face (van Dijk 2003: 85) between knowledge, discourse and the process of dissemination in its social dimension, and does so using linguistic analysis to lay bare any ideological bias or slant and to un-derstand the impact of the elements identified on social representa-tions and social cognition

Investigating conflict discourses in the periodical press: an overview

This chapter presents an overview of the concepts of conflict and conflict discourse, their coverage in the periodical press, and provides a review of relevant research. This is followed by reflections focusing on the use of discourse analysis in this area of investigation, with a brief discussion of some of the analytical tools most frequently deployed. In particular it is shown that the study of conflict discourse in the periodical press brings together various strands of research: on the one hand specifically linguistic and discourse analytical investigations of conflict communication, including Critical Discourse Analysis and argumentation theory, and on the other hand media studies, and in particular research on discourse in the news and in other periodical publications. It emerges from the analysis that for the only fact of being published in the periodical press (indeed prevalently in the daily press) articles dealing with conflictual issues contribute to spreading certain ways of viewing such issues. In the press news, events and notions are recontextualized in what could be defined as ‘the media order of discourse’, so their representation does not, or not only, reflect the issues involved, but rather it constructs them discursively, thus largely influencing people’s perception and opinions, with a different impact on public opinion and society depending on the nature of the conflictual or contested issue at hand, and its political, social or cultural weight (e.g. the debate over populism or immigration, or disabilities or environmental problems, etc.)

Representing and re-defining expert knowledge for the layman. Self-help medical manuals in late 19th century America

This paper analyses a corpus (over 1 million words) of three self-help medical handbooks published in the US in the latter quarter of the 19th century, R.V. Pierce’s The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser (1883), M.L. Byrn’s The Mystery of Medicine Explained (1887), and Gunn and Jordan’s Newest Revised Physician (1887). It aims to explore the discursive construction of medical knowledge and of the medical profession in the period, combining discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The popularity of these manuals has to be seen within the context of medical care at a time when, in spite of the advances made in the course of the 19th century, the status of the medical profession was still unstable. Initially the focus of the study is on the representation of the medical profession. In this respect, the analysis testifies to an approach to traditional medical expertise which is essentially ambivalent, taking its distance from abstract medicine and quackery alike, while at the same time promoting a new approach based on different, more modern principles. The focus then shifts to the episteme of the medical science as represented in the works under investigation. The construction of selected epistemically relevant notions – knowledge, theory/ies, experience, evidence, and observation – is discussed relying on concordance lines in order to retrieve and examine all the contexts where they occur. The results of the analysis indicate a shift in the epistemological approach to knowledge, with theory and suppositions being complemented by experience, evidence and facts, and a representation of knowledge as a tool for empowerment, in line with the increasing democratisation of medicine characterising the period