Going Green with… Communication A Comparative Analysis of Opposing Campaigns

In tune with rapidly increasing environmental awareness, terms like sustainability and eco-friendly frequently occur and are exploited in discourse domains from supermarket advertising to corporate communication. In contrast to these discursive simulations of concern, Greenpeace (GP) activists have consistently used non-violent protests as a means to protect our planet. GP’s campaigns are designed to raise questions, to make people rethink the way they live and (ab)use the Earth’s environment, and, ultimately, to engage volunteers and raise funds. In a different vein, Gazprom (GZM) also attempts to advertise its corporate image and its mission to distribute gas through powerful technology, connecting entire continents through a grid of pipelines and ships, ‘energising’ anything from industrial plants to gas stoves in apartments and small cottages. The aim of this study is to analyse aspects of both GZM’s and GP’s modes of advertising their goals, particularly the multi-layered composition of their online videos, using a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach and ecolinguistics. Both GZM and GP exemplify a tendency to “promotionalisation”, sharing the same codes and rhetoric strategies in a variety of advertising campaigns. Unpredictably enough, both utilise ‘green-speaking’ multimodally. The implications of the striking similarities between GP’s and GZM’s communication are also discussed

The 2019 State of the Union Address and Stacey Abrams’ rebuttal. A deferred dialogic exchange

A favoured communicative opportunity of Donald Trump was the State of the Union Address, which was widely broadcast across the contemporary mediascape, including via YouTube. Traditionally, the SOTU address is followed by a rebuttal speech from a representative of the opposition party, and in 2019 the speaker for the Democrats was Stacey Abrams, the first African American woman to deliver a rebuttal speech. This heteroglossic dialogic confrontation was further amplified by the simultaneous fact-checking of the news media, thus presenting the audience/s with a complex diachronic speech event. Indeed, the rich affordances of our polymedia environment critically engage the cognitive levels of human interaction and information exchange, leading to forms of bounded rationality, such as cognitive heuristics. Against this fluid background, the research purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, it evaluates the success of presidential rhetoric in the 2019 SOTU address, which aimed at projecting a renovated image of the desired unity of values and goals at a national level. Secondly, it comparatively considers the different qualities of the rhetoric of the SOTU and the rebuttal speech, as well as the media reaction. The analytical foci will be on both speakers’ attitudinal positionings by utilising the fine-grained resources of the appraisal framework (White 2015), with insights from Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, on their discursive strategies and topoi, following a broad discourse-historical approach (Reisigl 2017; Wodak 2015), as well as on the pragmatic aspects of such exchanges, which were finalised to gain political consensus

The 2019 State of the Union Address and Stacey Abrams’ rebuttal. A deferred dialogic exchange

A favoured communicative opportunity of Donald Trump was the State of the Union Address, which was widely broadcast across the contemporary mediascape, including via YouTube. Traditionally, the SOTU address is followed by a rebuttal speech from a representative of the opposition party, and in 2019 the speaker for the Democrats was Stacey Abrams, the first African American woman to deliver a rebuttal speech. This heteroglossic dialogic confrontation was further amplified by the simultaneous fact-checking of the news media, thus presenting the audience/s with a complex diachronic speech event. Indeed, the rich affordances of our polymedia environment critically engage the cognitive levels of human interaction and information exchange, leading to forms of bounded rationality, such as cognitive heuristics. Against this fluid background, the research purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, it evaluates the success of presidential rhetoric in the 2019 SOTU address, which aimed at projecting a renovated image of the desired unity of values and goals at a national level. Secondly, it comparatively considers the different qualities of the rhetoric of the SOTU and the rebuttal speech, as well as the media reaction. The analytical foci will be on both speakers’ attitudinal positionings by utilising the fine-grained resources of the appraisal framework (White 2015), with insights from Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, on their discursive strategies and topoi, following a broad discourse-historical approach (Reisigl 2017; Wodak 2015), as well as on the pragmatic aspects of such exchanges, which were finalised to gain political consensus

Regret and Other Emotions Related to Decision-Making: Antecedents, Appraisals, and Phenomenological Aspects

Objectives: The mainstream position on regret in psychological literature is that its necessary conditions are agency and responsibility, that is, to choose freely but badly. Without free choice, other emotions, such as disappointment, are deemed to be elicited when the outcome is worse than expected. In two experiments, we tested the opposite hypothesis that being forced by external circumstances to choose an option inconsistent with one’s own intentions is an important source of regret and a core component of its phenomenology, regardless of the positivity/negativity of the post-decision outcome. Along with regret, four post-decision emotions – anger toward oneself, disappointment, anger toward circumstances, and satisfaction – were investigated to examine their analogies and differences to regret with regard to antecedents, appraisals, and phenomenological aspects. Methods: Through the scenario methodology, we manipulated three variables: choice (free/forced), outcome (positive/negative), and time (short/long time after decision-making). Moreover, we investigated whether responsibility, decision justifiability, and some phenomenological aspects (self-attribution, other attribution, and contentment) mediated the effect exerted by choice, singularly or in interaction with outcome and time, on the five emotions. Each study was conducted with 336 participants, aged 18–60. Results: The results of both studies were similar and supported our hypothesis. In particular, regret elicited by forced choice was always high, regardless of the valence of outcome, whereas free choice elicited regret was high only with a negative outcome. Moreover, regret was unaffected by responsibility and decision justifiability, whereas it was affected by the three phenomenological dimensions. Conclusion: Our results suggest that (1) the prevailing theory of regret is too binding, since it posits as necessary some requirements which are not; (2) the antecedents and phenomenology of regret are broader than it is generally believed; (3) decision-making produces a complex emotional constellation, where the different emotions, singularly and/or in combination, constitute the affective responses to the different aspects of decision-making

ELF as the Medium in the Psychoanalytic Discourse Community: Science and International Dissemination

The current political debate on the use of English as Lingua franca (ELF) among people from different lingua-cultural contexts in influential domains – i. e. ELF as part of the more general phenomenon of EIL (Seidlhofer 2004) – mainly orbits around the basic questions whether English is to be described as a "Tyrannosaurus Rex" let loose in the world to gobble up other languages and, still more, as an imperialist killer (Swales 1997, Ives2006, Harvey 2005), or else, if its very spread can act as a paradoxical motivation for speakers of other languages to insist on their own language and culture (House 2007). A more neutral perspective is shared by linguists engaged in the building/studying of corpora such as ELFA ( ELF in Academic Settings – Mauranen 2003) and VOICE, (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English – Seidlhofer 2004) on spoken ELF interactions, and, still, as the inter-culturally oriented Italian CADIS which analyses textual variants arising from the use of English as a first/ second language, or lingua franca of the scientific community (Gotti 2006). Undeniably, the ever growing number of people with a degree of facility in English – predictably 2 billion in 2015 as compared to 250 million in 1952 ( Graddol 2006, Crystal 1997) – is a world historical phenomenon with massive political consequences, that is meeting increasing opposition. Both in the ‘decolonising’-oriented circles (Harvey 2005, waThiong 1981), and in academia, especially in France and in Germany, there is a growing disinclination to acknowledge English as The Language of Science (House 2007). Yet, in Germany, in the 1920s the outstanding and self -confident Freudian Psychoanalytic Community resorted to English when necessary for the dissemination of their works, which were frequently published in The British Journal of Medical Psychology (now published as Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice) – even though in those years German was a prestigious language for science. English was the official language also of the 2006 Baden Baden Conference –Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatics: Mind, Body and the Bridge Between, which has served as a benchmark for where the field stands at the present time – thereby confirming the 1920s linguistic choice. This study has used the 2006 Baden Baden Conference papers and some preceding and subsequent works as corpus. Our data indicated that the use of English by the Non Native Speakers of the psychoanalytic community tendentially conformed to academic/scientific linguistic standards and genres, but greater pragmalinguistic variants in terms of authorial identity are apparent as compared to other scientific domains. In the Psychoanalytic community argumentative (not rarely belligerent) debate played an essential role, and still does; this appears as one major reason for such variations. This study will provide both qualitative and quantitative data of such phenomena and provisional explanations for them, in the context of scientific dissemination via ELF

Glottodidattica trans-modale/mediale dell’inglese, inclusività e sostenibilità –considerazioni

Il progressivo evolversi delle politiche linguistiche europee in direzione del plurilinguismo, della comunicazione interculturale e dell’inclusività si rispecchia nei temi contemporanei della glottodidattica, disciplina che ha recentemente guadagnato terreno in misura notevole anche in settori scientifico-disciplinari in cui non era tradizionalmente centrale, quali Lingua e Traduzione Inglese, evolvendosi in più direzioni e ambiti di interesse socioculturale e politico. L’enfasi non è più sulla centralità degli standard britannico e statunitense dell’inglese, bensì sulla sua funzionalità come lingua internazionale/culturale in contesti comunicativi che includono comunicazione tecnico-scientifica, negoziazioni commerciali, turismo e trasmissione dell’heritage, diritto (extra-)europeo, sport, ecc., e i numerosi linguaggi settoriali. Le dimensioni multimodali e multimediali della didattica contemporanea hanno sensibilmente ampliato le possibilità di espansione

M. Marroni, Dialoghi traduttologici. Il testo letterario e la lingua inglese

I Dialoghi Traduttologici di Michela Marroni attraversano vari ambiti dei Translation Studies in prospettiva diacronica, proponendo una sistematizzazione di esperienze traduttive salienti e culturalmente rilevanti. Adottando un approccio articolato e flessibile, Marroni attraversa con competenza critica la storia di una disciplina che si configura come tale a partire dagli anni Settanta dello scorso secolo, rivalutando l’importanza socio-culturale della traduzione, per poi arricchirsi negli anni Novanta di una nuova consapevolezza e di temi complessi quali il gender e le culture post-coloniali. In sintesi, attraverso la lettura dei capitoli del volume si comprende come, per usare un’espressione di J. L. Subbiondo (2017), “the history of a discipline matters”