When a relationship ends “there can be no turning back”. The divorce metaphor in the Brexit discourse

Brexit has inspired far more metaphors than it has solutions. Many conventional and novel metaphors have been used to frame this issue and the relationship between the EU and the UK. This paper addresses one of them: the divorce metaphor. Starting from the assumption that it is not the side with ‘the most’ or ‘best’ facts that wins but the one that provides the most plausible and reliable scenarios (Musolff 2017), this paper intends to explore how the metaphor of divorce has been used by British politicians and in British mainstream media with a view to influencing citizens when justifying political actions. Modelling our method of analysis on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Charteris-Black 2004), we try to demonstrate how the same metaphor becomes a powerful tool for disseminating different evaluative content and expressing criticism

The new European Union. Different perspectives from different Member States

N.

Migration of n-grams and concgrams in political speeches

This paper investigates phrases and clusters, here termed also n-grams and concgrams, in politics, more specifically in American, British and Italian political spoken discourse. In particular the study focuses on two tri-grams, one occurring both in highly formal but also informal speeches and one typical of impromptu language: fight against terrorism and connect the dots. Firstly, the origin of the cluster is examined, then the extent to which it has migrated into other cultures: a diachronic study demonstrates in fact that Italian politicians who hardly uttered the word guerra in the vicinity of terrorismo are now frequently using the phrase guerra al terrorismo, whereas in the past lotta al terrorismo was the only choice; it is here argued that this may be attributed to the strong influence of the American war on terror. The paper discusses also how the cluster connect the dots, very surprisingly, has migrated from American into Italian spoken discourse more readily than into British spoken discourse, carrying within itself the same negative semantic prosody. The corpus was interrogated by ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves), a software able to handle positional variation (AB, BA), namely when the associated words occur in different position relative to one another, and constituency variation (AB, ACB), namely when one or more words occur in between the associated words (Cheng, Greaves and Warren). Such searches have proved to be an invaluable aid to uncover the full extent of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1991)

ESP Across Cultures

Diana Al-Aghbari Pragmatics in the ESP context: an interdisciplinary study 9 Richard Chapman Questioning assumptions in English language teaching and ESP 25 Stefania Consonni and Michele Sala Taboo, tabloids and Trump: the rise and twilight of a US President in digital mainstream news media 37 Ester Di Silvestro and Marco Venuti Populist leaders and masculinity: a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of hegemonic masculinity performances on social media 57 Daniele Franceschi Fostering multimodal literacy in ESP teaching: the case of lawyer-client interviews 81 Christopher Goddard Legal terminology in English: the challenges of international contexts 105 Jennifer Lertola Free commentary to enhance writing and speaking skills in EFL teacher training 125 Ian Michael Robinson Preparing for CLIL in southern Italy and beyond: CLIL teacher trainin

A contrastive analysis of English and Italian financial lexis: the pay-with-plastic system

In this paper we investigate two linguistic and financial systems and consequently two cultures by analysing the pay-with-plastic system on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing our research on two expressions, i.e. credit card and carta di credito contained in EIFECO (English and Italian Financial and Economic Corpus), a bilingual comparable corpus assembled at the University of Foggia. The texts in EIFECO come from The Economist for the English data and from Il Sole 24 Ore for the Italian. In this study we find unexpected and substantial differences in the behavior of two supposedly ‘true friends’ usually believed to be direct equivalents from a denotative point of view. After analysing the concept of equivalence and equivalent effect, we endeavor to find the best equivalent expression that might convey the spirit and manner of the source language and might produce a similar response in both users. Beyond the formal equivalence of the two payment systems taken into consideration, we try to find what Nida terms “dynamic equivalence”, or the principle of “equivalent effect” (Nida 1964). Our aim is to show that although some words sound and look the same, they convey different meanings, and traditional reference books do not seem to be suitable for capturing and relaying the nuances of meaning and function of given fixed expressions across languages and cultures

ESP Across Cultures

Lucia Abbamonte Barbara Cappuzzo Paola Leotta Fabiola Notari Monica Randaccio Museum AD: interpretative or un-interpretative audio description? Annalisa Sandrelli Alice Spence

In, out, or half way? The European attitude in the speeches of British leaders

Abstract – It cannot be denied that Britain is normally seen as an awkward partner in EU affairs (George 1994), and in many ways the British have always been half-in: in the two-speed Europe slogan, Britain is seen as a slow traveller (Musolff 2004), as a member that makes slow progress, it if is at all on the European path. The purpose of this paper is to try and unveil, with evidence at hand, the sentiment of the British leaders with respect to the European Union. Interestingly, the current government includes both Conservatives and Lib-Dems leaders, and it is well known that the former have been, more often than not, against Europe whereas the latter are highly passionate about their pro-Europeanism. Interviews, statements and speeches proper are thus analysed and compared: first wordlists are generated, then keywords lists and finally key-clusters lists (Scott 2012), with the purpose of identifying "aboutgrams" (Warren 2010; Sinclair, Tognini Bonelli 2011), and see what the two governments have in common, but mostly what differentiates them with regard to the European Union, i.e. what is prioritized in one administration and was not in another, clearly signalling a change in priorities (Cheng 2004; Cheng et al. 2006; Cheng et al. 2009). The study is a diachronic analysis, in the attempt to see how previous discourses have been reinterpreted, given that forty years after joining the Union the British are still reluctant Europeans who still consider Europe "abroad", thus slowing the "ever-closer union" envisaged in the Treaty of Rome, and who still have been calling for referendums, even more so after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.Keywords: European Union, UK, political speeches, opt out, aboutgrams

Phraseology in Political Discourse. A corpus linguistics approach in the classroom

The book starts from the assumption that the attraction between words is a matter of convention, that is, certain words significantly prefer each other’s company whether in adjacent or in discontinuous phrasal frameworks, other words just do not co-occur because they have no relationship with each other, and certain words are prohibited from co-occurring for no apparent reason other than habit. Thus, the investigation concerns not only those phrases which are obviously conceived as idiomatic, but also those which are not intuitively felt as such and which co-occur more often than chance would predict. This study highlights clearly that lexis and grammar are closely interdependent and that patterns, collocations, phraseology are the norm in language and not the exception, the core and not the periphery. After a short introduction to Corpus Linguistics and to how this applied discipline can illuminate language teaching, and after a brief account of the several different kinds of corpora that we rely on in our classrooms, this work presents a detailed investigation of some structures that appear very frequently in spoken political discourse, as well as in general spoken discourse, but are nevertheless somewhat overlooked in traditional reference texts. It also analyses first the most recurrent clusters in the speeches of British and American politicians, and then the most common as well as the most typical phrasal verbs, so frequently used by native speakers yet so commonly “avoided” by non-native speakers. The book is aimed at students, as well as at teachers and researchers, with the attempt to help provide some domain-specific insights on the teaching of political language as well as of general language. It tries to answer these basic questions: how idiomatic is language? How aware are students of such idiomaticity? How far do traditional reference books and dictionaries tend to be from the language which is taught in class? How useful are corpora in the classroom? All the examples provided are uttered by political leaders in the UK and in the USA from 2001 to 2011