Comparable Corpora in Cross-cultural Genre Studies: Tools for the Analysis of CSR reports

The chapter explores the potential of corpus tools in cross cultural studies of genres, using a cross cultural analysis of CSR reports as a case study. Based on the assumption that: a) the most important contribution of corpus linguistics lies in providing tools for the calculation of frequencies and for the observation of combination of elements; b) a cross-cultural comparison of genres requires integration of lexical categories with semantic and functional pragmatic perspectives, the chapter looks at how corpus tools (most notably keyness and concordances) can contribute to different ways of integrating these lexical, semantic and functional-pragmatic perspectives in genre analysis and how they can contribute to different, complementary paths of integration (bottom-up and top-down). It also shows that the integration of bottom-up procedures (from lexical units to semantics and functional-pragmatic units) and top-down procedures (from functional-pragmatic units to semantics and lexical units) can actually take place at different levels of textual structure

Knowledge Transfer through the Ages

Brief presentation of the rationale of the MIUR project on "Knoeldge dissemination across genres in English

Language variations across genres: Quantifiers and worlds of reference in (and around) economics textbooks

L’étude ici présentée a pour objet les variations linguistiques à travers les genres dans le domaine du discours économique. L’investigation des relations entre quantificateurs et mondes de référence (monde de fait/monde d’hypothèse) est conduit sur deux corpora. Le premier corpus est constitué de trente chapitres extraits de manuels anglais et anglo-américains ; le second corpus, plus limité, regroupe des travaux de Samuelson et comprend des chapitres de manuels, des articles de recherche et des commentaires publiés sur la presse. L’ensemble des textes rend possible une analyse des traits linguistiques caractéristiques ainsi que des structures typiques relevées dans les chapitres des manuels pour l’économique. La comparaison des données met en évidence des variations quantitatives et fonctionnelles dans l’utilisation des quantificateurs à l’intérieur des différents genres. Une particulière attention a été accordée à l’utilisation de quantificateurs exacts dans des actes hypothétiques. Les conclusions considèrent enfin les implications d’une analyse fondée sur le concept de genre, conduite à partir des supports pédagogiques en anglais de spécialité.The paper focuses on language variation across genres within the field of economics discourse. It investigates the relationship between quantifiers and worlds of reference (world of fact vs world of hypothesis) in two small corpora. The first is a corpus of thirty textbook chapters from English and American textbooks; the second is a small corpus of works by Samuelson, which includes textbook chapters, research articles and comments for the press. The textbook corpus allows an analysis of the characteristic language features and the typical structures found in chapters of economics textbooks. The comparative data show both quantitative and functional variation in the use of quantifiers in the various genres. Special attention is drawn to the use of exact quantifiers in hypothetical moves. Conclusions are drawn as to the implications of a genre-based analysis of materials in EAP

I am wild about cabbage: evaluative ‘semantic sequences’ and cross-linguistic (dis)similarities

The paper investigates the phraseology of evaluation in two comparable corpora of discussions from blogs in Italian and in English. Subjectivity markers are taken as an indication of the significant role that the writer’s ‘self’ plays in the genre, ideal territory for an analysis of the language of evaluation. After considering collocates and grammar patterns of the selected markers, the analysis centres on evaluative ‘semantic sequences’ by aligning typical recurrent surface arrangements with strings of prototypical meaning elements such as ‘entity or process evaluated’, ‘evaluation’ and different ‘sources of evaluation’. Four types of sequences are identified: ‘basic’, ‘framed’, ‘dialogic’ and ‘concessive’. The results attest for substantial semantic similarities over and above lexico-syntactic and inter-linguistic mismatches. Semantic sequences can be shown to be useful tools for cross-linguistic analysis

Variations of polyphony in blogs

This paper looks at dialogicity in the Slow Art Day blog and focuses on the way the representation of participants encodes the complexity of the communicative action through a polyphony of textual voices. By focusing on posts from the pandemic years (2020 and 2021), and contrasting them with the previous period, we carry out a collocation analysis and a study of semantic preferences (Sinclair 2004) to explore how writers present themselves and how they interact with the reader and other textual voices in a context of cultural intermediation. By looking at forms of address and of self-mention, we trace how this blog enacts different forms of dialogic action with its readers and stakeholders in the extended situational context

Risk and Threat during the Covid-19 Pandemic: a Micro-Diachronic Perspective.

Communicating risk during the Covid-19 pandemic Since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, media content has focused on issues related to the virus, ranging from scientific and medical information (i.e. structure of the virus, effects, vaccines, etc.) to safety measures and government restrictions (i.e. lockdown, curfews, use of masks, etc.). Covid-19 discourse has raised much interest in academia, both in linguistics and the social sciences especially concerning the frequently used metaphor of war (Sabucedo et al 2020, Wagener 2020, Castro Seixas 2021, Panzeri et al. 2021, Taylor 2021). Other studies have focused on the communication of risk during Covid-19 from a health perspective to address eventual gaps in the interaction between doctors and virologists and patients and non-experts (Abrams and Greenhawt 2020, Chesser et al. 2020). However, to our knowledge risk is yet to be studied from a linguistic perspective. The aim of this paper is to analyse how risk was conveyed in newspapers and on online magazines during 2020. More specifically, we present a diachronic analysis of the words risk and threat in the Coronavirus Corpus which was created to keep record of the economic, social and political impact of the pandemic. By tracing changes (if there are any) in frequency and meaning over the months, we aim at identifying collocates and phraseology used to convey issues related to risk and virus menace since the start of the outbreak. Results will shed light on the communication of risk and on significant patterns associated to the semantic field of threat during a health emergency

Devising a language certificate for primary school teachers of english

This paper sets out to examine how the Common European Framework of Reference can be employed as a useful tool for the purpose of devising a language certificate meant to assess the competence needed for effective teaching at the primary school level. To this end, the B1 level descriptors of the CEF have been re-written so as to make them correspond, as closely as possible, to the abilities actually displayed in the context of primary language teaching and they have also been referred to three different contexts of use: classroom management, professional self-development and language awareness. A tentative draft of one of the parts of the certificate meant to assess oral comprehension will be shown as the final step of a process which started with the definition of the profile of the foreign language teacher. Key words: Language proficiency certificate, descriptors, Common European Framework of Reference, foreign language teaching in primary schools Este trabajo se propone explicar cómo se puede emplear útilmente el Marco Común de Referencia Europeo (MCRE) en la realización de una certificación lingüística que atestigüe las competencias necesarias para una enseñanza eficaz y eficiente en el ámbito de la escuela primaria. El análisis dará cuenta de cómo se han modificado los descriptores del nivel B1 del MCRE, para que se correspondan lo más fielmente posible con las habilidades utilizadas en el ámbito de la enseñanza de una lengua extranjera en la escuela primaria, con referencia a tres ámbitos de uso distintos: la gestión de la clase, el propio desarrollo profesional y la conciencia lingüística. Se mostrará un esbozo de una de las partes de la certificación lingüística, destinada a evaluar la comprensión oral, para ilustrar el desarrollo de un recorrido que, a partir de la reescritura de los descriptores del MCRE, lleva además a configurar un perfil del docente de un idioma extranjero en la escuela primaria. Palabras clave: Certificación de las competencias lingüísticas, descriptores, Marco Común de Referencia Europeo, enseñanza de un idioma extranjero en la escuela primari

“Due to Heightened Risk”: Qualifying Risk in the Debate over Covid-19

Our paper presents an analysis of the conceptualisation and framing of ‘risk’ in the Covid-19 pandemic. We investigate all occurrences of risk-based vocabulary in two corpora dealing with the spread and the political/social/economic consequences of Covid19 from February 2020 to February 2021 (i.e. the InterDiplo Covid-19 corpus and the CORD-19 corpus). We apply a mixed-method approach to show how the concept of ‘risk’ is lexically qualified in the public communication of a hot issue such as the pandemic. Therefore, after a first recognition of all related expressions of the nominal realization of “risk” in the worldlists of the two corpora, we investigate their concordances to find typical collocations and phraseology used to qualify risk in Covid-19 epidemic. Our results show a clear tendency towards a negative thematisation of “risk” which is characterized by patterns highlighting uncertainty and fear in the fight against a disease spreading on an unprecedented scale and posing total threats that not only involve individuals but affect humanity globally. The focus on the phraseology around the lexical elements helps reconstruct communicative functions and approaches that characterize the two discursive contexts

Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves

The paper pivots around the different roles of evidentials and the different ways in which evidence is represented in the discourse of popular and academic history, thereby exploring the dynamics of both genres from a discourse analytical perspective. The analysis is based on two corpora of academic and popular articles on history. In particular, it is focused on those lexico-grammatical resources for tracing the speaker’s source and mode of information that constitute the distinguishing features of the two genres. The analysis shows that the high frequency of saw in popular articles refers to the narrative of history, and to the evidence provided by historical characters and sources, rather than by the speaker. The frequency of the attributor according in academic journal articles, on the other hand, clearly qualifies as evidentiality in the narrative of historiography, and acts as a marker of the importance of sources in historical reasoning. The different frequencies thus seem to be related to the different communicative and social functions of the two genres and to be closely connected with the triptych of narratives (Bondi 2015) involved in historical discourse