Narrative Descriptions in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. A Corpus Stylistics Perspective

The present study draws on corpus stylistics (cf. Semino, Short 2004; Hoover 2007; Mahlberg 2014; Hoover, Culpeper, O’Halloran 2014, to name a few) to investigate the narrative style in Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga (2005-2008). In particular, it focuses on keywords generated using Wordsmith Tools version 7 (Scott 2017), and the BNC as a reference corpus. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the most frequent lexical words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) reflect the writer’s focus on carefully selected physical elements of the characters. More specifically, the nouns preferentially denote specific physical attributes of the characters, the adjectives provide a general description of the protagonists and the setting, while the verbs used present the actions of all the characters, their interaction with the other protagonists, and their position in the narrative situation

Communicating the Image of Venice: The Use of Discourse Markers in Websites and Digital Travel Guidebooks In English

The study investigates a corpus of websites and digital travel guidebooks – collected in a corpus – that promote the city of Venice using English as a lingua franca to convey the promotional message. The study examines a corpus of texts already used in three previous contributions to conduct a more detailed analysis of the stylistic features present in the digital texts. The aim is to understand how the promotional message is conveyed to a varied audience who has different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In particular, it is here investigated the use of discourse markers (DMs), and their semantic and pragmatic relationships with respect to the context of occurrence. To do so, Bruce Fraser’s definition and classification of DMs will be used to analyse the corpus. Results show that the DMs investigated share the common pragmatic function of ‘topic orientation markers’, i.e., they signal an aspect of the organization of the ongoing discourse. Semantically, however, they have different – but very specific – relationships with the surrounding segments of discourse. More specifically, the authors of the texts preferably use DMs to signal that a warning, a reminder, or some advice, will follow in the next segment

The Construction of the Territorial Image in Tourism Websites: The Case of the Veneto Provinces

Websites are a popular platform for institutional tourist boards that want to promote their territories to visitors from all over the world. When tourism promotion is directly conducted by local institutions it entails greater responsibilities for the promoters since they are the real, actual territory introducing itself to prospective tourists. Therefore, the construction of the territorial image is fundamental to convey the aspects that best symbolize the land and that, eventually, will be the reasons why tourists will choose to visit the area. This study investigates how local institutions in the Italian region of Veneto promote their districts (a.k.a. ‘provinces’) both in English and in Italian. To do so, the official tourism websites of the seven Veneto provinces are considered. The corpora, composed of texts taken from the websites, are examined quantitatively and qualitatively to individuate the most recurrent keywords used in the texts. The aim is to identify the most representative aspects chosen by the seven territories as their symbolic markers, i.e. elements typical of a destination that are selected to provide an iconic, but also stereotypical, image of the local culture they are promoting

Variation in English across time, space and discourse. An introductory textbook.

This textbook is an introduction to the phenomena and processes of language change and variation in the English language in the past as today. The volume describes how English varies in geographical as well as in occupational/disciplinary settings; the aim is to provide students, who study English as a foreign language in mainstream courses in Italian Universities, the basic notions to better understand to what extent English differs according to the geographical and/or the domainspecific context. The textbook is for students with an intermediate/ advanced level of English (b2/c1 level of the cefr). Practice activities, already tested during lessons, complete each chapter and can be used during classes as well as for individual study

Balancing Tourism Promotion and Professional Discourse: A Corpus-based Analysis of Digital Travel Guidebooks Promoting Venice in English

The city of Venice is currently promoted through a wide range of channels, either traditional or innovative, using the Internet as their main ‘market place’. Besides Italian, the promotional message is conveyed in English as the main foreign language of communication, addressing not only perspective tourists from English-speaking countries but also tourists of other mother tongues who use English to communicate outside their country. Considering the multifaceted nature of the language in the field of tourism that balances domain-specific and general terms, the present study investigates the language that is used to ‘sell’ the city of Venice, a complex tourist destination, to international perspective visitors. By means of corpus linguistics methods of analysis, the study investigates the lexico-grammatical features present in a corpus of digital travel guidebooks, written in English, that are accessible on the Internet. The corpus, purposely collected and annotated, is examined in order to understand how the most peculiar aspects of Venice and its local culture are described to visitors, taking into particular consideration the strategies used by the authors to balance technical terms typical of the language of tourism with promotional terms that might contain specific connotations to attract the readers’ attention

The Blog is Served: Crossing the ‘Expert/Non-Expert’ Border in a Corpus of Food Blogs

The present study investigates some of the most popular food blogs (FBs) in the United Kingdom. The aim is to examine this particular genre of computer-mediated communication and, in particular, to individuate the features that characterise its discourse, in which language seems to constantly cross the border between professional and popular terminology. Through corpus-based research methods, the lexico-grammatical aspects of the FBs are analysed to see when and to what extent the food bloggers make use of a more professional language and when and to what extent they employ a more popular(ised) level of discourse. The paper provides evidence that the food bloggers constantly cross the border between the role as experts and the role as food lovers to avoid a lecturing style that would make the FB less attractive to the average user

RE-MEDIATION OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE: Reporting and Evaluating Prior Research in Archaeology Abstracts

The aim of the present study is to analyse a corpus of 163 research article abstracts in archaeology, an academic domain which, so far, has encountered little attention by linguists. The abstracts and the accompanying articles were published between 2007 and 2012 in the quarterly issues of three leading journals in the field, i.e. the Journal of Archaeological Research, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, which rank at the first three places in the SCOPUS database for the domain of archaeology. The study investigates the way archaeology abstracts report prior research, including the presence/absence of implicit/explicit evaluation, how archaeology authors structure this evaluation, the linguistic expressions they use, the place occupied by evaluation of prior research in the in the abstract’s rhetorical macrostructure. Results from the present work are analysed against already existing research on other academic disciplines in order to collocate archaeology along the disciplines’ continuum that includes the hard and the soft sciences at its extremes. Data show that abstracts in archaeology, as in other disciplines, tend to avoid open confrontationality, favouring criticism toward abstract entities

Representing Venice’s local culture to international tourists: the use of the ‘languaging’ technique in websites in English

Venice (Italy) is a popular destination for tourists of any kind; therefore, the goal of the material promoting the city is to present the city itself and its local culture. The present study conducts a qualitative analysis of websites that promote Venice to tourists using English as the preferred language of communication. The paper focuses on the so-called technique of ‘languaging’ (in studies on the language of tourism, defined as a term in a local language or dialect which is provided along with a translation or paraphrase in English). The analysis reveals that the authors of websites frequently use terms in the Venetian dialect but the translations or explanations provided fail, to a certain extent, to convey the most interesting cultural connotations contained in the terms themselves. The authors of the websites, thus, do not help fill the cultural gap between Venice and the tourists who, in turn, miss the opportunity to establish a real connection with the local culture

Doing things with words across time. Snapshots of communicative practices in and from the past

Knowing our contextualized (hi)story means being able to understand ourselves and how the world works. This kind of knowledge is key to self-awareness and self-empowerment, which also have a close connection with how we use language to communicate, to develop social interactions, to build relationships, and to project our identity. The diachronic evolution of languages is therefore a crucial part of a social being’s historical situatedness. The account of this evolution, i.e. historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language as a grammatical system, investigating changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. More recently, however, scholarly attention has broadened its scope to include functional aspects of language use, such as strategies and conventions of communicative affordances over time, thus giving rise to historical pragmatics. In this special issue, the contributions encompass three main areas within historical pragmatics: language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), the development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics). In particular, the papers offer complementary insights into communicative practices, examining interactional strategies in classical languages, politeness phenomena in grammar and discourse, the evolution of discursive practices, the pragmatic use of lexemes and the teaching of sociopragmatics. Significantly, the issue presents a cross-linguistic approach, since it considers pragmatic phenomena in English, Korean, Italian, Slavonic languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, thus helping us understand how current discursive forms are in fact both unique and comparable in several languages and cultures