Ethics and Legitimacy in the Discourse of Agri-biotechnology. A Study in Argumentation

Over the last few decades, scientific research and technology have advanced at incredible speed, creating the conditions for previously unimaginable progress in all areas of life, but at the same time raising ethical concerns often exacerbated by the rapidly spreading commercial exploitation of emerging technologies. One domain where both progress and ethical questioning have been especially strong is that of genetic engineering, which so far has reached widespread application primarily in the field of agri-biotechnologies. While having become progressively established throughout the world, agri-biotechnologies are far from being equally accepted everywhere. Objections to them range from misgivings about their moral acceptability, to fears about their possible consequences for human health, to the perceived risk of environmental damage, to the negative socio-political implications of giving a handful of seed producers what basically amounts to a monopoly on global food production. In the face of this criticism, agri-biotechnology companies have mounted a massive counteroffensive involving a sustained, coordinated rhetorical effort. This paper explores the argumentative strategies employed by major players in the agro-biotech sector (the like of Monsanto, now part of Bayer CropScience, Syngenta and Corteva Agriscience) in order to legitimate their operations and the technologies upon which they are based. In particular, it investigates the extent to which such argumentative strategies engage explicitly or implicitly with ethical issues, and attempts to identify recurring rhetorical structures in the self-legitimating narratives of major players in the industry. The study is rhetorical and (critical) discourse-analytical in focus and relies on pragmadialectics and the Argument Model of Topics for the analysis of argumentative patterns

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\u2019s The People\u2019s Common Sense Medical Adviser (1883), M.L. Byrn\u2019s The Mystery of Medicine Explained (1887), and Gunn and Jordan\u2019s 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 \u2013 knowledge, theory/ies, experience, evidence, and observation \u2013 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

Repertori retorici e negoziazione culturale nei racconti di vita di rifugiati : lingua franca e implicazioni ideologiche

This chapter analyses the storytelling performance of an asylum seeker speaking in English for an international audience and recorded on a video released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The primary purpose of the study is to investigate the rhetorical structuring of the narrative in an ethnopoetic perspective (Hymes 2003), and to identify the presence (or, even more significantly, marked absence) of dialogic signs of intercultural negotiation deployed in the process of conveying to a culturally diverse audience a highly culturally situated story embedded in a personal narrative of displacement. At the same time, the study also intends to contribute to the current debate on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) by addressing the issue of the inherently situated nature of ELF, and of the political and ideological implications of an ELF approach to intercultural communication in both asymmetric and (programmatically) symmetric power situations. The video selected for the analysis was retrieved from the UNHCR Youtube channel and is part of a series called Storytelling: through the eyes of Refugees designed to make refugees\u2019 stories known to the wide public and to legitimise refugees as a category of people endowed with agentivity and self-determination, and with the power of contributing to the discursive construction of their own role and status. Because of their global outreach, these videos qualify as instances of ELF usage in a broad international context and are eminently suited to the investigation and discussion of ELF approaches to conventionally asymmetric institutional communication

Debating evolutions in science, technology and society Ethical and ideological perspectives: An introduction

This article introduces the theme of the Special Issue on \u201cDebating evolutions in science, technology and society: Ethical and ideological perspectives.\u201d Its starts from the idea that new advances in science and in technology, new evolutions in society, politics and culture bring with them the need to update linguistic resources at different levels in order to be able to talk about them and accommodate new concepts. Thus they inevitably result in an impact on language and discourse that goes well beyond vocabulary and terminology. They change patterns of thinking, reasoning and conceptualizing, leading to new representations and new discourses. In particular, representation of evolutions in texts addressed to the general public involves the transfer of domain-specific knowledge to various non-specialist audiences and its recontextualization and transformation to be made accessible to the non-specialist. That is why it can never be neutral, even when the writer has the best intentions in terms of accuracy and honesty. The focus of this introductory article is in particular on the notion of discursive frame, frames being cognitive perceptual structures that either subconsciously or strategically influence participants on how to \u201chear or how to say\u201d something. It shows that framing, selecting and perspectivising are inevitable in knowledge dissemination and transmission, and argues that since they are so effective, discourse frames are a powerful ideological instrument, capable of influencing the public perception of the most crucial issues in society

Press releases as a hybrid genre : Addressing the informative/promotional conundrum

Press releases are short pieces of writing issued by companies or institutions to communicate newsworthy information to the journalist community on the one hand, and to the general public (indirectly, through newspaper reporting, or, increasingly, directly by making press releases available on corporate websites) on the other. While ostensibly informative, press releases also carry an implicitly self-promotional purpose, in so far as the information they contain comes from a source internal to the organization which is the object of the release itself. This paper explores the generic features of press releases and investigates the way in which they codify the different communicative purposes and multiple receiver roles which distinguish the genre. Drawing on Bhatia''s work on genre (Bhatia 1993, 2004), and building on Jacobs''s preformulating features (Jacobs 1999a), which can be seen as linguistic strategies aimed at achieving the primary and most ostensible purpose of the press release (i.e. getting the story in the news with as little manipulation as possible on the part of journalists), the paper identifies a set of moves and strategies common to the genre, and links them to communicative purposes on the one hand, and to envisioned audiences on the other. It is argued that the press release occupies a hybrid position along the informative-promotional continuum, and that identification of its communicative purpose relies as much on core as on peripheral textual features

Engaging with Professional Practice across Domains through the Lens of Applied Linguistics

This editorial outlines the theoretical framework in which the papers included in the present issue are set. The guiding principle laid out is that investigations of professional practice cannot be limited to the analysis of language use in itself. The inherent diversity of applied linguistic research is discussed, and it is pointed out that what binds much of this research together is the identification of societal problems that are linguistically and discursively manifest, with a conviction that the researcher-analyst has the necessary tools to approach the data, resulting in insights that would be practically relevant. The difficulty achieving this practical relevance leads researchers to position themselves differently and draw upon different research paradigms, some of which are then discussed. The editorial concludes that challenges remain with regard to how to strengthen the interface between professional practice research and applied linguistics, including the occasioning of critical reflections about applied linguists\u2019 professional practice

Markers of Trust: Epistemic adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs in CSR reports

The study explores the function of epistemic adverbs of certainty and of restrictive adverbs in a corporate genre, namely the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report. The underlying assumption is that through the investigation of interpersonal resources such as epistemic and restrictive adverbs it is possible to retrieve crucial information about the ideological underpinnings of CSR discourse, thus contributing to a better understanding of this recently emerged discursive formation. The epistemic adverbs of certainty which appear in the texts fall mostly in the category of expectation (Chafe 1986, 270), and are classified by White (2003) as examples of \u201cconcur\u201d, i.e. they represent the textual voice as upholding a broadly shared position, concurring with the real or imagined reader and simultaneously, by converse, invoking the reader's alignment with its position. Both the evocation of expectation and the invocation of alignment interpersonally engage the reader in the co-construction of shared common ground. On the other hand, restrictive adverbs are used to create scales of values, foregrounding some and backgrounding others. The study also shows that in the corpus under investigation adverbs of epistemic certainty and restrictive adverbs are often embedded (and occasionally co-occur) in syntactic structures featuring forms of concession. Concession entails and overcomes a clash between the expectations raised by the conceded proposition and the claims made in the one asserted, which is therefore given salience. Propositions linked by a relationship of concessions are not mutually contradictory; they coexist, but their coexistence is posited as something that would not normally be expected. In CSR discourse, what is posited as unexpected is the nonconflictual (and indeed mutually beneficial) coexistence of profit- and society-oriented motives, with adverbs of epistemic certainty being used to highlight the sharedness of the conceded proposition, and restrictive adverbs, usually accompanied by some form of negation (not only, not just, more than just), being deployed in the service of the redefinition of priorities