Specialized Discourses of Well-Being and Human Development. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

This volume brings together different kinds of expertise and disciplinary approaches to human development and well-being, crucial issues in today’s world threatened by such diverse problems as climate change, natural catastrophes, unequal distribution of wealth and economic exploitation of developing countries, uncontrolled technological progress, systematic violations of human rights, discrimination and racism, health emergencies. The language analysis toolkit ̶ e.g., cross-cultural pragmatics, corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics ̶ has been enriched by the analytical tools and frameworks volunteered by scholars in demography, economics, international relations, law and political geography. The analysis of the specialized discourses of well-being and human development has meant to investigate to what extent different communities of practice share approaches and methodologies around these current issues

Genre(s) on the Move in Private and Public Domains

The contribution highlights current issues on the international scene in relation to genre hybridization, tension and evolution as well as creation of new genres or influences across genres, in private and public discourses. It focuses on intertextuality and interdiscursivity drawing on corporate/promotional communication practices and strategies in processes of resemioticization and recontextualization across the media, and also on relationships between lay and professional reasoning and issues of authority

Prefazione

The preface to the volume describes the purpose of the volume and the types of scientific contributions in it which constitute steps of a journey in time. The journey metaphor is developed in parallel paths and moves from the search for a new political-cultural-linguistic identity for Europe to a number of issues like the search for a new language and identity for Labour or an analysis of consensus building by means of linguistic and discursive devices in Blair’s project on the British press

Interdiscursivity, intertextuality and visualisation in news discourse

This study is a discourse-pragmatic analysis of Blair's appeal to the country in 1997 with a view to highlighting strategies of consensus and power roles with a special focus on interdiscursity and intertextuality. Visualisation is here conceived of as how words interrelate with visuals and have a primary role in constructing images

Lingue e culture: riflessioni a porte aperte

Il contributo analizza l'apprendimento linguistico in relazione ai nuovi flussi migratori, con particolare attenzione ad aspetti correlati a educazione linguistica e integrazione, a mantenimento della lingua del paese di origine, in quanto language of identity, e all'apprendimento della lingua del paese di accoglienza, lingua che favorisce l'integrazione. Altre riflessioni toccano il dialetto, espressione dell'identità regionale, e il World Standard Spoken English (WSSE) nell'ottica di una molteplicità di varietà di inglese L2

Language in the Spotlight: News Manufacturing and Discourse

The aim of this volume is to conduct an analysis of news discourse in a selection of news reports following the studies on textual organisation (Labov e Waletzky 1967) and interrelations between the thematic organisation of text and associated language (van Dijk 1988). The volume consists of two main parts. In the first part, a number of issues around the notions of language, discourse and text have been examined in relation to news reports since different levels of analysis seem to emerge to make sense of the overall meaning and goal of a text/discourse, including the semantics of word-formation (Lieber 2004), discourse construction (Sunderland 2004). The volume covers a number of issues within the interdisciplinary field of linguistics which have provided materials to the investigation of the role and behaviour of language in news discourse, specifically in components of news stories. In the second part, aspects of the ‘grammar’ of headlines and leads in a selection of British daily newspapers have been examined taking into account the socio-economic profile of the target readership of each newspaper (Jucker 1992; Bell 1993). Interrelations between news making and the use of language in the construction of consensus and aspects of interdiscursivity (Bhatia 1993, 2004; Fairclough 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2001) have been explored along with interrelations between elements in the surface and deep text in news stories from up-, mid- and down market newspapers with reference to the organisation of rhetorical devices in the ‘manufacturing’ of consensus meant to support Tony Blair’s ambitious socio-political-economic enterprise following Labour’s landslide victory in 1997