You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This volume presents some of the findings from a project on various aspects of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), including conciliation, mediation, and arbitration. To study the discursive practices of ADR today, an international initiative has been undertaken by a group of specialists in discourse analysis, law, and arbitration from more than twenty countries. The chapters in this volume draw on discourse-based data (narrative, documentary and interactional) to investigate the extent to which the 'integrity' of ADR principles is maintained in practice, and to what extent there is an increasing level of influence from litigative processes and procedures. The primary evidence for such practices comes from textual and discourse-based studies, ethnographic observations, and narratives of experience on the part of experts in the field, as well as on the part of some of the major corporate stakeholders drawn from commercial sectors.
This interdisciplinary collection with contributions in English and French explores how the various disciplines of law and linguistics appreciate and work towards improving the nature of clarity and obscurity in legal language. For the first time, it brings together legal academics and practitioners, jurilinguists and linguists from the common law and civil law with the specific aim to understand the complex nature, practice and tools of clarity and obscurity in legal drafting. Topics addressed include how the Clarity framework has been put into practice through the use of plainer language, better comprehensibility, readability and access to legal or administrative texts. In an attempt to re...
The primary goal of this book is to reach a better understanding of how the digital revolution has affected language and discourse practices in the field of law. It also explores the complex nature of the techniques and discursive strategies which emerge in the relationship between the different stakeholders (including non-experts) thanks to technological advances. By adopting a discourse analytical perspective which combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the book explores the hybridity of new genres and communicative processes. It provides an interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns,...
Normative texts are meant to be highly impersonal and decontextualised, yet at the same time they also deal with a range of human behaviour that is difficult to predict, which means they have to have a very high degree of determinacy on the one hand, and all-inclusiveness on the other. This poses a dilemma for the writer and interpreter of normative texts. The author of such texts must be determinate and vague at the same time, depending upon to what extent he or she can predict every conceivable contingency that may arise in the application of what he or she writes. The papers in this volume discuss important legal and linguistic aspects relating to the use of vagueness in legal drafting and demonstrate why such aspects are critical to our understanding of the way normative texts function.
This book reflects the state-of-the-art in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) research, drawing on both top-down and bottom-up practices and methodological itineraries. In order to fill some of the gaps in the current literature, it provides well-grounded and thorough investigations into discursive practices in academic, workplace and intercultural settings, throwing light on the specific varieties of language used to achieve professional targets. Teachers have to act as an interface between theory and praxis, bridging the gap between the classroom and the workplace to create a dynamic virtuous circle. The multi-perspective and multi-method frameworks presented in this volume range from qua...
The first part of this book deals with specialized knowledge and its impact on LSP teaching; the second analyses the relation between teaching language for specific purposes and the processes of understanding; the third is dedicated to curriculum design.
Expert-lay communication in the medical field requires the utmost attention to readers’ or listeners’ needs and competences. If these are neglected, laypeople’s comprehension of the message is likely to be negatively affected. Text types like package leaflets and informed consents have been the object of countless studies. In this volume, Giulia Pedrini examines a new document type: the layperson summary of clinical trials. She conducts her analysis from a contrastive and translational perspective in three languages (English, German, and Italian). All texts are instances of interlingual translations of simplified documents written in Plain Language; a still widely unexplored niche within the field of translation studies.
The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language and legal culture has had to adjust to legal concepts very different from those of the English law system. Many of the papers were inspired by two major projects on legal language and inter-multiculturality: Generic Integrity in Legislative Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts based in Hong Kong and carried out by an international team and Interculturality in Domain-specific English, a national project supported by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research, involving research units from five Italian universities
This volume stems from a workshop organised by the Corpus Linguistics and Language Variation in English Research Centre, known as CLAVIER, held at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. It brings together a series of double-reviewed studies on the nature of the dissemination of specialist knowledge in English, its transformation from being a mere repository of information into a proactive source of understanding and empowerment. Through the chapters, the various principles, conceptualisations, constructs and pragmatic dynamics of knowledge dissemination are shown in a range of discourse genres. The studies reveal the multi-levels of knowledge, its varied typology and its ongoing co-construc...
Different cultures and languages make web-based communication among the members of international research projects often complex. Focussing on frequently neglected internal communication, this cumulative PhD thesis seeks to present methods from applied LSP research on a concrete case study – a research project from the area of Public Health. Aiming to establish a winwin situation between systematic approaches and communication optimisation, the case study is also used to verify known models. Systematic approaches can be beneficial for enhancing project communication, if they are part of a circle of theoria cum praxi. The thesis closes with appeals to linguists, project leaders and funding agencies for improving project communication as well as the involvement of applied linguistics in future.