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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 volume presents research studies that investigate various aspects of corporate communication from the viewpoint of language and discourse, giving special attention to emerging issues and recent developments in times of rapid sociotechnical evolutions. The studies included here are diverse in their outlook, analytical procedures, and objects of enquiry, spanning across various areas of corporate communication, both external and internal, such as corporate image and reputation management, various forms of corporate behaviour, branding at different levels including employer branding, recruiting, and consumer reviews. Similarly diversified are the settings, genres and media analysed, from face-to-face interaction to communication through the press, from traditional websites to social networking sites. All the studies presented in this volume are set in a discourse-analytical framework and share the ultimate purpose of providing new insights into the evolution of communication and discourse practices in the corporate environment, taking account of the most important issues that have attracted researchers’ interest and are still open to debate.
Media and politics have always been mutually influential. The media plays an important political role of its own in promoting and discussing policies, as well as conveying representations of power and ideology. On the other hand, media outlets are themselves subject to political forces that have an impact on their editorial line. This mutual influence comes to light not only in journalistic practices, but also in how news is constructed and conveyed. This volume explores the relations between politics and various types of media as expressed in different areas of the world, namely Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. Such a complex landscape calls for a multiplicity of analytical tools and cannot ignore specific socio-political, geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts which may be overlooked when approached from a global perspective. In this volume, a combination of senior scholars and young experts from a wide range of disciplines, such as discourse analysis, international relations, and cultural studies, come together in a conversation which recognizes the media as a global phenomenon without neglecting its local specificities.
This book explores the intercultural problems related to the widespread use of English in written and oral communication by native and non-native speakers in institutional and business settings. Each chapter looks at a different set of issues emerging from the confrontation of cultures across national, institutional and organizational discourse communities, taking an intercultural or cross-cultural approach. The focus is on workplace settings, both in institutional and business contexts (e.g. politics, public services, media, international corporate communication, advertising, business negotiations, etc.). The theme is all the more interesting today not only in consideration of the sheer magnitude of this phenomenon and its capillary spread, but above all on account of the pervasive penetration of English into professional and workplace contexts as a communication language also for local/internal communication. The complexity of intercultural communication as an object of research is reflected in the variety of the topics explored, the range of settings investigated, and the diversity of methodological approaches taken.
The analysis of academic genres and the use of corpus resources, methods and analytical tools are now central to a great deal of research into English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Both genre analysis and corpus investigations have revealed the patterning of academic texts, at the levels of lexicogrammar and discourse, and have led to richer understandings of the variations in such patterning between genres and between disciplines. The thirteen contributions included in this volume address issues in academic discourse studies from a range of perspectives: namely, corpus-based research into EAP at the lexicogrammatical and genre levels (Section 1); intercultural EAP research (Section 2); English as a Lingua Franca in academic communication (Section 3); and the relationships between corpus, genre and pedagogy in EAP, with an emphasis on implications and applications (Section 4). The collection is aimed primarily at teachers, students and researchers of EAP and applied corpus linguistics, but will also interest applied linguists in general. The emphasis of the contributions varies from studies with predominantly linguistic orientations to those focussing on practical applications.
The volume aims to advance understanding of argumentative practices in different communicative contexts, with special regard for those with heightened public resonance: politics, media, and public debate in general. Furthermore, it intends to explore the linguistic aspects of argumentation, including both explicit codification, with the related issue of indicators, and the activation of implicit meanings. Bringing together different paradigms to account for the relations between contextual factors and discourse realizations, the contributions articulate around three foci, placing emphasis on one or more of them: the communicative purpose within a given genre or activity type; the argumentative and linguistic features of the investigated discourses, among which prototypical patterns, argumentative styles, and implicit meanings; the assessment of argumentation quality and strategies to cope with illegitimate practices.
This volume is dedicated to Maurizio Gotti, in honour of his long and noteworthy academic career. Having served as Full Professor of History of the English Language and of English Language and Translation for more than two decades at the University of Bergamo, Italy, Gotti made significant contributions to multiple areas of study including specialized discourses, lexicography, history of the English language and language teaching. This wide-ranging collection brings together essays from these fields of enquiry authored by scholars whose academic input have interacted in various ways with ideas and topics introduced or extensively discussed by Gotti. The contributions are grouped into four theme-based sections representing the main threads in Gotti’s research, from the macro area of specialised discourse to the more specific fields of research in academic and legal languages, while the fourth section includes contributions dealing with the history of English language, and is followed by a miscellaneous section which concludes the collection.
This volume brings together a selection of contributions presented at the 15th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes, held at the University of Bergamo (Italy) from 29 August to 2 September 2005. The conference title, «New Trends in Specialized Discourse», reflects the emphasis given to recent orientations in research, coming from established as well as new authors in the field. As suggested by the title of this volume, the analysis of specialized discourse calls for a specialized discourse analysis. When applied linguists deal with vocational discourses, they are faced with a double challenge: on the one hand, an understanding of textualisations often alien to the general language; on the other hand, the use of analytical tools designed specifically for their investigation. The studies presented in this volume position themselves somewhere along this continuum, focusing alternatively on converging/diverging features of texts and discourses.
This collection explores the changing nature of health discourse in different digital environments. It offers sustained discourse analyses of a number of interactions generated through the affordances and constraints of these new social contexts, which are affecting health communication in subtle and profound ways.
Globalization, i.e. the spatio-temporal processes of change leading to a transformation in the organization of human affairs, is said to have started as long ago as the end of the 15th century. This first wave of globalization was subsequently followed by two others. The third wave of globalization, which began after 2000, has made the world noticeably smaller. In fact, technological innovations have sharply increased the availability of new modes and channels of communication. As a result, the sharing of knowledge and information all around the world has substantially increased and this has prompted the emergence of new ‘globalizing genres’. In addition, it has led to the implementation...