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.
This article discusses how sensitive bioethical issues are addressed in legislation, using as a starting point the analysis of a corpus of normative texts relating to Assisted Reproduction ...Technologies (ARTs), and in particular surrogacy, enacted in various English-speaking countries. In the investigation, special special attention is given to the re-elaboration and presentation of scientific knowledge in legal discourse with a view to detecting any possible slant or changes, and the reasons thereof. Another important object of investigation is the redefinition of certain well established categories of kinship because of the disruptive effects of biomediacal advances, and ARTs in particular, on family-based social relations. The analysis will focus on legal definitions, which are crucial in this domain considering that advances in the modern technosciences have brought about the need to categorize and name new medical practices and the situations they contribute to bringing about. The focus will be on how definitions are used in normative texts, functioning as initiators of a dynamic process generating discourses that acquire their meaning in the social and communicative contexts they are embedded in. Special attention will be devoted to the way in which specialised scientific, and especially medical, terminology and concepts, are dealt with in bioethically relevant legal discourse.
This volume brings together work by both well-known scholars and emerging researchers in the various areas of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), such as political, legal, medical, and business ...discourse. The volume is divided into three parts in order to align rather than separate three different but related aspects of LSP: namely, translation, linguistic research, and domain specific communication on the web. Underlying all the contributions here is the growing awareness of the ever-increasing multiformity of specialised communication and the ever-wider social implications of the communicative situations in which it is embedded, especially where it involves the need to move across languages, cultures and modes, as in translation and interpreting. The contributions consistently bear witness to the need to review received notions, pose new questions, and explore fresh perspectives. The picture that emerges is one of extreme complexity, in which researchers into specifically linguistic aspects of LSPs and their translation across languages and media declare their awareness of the pressing need to come to terms with a wide range of social, pragmatic, intercultural and political factors, above and beyond socio-technical knowledge of the domains under investigation.
This book deals with discursive aspects of specialised communication, looking in particular at the role and scope of language and discourse in professional practice across a variety of fields and ...modes. Its chapters are diverse in their outlooks, analytical procedures, and object of enquiry, and span across different specialised domains, settings, genres, and media (from face-to-face communication to television, from traditional websites to social networking sites). In broad terms, they are all set in a discourse-analytical framework and share the ultimate purpose of providing new insights into the evolution of discourse practices used by professionals in a variety of specialised genres at a time characterised by rapid scientific and dramatic technological advances accompanied by important societal, sociotechnical and cultural transformations. Professional and workplace routines and procedures are embedded in a dense network of discursive practices, which both determine and reflect professional roles, knowledge, expertise, positions and tasks at any given moment in time. Thus, when experts communicate with the general public, a display of competence in the specialised register of the relevant domain is of the essence. This need for discursive competence, in addition to professional expertise, is generally acknowledged also in education and training. The essays gathered in this volume bear out this view, and collectively aim to contribute to the discursive study of professional practices by providing insights into the multiple ways in which discourse partakes of them.
Featuring multidisciplinary and transcultural investigations, this volume showcases state-of-the-art scholarship about the impact of argumentation-based discourses and field-specific argumentation ...practices in a wide range of communities of practice belonging to the media, social, legal and political spheres.
•This paper contributes to the debate on the use of shall in legislative drafting.•It shows its decline in UK legislation started in the early 1990s.•It argues that its gradual abandonment is due to ...a restricted notion of its meaning.•As philosophers of law have shown, shall can be performative, as well as deontic.•Shall substitutes are not totally free from the problems for which shall is blamed.
On account of objections to its use in legislation raised by experts and Plain Language advocates, shall has disappeared from legislative texts in some jurisdictions and is used ever more sparsely in others, triggering a “modal revolution” in legislative drafting. This paper presents a corpus-based study which outlines a chronologically detailed picture of the frequency of shall in U.K. legislation since the 1970s, showing that it is now approximating zero, and that its decline started in the 1990s, earlier than usually indicated in the literature. It then examines the reasons for this gradual abandonment, and the problems involved in the use of shall in legislative texts, arguing that some of the criticisms levelled at it are based on a limited idea of its meaning, also due to a neglect of studies produced in other neighbouring disciplines, i.e. philosophy of language and philosophy of law, which have shown that shall can legitimately perform both a deontic and a performative function. The discussion of the forms used to replace shall leads to the conclusion that in most cases they are not totally free from the problems for which shall is blamed. Therefore, its suppression and replacement with other forms do not appear to be as effective as usually believed.
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’ professional practice.
This book provides insights into the ways in which legal professionals participate in their day-to-day activities, and critically focuses on how language is used and exploited in everyday ...professional discourse. It is organised into two parts dealing with topic areas of legal discourse (written and spoken) relevant to professional practice and communication. The innovative research landscape offered by this book covers diverse and complex features of legal discourse construction where social.
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