107,224 research outputs found
Interdisciplinary dynamics and generic conventions: the case of Clinical Ethics Committees
No full textIn recent years, Clinical Ethics Committees (CECs) have become increasingly istitutionalised by way of a growing belief that they play an important role in successfully helping health care professionals to address ethical dilemmas. The majority of members have a medical or nursing background, with an increasing number of legal members, lay, and religious representation, and discuss a variety of issues that might arise in clinical settings, from Withholding and Withdrawing Treatment and Do Not Resuscitate Orders, to Advance Directives and Confidentiality, to name just a few. In this regard, the UK Clinical Ethics Network (UKCEN) was established in 2001 to provide support for the growing number of CECs and groups that were developing in National Health Service Trusts and some private hospitals in the UK.
This study investigates the UKCEN’s newsletters (2004-2020) to explore the interdiscursive mechanism deployed in a written genre where traditionally distinct fields (medicine, ethics, law) become socially embedded and actualised in the larger external society, while addressing contextual, social, and institutional challenges and opportunities. From a comprehensive analysis of the newsletters written by the Board of Trustees as part of the annual report, it is evident the need to go beyond the textual data to consider intertextuality as well as interdiscursivity (Candlin/Maley 1997; Sarangi/Coulthard 2000; Prentice/ Barker 2017). Eventually, the socio-pragmatic aspects of the construction, interpretation, and use of newsletters not only becomes the interesting foci for the exploration of the interactive interdisciplinary process, but also reveals a ‘hidden agenda’ (Bhatia et. al 2008; Garzone 2012) realised through a conscious bending of the generic conventions to ‘promote’ corporate interests (Bhatia/Flowerdew/Jones 2008; Flowerdew 2014), rather than simply informing about the development of ethics support in the UK and the promotion of a high level of ethical debate in clinical practice
Bounds for the variation of the roots of a polynomial and the eigenvalues of a matrix
No full textBhatia R, Elsner L, Krause G. Bounds for the variation of the roots of a polynomial and the eigenvalues of a matrix. Linear algebra and its applications. 1990;142:195-209.We derive some new bounds for the distance between the roots of two polynomials in terms of their coefficients and for the distance between the eigenvalues of two matrices in terms of the norm of their difference
V. J. Bhatia, Critical Genre Analysis. Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Practice
No full textA New Phase in Bahrain’s Counter-Revolution
No full textThe jailing of moderate opposition leaders and increased repression of human rights activists marks a change of strategy for the Bahraini regime, argues Luke G. G. Bhatia
Polyphony and dialogism in legal discourse: focus on syntactic negation
No full textThis study draws on the notion of polyphony to discuss some inherent properties of discursive practices in the legal domain.
In particular, it focuses on judgments, and analyses them as highly stratified argumentative texts in which judges construct their opinions and decisions making references to other authori-tative texts (precedents, statutes, etc.), and at the same time give account of the stances of the various parties involved (prosecu-tor, defence counsel, defendant, witnesses, experts, police inves-tigators, etc.). In this way they also respond to all possible objec-tions and anticipate counterarguments by incorporating them in their decisions (e.g. Amossy 2000; Mazzi 2007).
The notion of polyphony (or dialogism) was originally intro-duced by Mikhail Bakhtin (1929/1984) with regard to the novel and later expanded to embrace other forms of linguistic commu-nication (Bakhtin 1981). It postulates the presence of different ‘voices’ in ‘speech utterances’ (in Bakhtin’s terminology), and was taken up and elaborated by various scholars in linguistics, and in particular Ducrot (1984), and later the Scandinavian ScaPoLine group (Nølke/Fløttum/Norėn 2004) and Bres and Nowakowska (Bres 1999; Bres/Nowakoska 2005).
In this Chapter it will be shown that polyphony as the property of discourse to incorporate multiple layers of other discourses is especially relevant to judicial discourse, where it is realized by means of a range of different linguistic devices, some of which are evidently dialogic (cf. Fairclough's manifest intertextuality: 1992: 117-123; cf. also Martin/White 2005), while others are less manifestly so (Bres/Nowakoska 2005: 139).
Taking as a starting point the examination of a corpus of Judg-ments issued by the UK Court of Appeal, the UK Supreme Court and the House of Lords, the presentation will identify and discuss some of the most noteworthy polyphonic devices de-ployed in them (e.g. concession, language reports irony, presup-position, comparison, rectification, etc.), examining their discur-sive function (cf. Garzone 2012; Garzone/Degano 2012).
References
Amossy, Ruth 2000. L’argumentation dans le discourse. Dis-cours politique, littérature d’idées, fiction. Paris: Nathan.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1929/1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poet-ics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Es-says, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Mi-chael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bres, Jacques 1999. “Vous les entendez?” Analyse du discourse et dialogisme. In Modèles linguisitques. 20, 71-86.
Bres, Jacques / Nowakowska, Alexandra 2005. Dis moi avec qui tu ‘dialogues’, je te dirai qui tu est ... De la pertinence de la notion de dialogisme pour l’analyse due discours. Mar-ges Linguistiques. 9, 137-153. Online at .
Ducrot, Oswald 1984. Le dire et le dit. Paris: Les Éditions de Minut.
Fairclough, Norman 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Ox-ford: Polity Press.
Garzone, Giuliana 2012. Dialogism in Arbitration Awards: Fo-cus on Concessive Constructions. In Bhatia, Vijay / Gar-zone, Giuliana / Degano, Chiara (eds) Arbitration Awards: Generic Features and Textual Realisations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 67-90.
Garzone, Giuliana / Degano, Chiara 2012. Voices in arbitration awards: polyphony and language reports. In Bhatia V.K., Candlin C.N., Gotti M. (eds) Discourse and Practice in In-ternational Commercial Arbitration: Issues, challenges and prospects. London: Ashgate, 179-207.
Martin, James R. / White, Peter R.R. 2005. The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave Mac-millan.
Mazzi, Davide 2007. The Linguistic Study of Judicial Argumen-tation. Theoretical Perspectives Analytical Insights. Mode-na: Edizioni Il Fiorino.
Nølke, Henning /Fløttum, Kjersti /Norén, Coco 2004. ScaPo-Line. La théorie Scandinave de la polyphonie linguistique. Paris: Editions Kimé
Legally dead, illegally frozen? The legal aspects of cryonics as discursively constructed online by providers and the media
No full textCryonics is defined as the practice or technique of cryogenically preserving a person’s body with the aim of reviving it in the future; esp. the cryogenic preservation of a person with an incurable disease until such time as a cure is found. As such, it is a practice that mixes viable existing technology, i.e. cryopreservation with currently unattainable objectives such as resuscitation from death. Its hybrid nature makes it scientifically questionable yet highly fascinating at a popular level. This is well reflected in the number of publications that have dealt with it since its inception, in the 1960s. The legal aspects revolving around cryonics also emerge from the frequency, this time quite high, of the word legal. They seem to regard specific cases, though, and not the legality of cryonics in itself, which could be expected since, as seen in the Background section above, the practice is far from regulated
Discursive illusions and manipulations in legal blogs on medically assisted procreation: the case Parrillo v. Italy
No full textThis chapter sets to overview the European Court of Human Rights’ judgment Parrillo v. Italy and its representation in blogs to analyse the phenomena of discursive alterations in legal blogs covering the controversial issue of embryo donation. The study applies the popularisation framework to the transfer of information from the institutionalised context of the court, represented by its final judgment, to the less regulated web-domain of legal blogs, or blawgs.
The general methodological framework is Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically, the study applies van Dijk’s triangulation approach and the notion of discursive manipulations or illusions, created by subjective reconceptualisation of the perceptions of objective realities.
The aim is to identify the complex mechanisms that shape the discursive illusion and that could lead to readership manipulation in the popularised context of blogs as compared to the institutional settings of judgments. This aim is verified on a small ad hoc created corpus of ten blog posts and the final judgment on the case accompanied by six concurring and dissenting judicial opinions. The study also uses the legal summary of the judgment and the Court’s press release for consultative purposes.
The findings show that blogs employ a vast array of techniques that could be defined as ideological manipulations or discursive illusions in that bloggers use legitimate information in a selective manner, leading to a one-sided representation of the case. In addition, the blogs provide subjective interpretations, both textual and paratextual, attempting to pass them as objective, and trigger selective appraisal patterns, including through the use of evaluative language, specifically in regard of responsibility attribution
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