3,174 research outputs found
Popular Botanical Terminology in Ireland during the Late Modern English Period: A Diachronic Overview
No full textFrom the book's Preface: "Daniela Cesiri investigates the popularisation of terminology in Irish botany texts published during the Late Modern English (LModE) period. She analyses how the opening of botany as a scientific discipline to a public of amateurs and to their contribution in collecting and classifying samples, plays a very relevant role in shaping the popular botanical terminology"
Nineteenth-century Irish English: a corpus-based linguistic and discursive analysis
No full textThis is the first book to carefully analyze the linguistic conventions associated with Irish English folklore. Other books have studied linguistics in this language variety by studying letters, and all have ignored the use of folklore in constructing language conventions. This is the first book to discuss how peasants played a role in the construction of the Irish English languages.
The main purpose of this volume is the study of linguistic and discursive aspects of nineteenth-century Irish-English. The purpose is to introduce new insights into the historical evolution and development of this variety of dialect. This is done through the investigation of particular texts that fit a typology that until now have never been used as a source of historical dialect material. The texts chosen are written transcriptions of oral tales narrated by Irish peasant storytellers.
Reviews
“The work presented by Cesiri aims to add to the study of literary corpora in the context of Irish English.”
-Prof. Carolina P. Amador-Moreno,
University of Extremadura
“… and important contribution to the study of Irish English in the Late Modern period.”
-Prof. Marina Dossena,
University of Bergamo
“Investigates texts that have previously never been used in historical dialectology. The author has skillfully amalgamated different methodological approaches to her work.”
-Prof. Susan Kermas,
University of Salent
Introduction to Food Blogging in English
No full textThis article aims to present food blogs as one of the genres in which digital food-related communication has been commonly expressed in the last few decades. Food blogs are a sub-typology of blogs that focus on food preparation and consumption, dating from the early 2000s and growing significantly in importance. They allow non-experts to gain influence by sharing knowledge, experiences, and recipes within Web 2.0. (Cesiri 2020)
Communicating Food to Children. Linguistic and Socio-Cultural Perspectives
No full textThis book offers a systematic account of communication on food aimed at children, investigating verbal and visual strategies used in food media in English from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.
While there is a wide body of research on food discourse, there has been little to date on children as a particular category of actors within food-related communication. Cesiri integrates work from corpus linguistics, genre analysis, and multimodality to analyze verbal and visual components in media that transmit specialist knowledge and familiarize children with foundational food concepts, the extra-linguistic factors that shape food-related communication, and the ways in which different genres represent culinary traditions to children. The volume features an extensive corpus of technical products such as cookbooks, commercial products such as advertisements, and institutional products such as leaflets from international institutions. In applying a multi-layered perspective to a diverse range of food-related communication materials, Cesiri seeks to unpack whether potential differences in communicative strategies can be attributed to the source culture of interactants or those shared by a specific community of actors, and in turn, further insights into the nature of domain-specific discourse.
This volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics, and childhood studies
Investigating the development of ESP through historical corpora: the case of Archaeology articles written in English during the Late Modern period (and beyond?)
No full textA number of recent linguistic contributions focus on the study of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), a discipline that studies the use of English for communicating specific and specialized knowledge in the global context. However, as specialised terms often enter the general lexicon as well, diachronic linguistic inquiry is essential to study the development of ESP as also the evolution of general English.
Specific terms become, then, part of the general public’s linguistic repertoire, contributing to the spread of ‘scientific’ lexis and to the popularisation of specialized knowledge. One example of a discipline that awaits further linguistic investigation is archaeology, a field that is becoming increasingly popular among the general public both due to the desire to rediscover our ancient past and also thanks to the spread of popularised publications, journals, television programmes and movies (Clack & Brittain 2007). The investigation of a historical corpus of archaeology texts and essays is therefore important for studying the evolution of the discipline’s specific discourse in English and how the language of archaeology in English has evolved to become a distinct branch of ESP.
A previous contribution (Cesiri forthcoming) considers the linguistic features of present-day cultural heritage research articles (of which archaeology constitutes an important part). In continuation of this study, my article will seek to investigate the linguistic features characterising publications in English on archaeology. I will consider in particular the beginning of the discipline, that is to say the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are the core centuries in the development of scientific techniques in archaeology and it gaining a proper academic status. The study will use a corpus of archaeology texts and the corpus analysis software Wordsmith Tools 5.0 (Scott 2008). Finally, the results from this study will be compared with those from Cesiri (forthcoming): this will be essential in the investigation of disciplinary and linguistic evolution in the field of archaeology as a distinct type of ESP
Botany texts and the popular terminology of plants during the Late Modern English period in Ireland
No full textIn the first part of my work on popular botanic terminology in Ireland (Cesiri 2012), I considered a 1735 text in which the author, John K’Eogh, attempted to produce a work on Irish medicinal plants in order to explain their properties to the general public who could, subsequently, use them in everyday life.
The analysis of the popular names of the plants contained in the volume revealed the tendency to repeat patterns of word-formation in the terms reported as well as the use of what Gotti (2003: 73-74) defines as “nominal adjectivation, i.e. the use of a noun to specify another with an adjectival function”, a very common phenomenon in present-day specialized discourse borrowed from general language. The text examined, then, revealed a tendency typical of present-day scientific texts.
The aim of the present study is to analyze the popular terms used in botany texts published in Ireland during the Late Modern English (LModE) period, in particular during the 19th century, in order to investigate whether the tendency discovered in K’Eogh (1735) was adopted also in later centuries, thus becoming typical of the specific textual genre, or whether these texts followed different patterns of word-formation.
The investigation conducted in the present contribution will be important to discover possible patterns inside the textual genre of botany texts published in Ireland during the LModE period compared to those already found in the 18th-century text. This comparison and the diachronic approach undertaken in the present project might produce a finer-grained definition of the textual genre itself
The promotion of the Veneto territory in times of crisis: a critical discourse analysis of tourist boards websites during the COVID-19 pandemic
No full textThe aim of the study is to investigate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on institutional tourism communication. In view of the necessary changes occurred in the tourism field since the start of the pandemic, a comparison will be made with the results of a previous study (Cesiri, 2019) of the English and the Italian versions of the seven tourism board websites corresponding to the seven “provinces” in the Veneto region.
The present study analyses the changes in the communicative strategies used by the tourist board websites occurred since the 2019 study, examining how each territory is presented to prospective visitors as well as how the websites inform prospective visitors about the pandemic and the regulations in place to prevent contagion. The Italian and the English versions of the websites will be investigated, first to ascertain if the English text is a translation of the Italian one or a text originally written in English. Then, the verbal component of the websites will be investigated using Fairclough’s (2003) approach to discourse analysis. Particularly relevant will be the notion of ‘presupposition’, namely any kind of background assumption that is present in a text. Levels of presupposition will be investigated not only at the level of territorial description and promotion but also at the level of specialised communication about the pandemic, its outcome, and the corresponding restrictions and regulations that are in place at the moment of writing and that will presumably still be in place in the near future
Research genres and hybridisation: a case study from research articles in the field of Cultural Heritage Studies
No full textThe chapter examines generic features of research articles in the field of Cultural Heritage (CH) studies, an extended (and yet under-investigated) interdisciplinary research domain consisting of different focus areas ranging from history to the arts (history and criticism) and archaeology, and including also sub-domains specifically dealing with techniques of art preservation and restoration. The purpose of this chapter is to define and describe CH research artefacts on the basis of their dominant linguistic features. In consideration of the complexity of the domain, Cesiri distinguishes CH RAs into three thematic macro-categories − namely, Archaeology (A), Art History and Criticism (AHC), Cultural Heritage Preservation and Restoration (CH Pres/Rest) − and offers a quantitative analysis of the texts primarily on the basis of the use of epistemic modality markers (hedges and boosters) which are indicative of the type of voice, the stance and the style which are recognized as appropriate and effective to represent given content material. This provides sound criteria to measure CH RAs generic hybridization (since they resort to both representation practices typical of the humanities and hard sciences) and their generic specificity
“Safe Holidays” in Veneto. A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Health-related Information in Institutional Tourist Webpages.
No full textGoing on holiday usually encompasses several planning activities, one of these being how to deal with possible health issues. Covid-19 has made this aspect more prominent also due to the variety of restrictive measures adopted worldwide. Even though, according to the WHO, the pandemic is officially over, there are many other reasons why tourists may need to retrieve health-related information before and during their holiday. In this regard, one of the first sources prospective visitors are likely to consult are local tourist websites administered by public institutions and private companies. This paper presents a case study carried out on institutional tourist websites in the Veneto Region, a popular destination for both Italian and foreign visitors. The aim is to explore whether and to what extent these websites feature health-related information in Italian and how much of this information is made available in English.
The paper presents a follow-up of two previous contributions (Cesiri 2021; 2019), which investigated tourism promotion before, during, and immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic. Starting from the results of these two studies, the paper considers institutional tourist websites in the aftermath of the pandemic. By adopting qualitative multimodal discourse analysis methods of investigation, the paper analyses the communicative strategies employed in these websites to assess whether the health-related information available is easy to retrieve. Of particular concern are the foreign tourists who might not be informed about the organisation of the national health system and the services it provides through the local institutions
International Communication connected to the Expo Milano 2015 event: some case studies in English and German
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