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ESP Across Cultures
No full textThis present volume constitutes the third online edition of ESP Across Cultures.
The decision to change from a paper-based to an online edition has undoubtedly
been beneficial in terms of enjoying greater visibility within the international academic
community. One thing that has not changed over the years, however, since
the inception of the journal in 2004, has been the policy of double-blind peer reviewing,
which means that only a selected number of the papers submitted end up as
being published.
There are seven papers in the current issue, each one analysing a particular aspect
of English for Specific Purposes from a cross-cultural perspective.
The first paper, by Hmoud S. Alotaibi, focuses on research article introductions
in Arabic, analysing the extent to which scholars writing in Arabic in the sphere of
education adhere to the CARS (Create A Research Space) model delineated by John
Swales which was elaborated in particular with regard to the academic conventions
widely adopted in the English-speaking world. Instead of restricting the investigation
to the introductory section as past studies in this field did, the author examines
all of the subheadings and he concludes that all introductions include Move 2 in a
subheading entitled the Problem of the Study, a result that contradicts previous
findings where the paucity of Move 2 was common in non-English RAs, and especially
in Arabic ones.
Patrizia Anesa analyses the websites of the main arbitration centres operating in
Asia from a textual perspective to define how they are discursively constructed and
can be used as promotional tools, thereby helping us to evaluate the importance assumed
by internationalization processes or by local cultural elements in promoting a
particular centre as a seat for international arbitration. She concludes that while
some scholars argue that we are witnessing the ‘Asianization’ of arbitration, with
the increasing bargaining power of Asian parties, on the other hand a phenomenon
of ‘Universal Arbitration’ is also emerging, i.e. a form of convergence of how disputes
are resolved so that parties of any nationality can operate in the same way
with ever fewer language barriers.
In their paper, Mahmood Reza Atai and Fatemeh Asadnia examine the communicative
and promotional function of university homepages by looking at the ‘university
overview’, ‘university mission statement’, and ‘university introduction at a
glance’ genres, using a corpus of 210 texts selected from homepages of the top 500
universities ranked by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. The findings
demonstrated that the three genres shared communicative purposes, functional
units, certain moves and steps, socio-academic contexts, and discourse community
members that led to the formation of a genre set.
Gaetano Falco explores ways of using comics in an MA course on translation of
economic texts as a means of stimulating the interest of language students with no
economics skills in order to introduce economics-related lexis and improve thematic
competence in general. He observes that empirical research has shown that films
and comics can indeed be useful resources to teach economic translation to students
with no skills in economics. However, the author warns that the use of comics for
educational purposes may have its drawbacks, e.g. when students deal with complex
sign systems which embody complex economic concepts, where often the humorous
element is lost.
In her paper, Irina Khoutyz describes the differences in how scholars present
their findings in research articles (RA) in international journals in English and in
Beyza Björkman
Christian Burgers
Jan Chovanec
Anda-Elena Cretiu
Erika Dalan
John Douthwaite
Hanem El-Farahaty
Said Faiq
Silvia Ferreri
Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez
Pedro Fuertes-Olivera
Giuliana Garzone
Christoph Hafner
Ruba Khamam
Anna Loiacono
Geraldine Ludbrook
John McRae
Susan Petrilli
Silvia Pireddu
Tarja Salmi-Tolonen
Jeffrey Segrave
Charlotte Taylor
Margherita Ulrych
John Kenneth White
Jessica Williams
I hope you will enjoy the current issue of this journal and will make the most of
the free access to all past issues.
Christopher Williams
(Chief Editor)
6 FOREWORD
local journals in Russian. She then looks into the reasons for these differences, seeking
explanations from the sociocultural contexts in which these RAs were written,
as well as providing advice to local authors as to how to make their RAs more competitive
at the international level. The differences include the apparent lack of
structure of Russian RAs with respect to English RAs; the tendency in Russian authors
not to specify the purpose in writing a paper; and the tendency of Russian authors
to present the methodology used in less detail compared with English RAs.
Luisella Leonzini investigates the use of verbal and visual metaphors in economic-
media discourse within the context of the euro crisis by studying the correlation
between linguistic and pictorial metaphors and text-image intersemiotic relations.
The research is based on a cross-analysis of English and Italian editorial
articles published between 2009 and 2012. In both corpora, metaphorical realizations
frame the economic crisis which hit the single currency and the eurozone in
2009 as a partial collapse and hint at a possible return to stability in the form of a
recovery. The aim of this paper is to analyse the collapse/caduta and
recovery/ripresa metaphors across languages in the press.
Ian Robinson reports on using corpus linguistics to aid students in writing a creative
text. He looks at the available literature to help understand what is meant by
‘creativity’. A worksheet was prepared using a corpus linguistic analysis of modern,
English versions of the stories of the Brothers Grimm. This worksheet was constructed
with the use of a specialized corpus, and a stop-list was created which contained
single words as well as word clusters found in the tales. Students were then
asked to select some of these words and phrases to help them write stories which
were then analysed, and a follow-up questionnaire was used to elicit the students’
perceptions concerning creativity. The author concludes that creativity is essential
in EFL and that it is something to be fostered in students
Migration of n-grams and concgrams in political speeches
No full textThis paper investigates phrases and clusters, here termed also n-grams and concgrams, in politics, more specifically in American, British and Italian political spoken discourse. In particular the study focuses on two tri-grams, one occurring both in highly formal but also informal speeches and one typical of impromptu language: fight against terrorism and connect the dots. Firstly, the origin of the cluster is examined, then the extent to which it has migrated into other cultures: a diachronic study demonstrates in fact that Italian politicians who hardly uttered the word guerra in the vicinity of terrorismo are now frequently using the phrase guerra al terrorismo, whereas in the past lotta al terrorismo was the only choice; it is here argued that this may be attributed to the strong influence of the American war on terror. The paper discusses also how the cluster connect the dots, very surprisingly, has migrated from American into Italian spoken discourse more readily than into British spoken discourse, carrying within itself the same negative semantic prosody.
The corpus was interrogated by ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves), a software able to handle positional variation (AB, BA), namely when the associated words occur in different position relative to one another, and constituency variation (AB, ACB), namely when one or more words occur in between the associated words (Cheng, Greaves and Warren).
Such searches have proved to be an invaluable aid to uncover the full extent of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1991)
Phraseology in Political Discourse. A corpus linguistics approach in the classroom
No full textThe book starts from the assumption that the attraction between words is a matter of convention, that is, certain words significantly prefer each other’s company whether in adjacent or in discontinuous phrasal frameworks, other words just do not co-occur because they have no relationship with each other, and certain words are prohibited from co-occurring for no apparent reason other than habit. Thus, the investigation concerns not only those phrases which are obviously conceived as idiomatic, but also those which are not intuitively felt as such and which co-occur more often than chance would predict. This study highlights clearly that lexis and grammar are closely interdependent and that patterns, collocations, phraseology are the norm in language and not the exception, the core and not the periphery.
After a short introduction to Corpus Linguistics and to how this applied discipline can illuminate language teaching, and after a brief account of the several different kinds of corpora that we rely on in our classrooms, this work presents a detailed investigation of some structures that appear very frequently in spoken political discourse, as well as in general spoken discourse, but are nevertheless somewhat overlooked in traditional reference texts. It also analyses first the most recurrent clusters in the speeches of British and American politicians, and then the most common as well as the most typical phrasal verbs, so frequently used by native speakers yet so commonly “avoided” by non-native speakers.
The book is aimed at students, as well as at teachers and researchers, with the attempt to help provide some domain-specific insights on the teaching of political language as well as of general language. It tries to answer these basic questions: how idiomatic is language? How aware are students of such idiomaticity? How far do traditional reference books and dictionaries tend to be from the language which is taught in class? How useful are corpora in the classroom?
All the examples provided are uttered by political leaders in the UK and in the USA from 2001 to 2011
A contrastive analysis of English and Italian financial lexis: the pay-with-plastic system
No full textIn this paper we investigate two linguistic and financial systems and consequently two cultures by analysing the pay-with-plastic system on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing our research on two expressions, i.e. credit card and carta di credito contained in EIFECO (English and Italian Financial and Economic Corpus), a bilingual comparable corpus assembled at the University of Foggia. The texts in EIFECO come from The Economist for the English data and from Il Sole 24 Ore for the Italian. In this study we find unexpected and substantial differences in the behavior of two supposedly ‘true friends’ usually believed to be direct equivalents from a denotative point of view. After analysing the concept of equivalence and equivalent effect, we endeavor to find the best equivalent expression that might convey the spirit and manner of the source language and might produce a similar response in both users. Beyond the formal equivalence of the two payment systems taken into consideration, we try to find what Nida terms “dynamic equivalence”, or the principle of “equivalent effect” (Nida 1964).
Our aim is to show that although some words sound and look the same, they convey different meanings, and traditional reference books do not seem to be suitable for capturing and relaying the nuances of meaning and function of given fixed expressions across languages and cultures
"Britain was already cherry-picking from the European tree without bopthering to water the soil or tend to its branches". A metaphorical study of the UK in Europe.
No full textStarting from the ambivalent discursive constructions of belongings and attachments, and the awkwardness of the repetition of the statement “We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe”, this paper is a description of the uneasy and uncomfortable relation between the UK and the ‘continent’. The study discusses the historical British insular attitude looking at the metaphorical language used around Brexit, with a special emphasis on the metaphor “have one’s cake and eat it”, referring to the “cherry-picking” attitude that the British government wishes to have, retaining EU membership benefits without its obligations. Combining moral reasoning with humour, Boris Johnson admitted that his policy on cake was “pro having it and pro eating it”, expressing an argument that, on withdrawing from the European Union, Britain would still retain many of the benefits that it had enjoyed as a member. Indeed, Britain was already “cherry-picking from the European tree without bothering to water the soil or tend to its branches”, and was already “having its cake and eating it” when it was in the EU, given the very special status and the beneficial state of affairs it had managed to achieve
Metaphorizing the Discourse of Challenging Times
Full text linkThe pandemic has provided fertile ground for linguistic creativity (Salamurovic 2020). During the pandemic, metaphors and similes of all sorts were produced, and surely it did not come as a surprise that a new virus, causing illness and death, requiring urgent and radical responses from governments and citizens, would be talked about through metaphors. From its very beginning, the global understanding of the pandemic was a metaphorical one, as metaphor uses the better known to elucidate the less known.
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he pandemic has provided fertile ground for linguistic creativity (Salamurovic 2020). During the pandemic, metaphors and similes of all sorts were produced, and surely it did not come as a surprise that a new virus, causing illness and death, requiring urgent and radical responses from governments and citizens, would be talked about through metaphors. From its very beginning, the global understanding of the pandemic was a metaphorical one, as metaphor uses the better known to elucidate the less known. Many frames surrounding the pandemic were thought of as an alternative to the war rhetoric that, despite the ‘blanket criticism’ of being misleading and/or counterproductive, was the dominant, unavoidable and inescapable frame used to describe the extraordinary global pandemic that has affected the whole world.
In this paper we look in particular at the originality of Jonathan Van-Tam who, with his straightforward, down-to-earth but no-nonsense communication style from the podium at No. 10 Downing Street, managed to creatively and clearly provide the British people with information about what was going on and what was at stake, never relying on negative nor worn-out frames
Lexis and Grammar in Spoken and Written Discourse
No full textThis book, entirely based on authentic and attested language, is the outcome of several years of teaching English Language and Translation to undergraduates studying English for Politics: their main concerns and purposes are acquiring a language which allows them to “talk politics”, as it were, in its broadest sense.
When they begin their university experience, students expect to study grammar, meant as a set of rules and structures, separate from the lexicon. Indeed, this book starts with the assumption that lexis and grammar are inextricably linked and that it is folly to decouple them. It cannot be denied, though, that grammar has long been described separately from lexis, and only recently has the notion of lexico-grammar come into some advanced grammars. Lexis has long been entirely concerned with word meaning and not with pattern, and phraseology was hardly an issue of serious study. Yet, phraseology constitutes 80% of our language and only with the advent of corpora has this been unveiled. Over the last three or four decades research in corpus linguistics has shown that lexis and grammar are closely interdependent.
In this book I advocate Brazil’s concept that grammar is responsible for assembling units and manages the organization of units into texts, like the textual glue which holds the text together. In other words, grammar is not involved in the creation of meaning, but rather it is concerned with the management of meaning, and it is through the constant relationship between lexis and grammar, or between syntax and semantics, to put it differently, or between structure and vocabulary, that meaning is created. This book is also influenced by Halliday’s view of lexis and grammar as “complementary perspectives” and his conception of the two as notional ends of a continuum, in that if you interrogate the system grammatically you will get grammar-like answers and if you interrogate it lexically you get lexis-like answers.
The book is also strongly influenced by Hoey’s theory which reverses the role of lexis and grammar, arguing that lexis is complexly and systematically structured and that grammar is an outcome of this lexical structure. Following Sinclair’s ‘idiom principle’ and Hoey’s ‘lexical priming’, the book attempts to prove that the freedom to combine words in text is much more restricted than is often realized, and that although we are in principle free to say whatever we want, in practice we are constrained and influenced in many ways.
Taking the above ideas as our starting point, Lexis and Grammar, hence the title of the book, takes all its data from real life language, and in particular from British and American politics, both from spoken and written data
Classifying phraseology in a spoken corpus of political discourse
No full textThis paper is a corpus-driven study which aims to analyse phraseologies and recurrent word-combinations in spoken political discourse. The corpus used here is made up of the speeches of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi during 2005. The words terror/terrore and terrorism/terrorismo and the clusters that these words create are investigated in American English, British English and Italian. Following Sinclair’s (1987) ‘idiom principle’ and Hoey’s (2004) ‘lexical priming’, the corpus shows that terror/terrore and terrorism/terrorismo do not lend themselves to creating multi-word units in an equal manner across languages and that Bush’s language seems to be, among the three, the one most inclined to create phraseologisms. This paper is an attempt to show that phraseology – in this case phraseology occurring in political discourse – varies across cultures: the data here suggest that the three cultures under investigation use, respectively, three distinct clusters to refer to the same event − war on terror, fight against terrorism and lotta al terrorismo − and that other variants such as war against terrorism, war against terror, fight against terror, guerra al terrorismo, lotta contro il terrore – albeit well-formed and grammatically correct (Chomsky 1957) – only rarely occur, thus confirming the idea that “something may be possible, feasible and appropriate and not occur” (Hymes 1972). The strength of attraction and repulsion between words shows that the freedom to combine words in text is much more restricted than is often realized (Stubbs 2001), and that although we are in principle free to say whatever we want, in practice we are constrained and influenced in many ways
Framing the pandemic in the UK and in the US: the war, the science and the herd
No full textThis research looks at the frames British and American leaders have chosen to refer to the COVID-19 crisis. After a short description of the black swan metaphor to prove that the coronavirus pandemic was not an unexpected event, but rather predicted and foreseen, the paper first illustrates how politicians found themselves using a military language when discussing such a ‘crazy and horrible plague’, as bellicose rhetoric serves special and legitimate purposes, thus communicating the sense of urgency and emergency. Then, I look at two frames which have come to characterize the pandemic: ‘the’ science and the myth of herd immunity. I first show how leaders claimed to “be guided by the science”, thus causing the frustration of experts who were held responsible for all decisions made by politicians, and then I illustrate how the ‘herd immunity’ myth is managed in the UK and in the US, with a special focus on the idiosyncratic use Donald Trump makes of the word ‘herd’, which takes on an altogether different meaning from the scientific original frame
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