1,720,963 research outputs found
EU Regulations as a hybrid genre
No full textThis research aims to approach hybridity in EU regulations from the perspective of genre analysis. Given the established structure that characterises EU regulations, the aim of this research is to explain the reasons why EU regulations are written as they are and to demonstrate that, on the one hand, it is possible to identify fixed moves that fulfil precise communicative purposes in EU legal documents and, on the other hand, that these communicative purposes are typical of written operative, expository and persuasive legal documents. The study, based on the principles of genre analysis, speech act theory applied to legal discourse and thick description of legal texts, was carried out on a corpus of ninety EU regulations on subjects (customs union; competition rules; monetary policy; marine biological resources; common commercial policy) that fall under the exclusive competence of the European Union according to the principle of conferral, which governs the limits of EU competences. The findings shed light on a new approach to hybridity in EU secondary legislation. They start from the assumption that the legal order created by the European Union is hybrid - due to its origins in common law, civil law and international law - and lead to the conclusion that such a hybrid legal order is expressed through hybrid legal texts, namely EU regulations: they are influenced by the legal framework from which they originate and by the political and historical reasons that led the founding father of the former European Community to address the problem of the so-called 'democratic deficit' also from a textual point of view, and not only by means of economic and political strategies. They start from the assumption that the legal order created by the European Union is hybrid - due to its origins in common law, civil law and international law - and lead to the conclusion that such a hybrid legal order is expressed through hybrid legal texts, namely EU regulations: they are influenced by the legal framework from which they originate and by the political and historical reasons that led the founding father of the former European Community to address the problem of the so-called 'democratic deficit' also from a textual point of view, and not only by means of economic and political strategies.The results show that EU regulations, despite being operative legal documents, are highly persuasive texts that make use of rhetorical and linguistic devices such as semantic evaluation, hedging, intertextuality and modality in order to mitigate their illocutionary force and strengthen the power of the reasons given in the recitals to justify the provisions of the articles in the operative provisions.This textual peculiarity of EU regulation is even more significant when combined with another critical factor: the contractual nature of EU law.The parties involved in the 'negotiations' are on the one hand the Member States and the EU institutions, but on the other hand they are the Member States and their citizens, since once ratified, EU regulations do not require any further step or transposition to become part of the respective national legal frameworks.Thus, the persuasive and rhetorical power of EU regulations and their textual peculiarities, as described in this study, support the initial hypothesis according to which EU regulations are an instrument created to regulate social behaviour - as is the nature of laws - and to address the phenomenon of the 'democratic deficit' from a textual perspective
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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