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Several recent news items discuss cases where medical assistance in dying seems to be sought not because the medical situation is beyond hope despite optimal supports, but rather because supports that could theoretically be available are inaccessible in practice or, if accessible, are apparently insufficient. We discuss these developments.

We were astonished to read a recent media news item about a 51-year-old woman in Ontario who was offered and accepted medical assistance in dying (MAID) because she was experiencing multiple chemical sensitivities, also known by its preferred diagnostic term, idiopathic environmental intolerance (IEI). Reportedly, she could not access appropriate housing. We find this concerning, as providing MAID to individuals with refractory IEI symptoms on the basis of housing unavailability implies that there were no better management options available. This case should prompt ethical reflection on whether our supports for the most vulnerable enable them to maintain basic human dignity, and whether systemic societal action in other ways could better support people with IEI.

This article is based on a research project currently being carried out at Heidelberg University, and inspired by Christian Plantin. We present some considerations on how a multidimensional approach can be used to analyse emotions. In the first step, we examine emotions as objects of argumentation in the EuroParl and OpenSubtitles corpora. In the second step, we conduct a study of the lexical field of terms denoting suffering in French, beginning with an analysis of the most frequent collocations, an approach which enables us to provide a detailed semantic description of this lexical field. In the last step, the results of the analysis of the collocations of haine ‘hate’ are compared to the results obtained by Christian Plantin in his examination of the network of references between selected terms and other entries in monolingual dictionaries. Our current studies are by no means complete, and cannot therefore be considered to provide definitive results, but they clearly illustrate the usefulness of a multidimensional perspective on emotions and thus show the importance of Christian Plantin’s research in this field.

This is a fairy tale about unintended consequences, a re-telling of the story of Midas, with lessons for responding to a Public Health emergency.

Europe is a unique framework of communication with similar issues discussed in different linguistic and cultural areas. This paper gives a detailed overview of a discourse linguistic project that analyses this multilingual discourse space. We focus on the issue of vaccination since this is a controversial issue in the media of all countries that are of interest for this study (Germany, Italy, France, UK). Methods from discourse, corpus and computer linguistics are used to identify the most relevant linguistic, argumentative, and emotional patterns in discourse. The paper discusses these methods in detail. We then show how these patterns are annotated in our corpora and how the different kinds of annotations can be analysed in correlation.

Se comentan cinco taxones de compuestas que aparecen confusamente ilustrados en publicaciones florísticas de Andorra y que nunca se han recolectado en territorio andorrano.

This article is based on a research project currently being carried out at Heidelberg University, and inspired by Christian Plantin. We present some considerations on how a multidimensional approach can be used to analyse emotions. In the first step, we examine emotions as objects of argumentation in the EuroParl and OpenSubtitles corpora. In the second step, we conduct a study of the lexical field of terms denoting suffering in French, beginning with an analysis of the most frequent collocations, an approach which enables us to provide a detailed semantic description of this lexical field. In the last step, the results of the analysis of the collocations of haine 'hate' are compared to the results obtained by Christian Plantin in his examination of the network of references between selected terms and other entries in monolingual dictionaries. Our current studies are by no means complete, and cannot therefore be considered to provide definitive results, but they clearly illustrate the usefulness of a multidimensional perspective on emotions and thus show the importance of Christian Plantin's research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]