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The implementation of a bilingual teaching program requires a series of actions concerning methodological training and language support for both teachers and students. The Bilingual Education Program at Escuela Superior de Ingeniería (School of Engineering, University of Cádiz, Spain) was approved by the Board of the School in 2014 with the aim of developing English-Spanish CLIL-based bilingual curricula for the various Bachelor degrees offered. Amongst the measures taken to implement the program, teacher training has been a priority, with monitoring being an essential part. Monitoring sessions have now been carried out for more than six academic years and have a double objective: gathering the teachers’ perceptions and beliefs regarding their role as EMI teachers and providing them with feedback as to their practice through class observation in order to fine-tune future language development and methodology programs. The goal of this paper is to show that monitoring sessions may serve as a valid tool for assessing the impact of in-service training on bilingual teaching. The results show that teachers have experienced remarkable progress by incorporating language awareness into their practice as EMI teachers, thus contributing to improve the language level of both their students and themselves, and by applying specific didactic strategies to make the learning process more dynamic, participatory, stimulating and creative.

This article analyses the components of a method of literary education aimed at strengthening critical awareness. It discusses whether the current academic context is hospitable to a literary education that fights against the over-simplification of our epistemological horizons. The popularisation of a utilitarian version of university study, the neglect of reflective practices and the marginalisation of the usefulness of the discipline of literature within the field of English Studies are some of the realities that we currently face. Within this context, a literary education involving activism can play an important role in promoting resistance against the pandemic of media manipulation we are in the midst of. After having examined the views of a group of students at the University of Jaén (Spain) concerning the importance of studying an English Studies degree in contemporary society, it is clear that such an education needs to be based on emotional aspects, paying special attention to the students’ feelings and perceptions. The results of our corpus-based study using Sentiment Analysis techniques evidence the emotional disaffection of students from certain subjects, namely literature, which are specifically aimed at encouraging critical thinking. Thus, one of the future challenges that must be faced is to foster positive emotions in our literature lessons, as they are essential to promote the students’ critical awareness and activism.

Shakespeare’s works have long been a place of cultural and political struggles, and continues to be so. Twenty-first century non-canonical fiction is appropriating Shakespeare for activist purposes. The present article will analyze this phenomenon, applying the concept of cultural capital, the theories of cultural materialism, intertextuality, and appropriation in relation to popular culture, in order to study how Shakespeare’s plays are being appropriated from more radically progressive positions, and resituated in alternative contexts. Among the plethora of Shakespearean adaptations of the last decades, non-canonical appropriations in particular offer brand new interpretations of previously assumed ideas about Shakespeare’s works, popularizing the playwright in unprecedented ambits and culturally diverse social spaces, while giving voice to the marginalized. Thus, through entertainment, non-canonical fiction products such as V for Vendetta and Sons of Anarchy recycle the Shakespearean legacy from a critical point of view, while using it as a political weapon for cultural activism, helping to make people aware of social inequalities and to inspire them to adopt a critical stance towards them, as free and equal citizens.

Active and adventure tourism are two types of tourism that take place outdoors in contact with nature. The present article discusses the language of sports and adventure tourism in Spanish focusing on the use of Anglicisms. We examine the different aspects related to the integration and adaptation of English words. The integration process is often attested through the change in the spelling of the word and its adaptation to the Spanish orthographic system. Furthermore, the influence of English upon Spanish pervades not only its lexicon, but also its morphology, syntax, semantics and phraseology. In this article, we analyse word morphology in terms of plural formation and gender assignment. In order to carry out the research, the data are retrieved from a corpus and an associated database, known as Anglicor, that the authors have been compiling since 2003 up to now. The corpus is made up of several subcorpora, whose main topics are computers, medicine and health issues, fashion, beauty, science and technology, and tourism. The tourism subcorpus is a collection of texts from airline magazines, brochures, academic journals, leaflets, websites and active tourism magazines. For this study, we have made use of recent texts from specialised websites and printed magazines. Thus, the explanations are illustrated with examples obtained from authentic sources, which will provide an up-to-date overview of the presence, use and significance of Anglicisms in the language of sports and adventure tourism in Spanish.

Introduction

Running entered the official French language dictionary in 2019. This paper proposes to focus on the motivations which have led to the acceptance of this Anglicism in French. Indeed, running has achieved the performance of being more than the mere activity of running: it is a whole phenomenon which has been gaining ground since the late 2000s, as communities, events and derived products have been flourishing. Supposedly, running must have been a buzzword in the field of sports. But given its lexicalization, running could not just remain a buzzword. It has become a whole concept as it contributes to feeding the field of running in French through both semantic extension and precision. It will be of interest to examine the pathway of the Anglicism running from a phenomenon creating the buzz to a widely accepted and frequently used lexeme in French. The question of linguistic performance will therefore be tackled, thanks to recent online data, in order to show how running has become important not only in the world and language of sports, but also in the standard everyday language in France.

Physical forms of ruin and psychological forms of ruination is an area within spatial theory that will enhance literary studies, especially literature of the First World War. The literary representation of the trench as a ruined space is a predominant feature of literature that emerges from the Great War. Among the different genres, it is drama that is ideally poised to offer a critique of the way both physical and psychological ruin can be depicted on the stage. Both R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End and Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie consciously depict trench space as a site of embodied trauma for soldiers who experienced trench warfare and, consequently, trench space functions as an ‘experiential ruin.’ This ‘embodied exchange’ emphasizes the relationship between the battlefield (or cite of trauma) and the actual war-related trauma itself. Both Sherriff and O’Casey have created plays that show the decaying landscape and decaying psyche as inseparable victims to the devastation of the First World War.

In his book on propaganda Jacques Ellul acknowledges the unsavoury connotation - which is a common place of today’s culture - surrounding those who write to influence a public. This is an interpretation which is frequently applied to the government propaganda writers of the First World War, yet to do so removes those writers from their context and applies modern understanding to a historical act. Over the last century since the Great War society has developed, causing a social linguistic shift. This shift has affected the way propaganda is understood, and propaganda in an Edwardian sense is not simply synonymous with propaganda as the term is interpreted and used today. My paper demonstrates how this word has undergone lexical development over the intervening years since the War, using corpus-based analysis to track the definition of the term ‘propaganda’ in Oxford English Dictionaries using the Antconc database software. I combine this quantitative research with in-depth exploration of propaganda theories from the Twentieth Century, and examples of First World War propaganda to ascertain when in history, if indeed a certain time was pivotal, this word began to mutate. This paper argues that better understanding of the development of this term reveals the contradictory nature of many modern-day attitudes to the relationship between literature and politics; the disconnect often at play between how we view our own modern culture and the judgements we are tempted to make about the past.

For the last century, historians of the conflict have not systematically used the poetry of the First World War as a source. Whether reduced to a canon established a posteriori or excluded from literary periodisation altogether, this corpus needs to be considered from a transdisciplinary perspective and be used as a document about the experience of war itself, and not just about the conflict’s remembrance. The present article aims to present the French and British landscape of research about the poetry of the Great War and to establish a theoretical framework combining literary history, anthropology, literary criticism, and linguistics, which will allow for the usage of poetry as a historical source. Finally, the article will discuss two digital humanities projects which draw upon the Centenary to contribute to the establishment of a relation between History and Poetics in the context of the sources available to the cultural historian looking at how individuals internalised a culture shared by all those who experienced the war and at how the poetic gesture shaped the experience of war itself.

This paper focuses on non-native accents in ESP classrooms. In particular it looks at native and non-native speakers of English accents used in the audio material accompanying six ESP textbooks. In a second study, a group of undergraduate ESP students of Law and Tourism were asked to assess some of the non-native speakers accents found in these materials, focussing on aspects such as fluency, pronunciation, intelligibility and foreign accent. More specifically, they were asked to rate the following non-native accents of speakers in English: French, German, Polish, Chinese and Spanish. Results from the first part of the study show that native speaker models continue to be present in ESP textbooks to a far higher degree than non-native ones. In the second part, the non-native accents that students rated most positively were those of German and Polish speakers, and those seen in the most negative terms were French and Spanish. In general, the Law students tended to value native accents more than non-native ones, whereas students of Tourism broadly accept both native and non-native accents. The research described in this paper was funded by the Autonomous Government of Galicia (Grants numbers CN2012/81, GPC2015/004) and by the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Industry (Grant number FFI2015-64057-P).

Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) stands in the tradition of African American use of the biblical musings that aims to relativize and yet uphold a new version of the sacred story under the gaze of a black woman that manipulates and admonishes the characters of the gospel to offer a feminist side of the Bible. The novel discloses Hurston’s mastering of the aesthetics that black folklore infused to the African American cultural experience and her accommodation to bring to the fore the needed voice of black women. Rejecting the role of religion as a reductive mode of social protest, the novel extends its jeremiadic ethos and evolves into a black feminist manifesto in which a world without women equates disruption and instability. Hurston showcases the importance of an inclusive and ethic sacred femininity to reclaim a new type of womanhood both socially and aesthetically. Three decades before the post-colonial era, Hurston’s bold representation of the sacred femininity recasts the jeremiad tradition to pin down notions of humanitarianism, social justice and the recognition of politics of art. All in all, in an era of a manly social protest literature Hurston opts for portraying the folkloric aesthetics of spirituality as creative agency simply to acknowledge the leadership of the sacred femininity that black women could remodel into art.

The teaching of the literary essay is usually ignored in many universities due to its probing and inconclusive form which has not favoured the existence of models of analysis. However, the argumentative nature of this discourse can be examined through a reading that allows the recognition of some rhetorical operations like the invention of arguments (inuentio), their arrangement (dispositio) and expressive manifestation (elocutio). This article proposes a model of analysis following this rhetorical approach. In particular, I apply this analysis to a short essay by Virginia Woolf, ‘Royalty’. Woolf has been considered a major writer of the twentieth century. Although the style of her novels has been extensively researched from diverse perspectives, the style of her essays has not received much critical attention. Throughout my study, I indicate how the recognition and interpretation of arguments and rhetorical figures can help to define the style of this essay. Furthermore, I provide some guidelines for the identification and further interpretation of these rhetorical elements. Both the analysis and the guidelines can be useful in the literature and composition classes.

I argue in this paper that agreeing past participles are merged externally in the derivation in V endorsed with a feature [+resultative], whereas non-agreeing past participles are bound to value a feature [+perfective] against the have-auxiliary. Phi-agreement on the former kind of participle occurs since the meaning [+resultative] denotes a property of the logical object, which happens to merge in the position of sister to V-en. As postulated in standard frameworks, phi-agreement consists in that the V-en form values uninterpretable phi-features against the DP object. In contrast with agreeing past participles, non-agreeing past participles are merged externally in the form of V and they get their –en suffix in v valued against the have-auxiliary once the latter enters the derivation. The meaning or interpretation of this –en suffix is [+perfective] or [+anterior]. No phi-agreement occurs between these V-en forms marked [+perfective] and their logical object (whenever they select for one) since [+perfective] is a property of the event or situation as a whole, and not of the object. It is further suggested that the specific Agree relation that is phi-agreement appears not to be subject to configurations of asymmetric c-command, but to just occur on external Merge of the DP that bears the corresponding valued, interpretable phi-features.

This article studies the Orientalist and Feminist discourses that underlay Ellen M. Rogers’s A Winter in Algeria: 1863-4 (1865). Her conception of Algeria reproduces the Victorian imperialist attitude toward the Algerian as inferior to the European in order to celebrate British imperial power. Underneath this colonial discourse, the writer proclaims her feminist point of view about empire and juxtaposes feminist attitudes in Victorian Britain with the degraded condition of the Oriental woman. To contribute to Victorian feminist struggle for gender equality, she identifies with the suffering of Muslim Algerian women under male domination and compares their confinement to the harem and their veiling to Victorian “separate spheres” ideology. From this perspective, Rogers presents the profiles of the Orientalist as defined by Edward Said (1978) and the feminist as defined by Antoinette Burton (1994). Said limits his discussion of Orientalism to male writers and travelers who construct imperialist views about the colonial world and its people. However, Burton argues that many Victorian travel writers were women who not only circulated Orientalist ideas but also constructed a feminist discourse. Women writers found in the colonial world ways to cross the boundaries of gender and power in order to criticize male writers who insisted on women’s inferior status. In sum, the major claim made in this article is that Ellen M. Rogers projects a feminist-Orientalist view in her travel account about French Algeria.

International audience; American law and English law belong to the same legal tradition, called the common law characterized by a case-law system based on judicial decisions and the rule of precedent. There are indeed common features between the American and the English common law systems. There is a common language with close expressions, but also similar concepts, principles and procedures. But how common are in fact the American and British legal systems? This paper aims at finding some possible answers through a legal and linguistic analysis of some US and UK superior court decisions.

The formulation of legal norms is greatly conditioned not only by different juridical systems and drafting traditions, but also by specific linguistic features and socio-cultural aspects. The paper investigates this issue by taking into consideration provisions concerning commercial arbitration in an Asian country. The text selected for our analysis is The People’s Republic of China Arbitration Law 1994 (PRCAL, for short). This law can be considered a highly important step in the development of Chinese legislation in this field as it has had a great impact on international arbitration carried out by Chinese companies. International business exchanges with China have increased enormously over the last few years and even the recent economic recession has not slowed down this growth, making China the biggest Asian market in terms of import-export trade. As a natural consequence, this increase in business deals and contracts has brought about a rise in the number of trade disputes, with a consequent increase in arbitration proceedings. The aim of this paper is to examine the English version of PRCAL in order to highlight some of the linguistic and legal features present that betray specific cultural values. In some cases, the PRCAL text is compared to the United Nations Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, with the aim of offering a more detailed understanding of textual phenomena closely linked to differing legal and cultural traditions.

The aim of my essay is to show how the Afro-American writer Michelle Cliff uses the concept of matriliny in the process of the feminist recovery of the history of Jamaica. I will argue that Michelle Cliff is a writer that honors the anachronistic tradition of essentialism that is based on the notion that cultures and identities have certain innate qualities immutable irrespective of time and place. I will contend that this essentialist worldview, skews the fictive world of Cliff’s much celebrated “Clare Savage novels”: Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven by reducing it to facile, Manichean oppositions between the colonizer and the colonized, white and black culture. My essay will particularly focus on how Cliff’s project of the affirmation of matriliny is undermined by her deep ambivalence about the institution of motherhood, which in times of slavery and decolonization was implicated in various discourses inimical to the well-being of black women.

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was one of the most prominent British writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. In addition to pedagogical essays and feminocentric fiction, this Anglo-Irish authoress produced some tales for children which were quickly translated into a number of European languages. This paper is part of a larger project which considers the reception of Edgeworth’s oeuvre on the Continent, and analyzes the Italian version of one of her last fictions for children, Frank (1822). Bianca Milesi’s rendering of the text into Italian will be studied within the framework of translemic studies. For this purpose, we will contextualize Edgeworth’s educational work and make reference to the impact of Milesi’s books in literary magazines and her relationship with Edgeworth. Though the readers of the source and target texts remain the same, Benedetto is conditioned by Milesi’s personality and historical circumstances. As a result, there is a balance between fidelity to Edgeworth’s Frank regarding the main plot and characterization, and the will to adapt the story to a new context through a number of suppressions which affect the macro and microstructure of the text. There are also some additions, these intended to bring Frank closer to young Italian readers. This article suggests that, rather than a translation, the changes in the target text point to an adaptation of Edgeworth’s narrative.

The performance of identity involves impression management, social skills, and self-reflexivity. To perform identity in media environments involves writing our identities into being. Media environments have facilitated a new kind of selfhood—brand—in which we model our identities on celebrities. However, because brand identity has no ethical grounding, it raises legitimate concerns. To incorporate ethics, I perform my identity through mystory, Gregory Ulmer’s genre of reflexive writing. By composing a mystory, I consult with an avatar—which in Hindu tradition was a god descended into earthly form—that reveals my ethical condition and a pathway through it. This consultation functions as pharmakon (Derrida, 1995), revealing truths to me which both wound and heal. I use mystory to address a personal question, “How do I lead an ethical life?” and a policy problem: water pollution in Florida. The conclusion of this essay presents a response to this problem: a performance art piece designed to teach manatees about mortality.

The relationship between spectators, performers and spaces is investigated in a critical perspective which aims at further developing the concept of the city as a performance place where precarious urban identities are dynamically and temporarily shaped and reshaped. Even if this essay takes into due account the seminal studies of Barthes (1971), H. Lefebvre (1974), and urban theorists such as Reyner Banham and Kevin Lynch who conceived of the city as a ‘legible’ text, at the same time it argues that textuality and performativity must be perceived as intertwined cultural practices that work together to shape the body of phenomenal, intellectual, psychic, and social encounters that frame a subject’s experience of the city. London 2012 Olympic Games, and in particular the stunning Opening Ceremony directed by Danny Boyle, for which visitors and overseas spectators were invited to transform themselves into a global theatrical audience, can be used as a privileged viewpoint from which to analyse the different ways of perceiving, but also being looked at and performing oneself, in and through spaces which tend at modifying, or at interrogating or destabilizing one’s traditional identity.

This essay focuses on the elaboration of postcolonial literature as an event emerging from the interaction among the many and diverse agencies which allow the postcolonial work to come into being. This formulation both highlights the repetition of tropes in postcolonial literature and the variations to the tropes themselves, which can become ethically and politically relevant by creating an interruption in accepted notions of what a postcolonial work should sound like. Following this lead, the essay will outline a methodological approach which interprets the literary work as a performative act in the complex nexus of discourses constituting the postcolonial writer as a figure of the global collective imaginary, taking as case study J. M. Coetzee’s work with particular focus on his Nobel Prize lecture and the third instalment of his memoir series, Summertime (2009). His work, together with others, is taken as a symptom of how public lectures and statements, together with the literary work proper, have all become an expression of the writer’s own performativity as a writer; while these phenomena have an impact on literature as a whole, the essay focuses on the postcolonial writer figure as historically endowed with what Kobena Mercer has famously termed “the burden of representation.”

Among fictitious autobiographies as well as among historical novels, Robert Nye’s Falstaff (1976) is a special case in that it is not the autobiography of a historical personage, but of a dramatic character —who happens to be one of the most famous in Shakespeare, indeed in world drama, to be dictated by Falstaff to various amanuenses. After briefly discussing the sub-genre of fictitious autobiography, this paper will analyze the varied use of intertextuality, the tensions fabricated between the autobiographer and his helpers, and the critical thoughts and tendencies which Nye absorbed in preparing the work with particular emphasis on the clash between the Shakespearean intertexts and the diction surrounding it.

Translating financial texts is a difficult and complex work. The labour market in this specialized area demands much of the translator, not only from the point of view of the translation subject matter itself, but also from the perspective of the translator’s professionalism and preparedness. Our contribution here concerns applied research for teaching specialized translation, particularly for the teaching-learning process regarding financial translation for the language pair English-Spanish. This article will discuss the different translation sub-competencies that we propose students should master, offering a series of teaching-learning objectives and suggesting the use of certain pedagogical material. With respect to professional sub-competencies, and in order to make translation learning experiences in the classroom as close as possible to the actual practice of translation in the real world, i.e. in a professional working environment, we will discuss certain characteristics of the professional labour market in the area of financial translation, as well as some of the professional skills that the student translators should develop in order to survive in this specialized domain of translation.

The plays of William Shakespeare have been performed all over the globe. This is particularly true of the erstwhile colonies of Britain and India is no exception. Along with other English playwrights, Shakespeare’s plays began to be performed in India during the eighteenth century by British officials for their entertainment. Educated Indians took these performances as a model to develop ‘modern’ Indian theatre. The present essay engages with Shakespeare production in colonial Calcutta, starting with Shakespeare performances in English before moving on to consider the later process of ‘indigenizing’ Shakespeare. The essay also proposes that Shakespeare production in Calcutta after the 1850s when Shakespeare’s plays moved out of the confines of schools and colleges has been governed by its own aesthetics.

This article engages with one of the current critical and bibliographical concerns of Shakespeare studies: the collaborative nature of Shakespeare’s work. Bibliographers have identified other hands in the fabric of Shakespeare’s plays. Here the focus is Shakespeare’s collaboration in the plays of others. Three such instances will be examined; The Book of Sir Thomas More, The Spanish Tragedy and The Chronicle History of King Lear. Substantially different as these cases may be, in all of them Shakespeare is working with the materials of others. Shakespeare’s King Lear is an adaptation of the older Leir play performed by the Queen’s Men and in that sense it is a deeply collaborative work. As this essay concludes, without a model there would be nothing to stimulate, or provoke or exceed.

This essay examines Pablo Avecilla’s Hamlet, an ‘imitation’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy of the prince of Denmark published in 1856, both in its own terms and in the historical context of its publication. This Shakespearean adaptation has been negatively judged as preposterous and unworthy of comment, but it deserves to be approached as what it claimed to be, a free handling of the Shakespearean model, and as responding to its own cultural moment. Avecilla turns the Shakespearean sacrificial prince into a righteous sovereign that has kept the love of a lower-ranked lady and, by pursuing revenge, has successfully overthrown a dishonourable and corrupt ruler. This re-focusing of the Shakespearean plot and politics recalls the French neoclassical adaptation by J-F. Ducis in 1769. In fact, Avecilla seems to combine neoclassical form, which he advocated in his 1834 treatise Poesía trágica, with more Romantic traits at a time when playgoers demanded stronger sensations. As with Ducis’s Hamlet and its earliest translation-adaptations in Spanish at the turn of the century, the alterations from the Shakespearean model may be seen to have political resonances. Seen in the historical context of the so-called Progressive Biennium of 1854-1856, Avecilla’s emphasis on virtue and implicit approval of popular uprising led by an idolized authority is in tune with contemporary concerns for the right of the people and their leaders to rise up against immoral rule, with the Progressives’ support for both monarchy and national sovereignty, with their criticism of the corruption of conservative governments prior to the 1854 revolution, and with the role of ‘revolutionary’ generals such as O’Donnell and Espartero. This political interpretation is strengthened when Avecilla’s own political involvement in the Progressive programme is taken into account.

The process of teaching any subject involves the use of all resources available to achieve efficient/effective result. When dealing with teaching foreign languages, we have noticed that such a traditional and apparently well-known tool as a dictionary is not so well-known nor used efficiently by students. Nevertheless, in our opinion, the dictionary should play an important role in the teaching-learning process. Therefore, we have carried out a research in our classroom in order to check that if students work systematically with the dictionary, they will improve not only their dictionary skills, but also their L2 skills mainly in writing, reading comprehension and vocabulary. The research was done at two different levels during a whole academic year focusing on dictionary training and dictionary activities. Our work showed quite interesting outcomes: (a) students were aware of the usefulness of dictionaries because they learnt that dictionaries helped them; (b) students’ confidence to face activities increased; (c) students improved their language use and knowledge; and (d) they really enjoyed the tasks. As a general conclusion we can state that with better dictionary use students acquire autonomous learning strategies for learning a foreign language.

The underlying assumption of this study is the understanding of a specialized term as a summary of disciplinary knowledge, formalized at a textual level in the contextual relations which structure disciplinary lexical knowledge and are therefore essential for the successful interpretation of a text. With that aim this paper carries the analysis of the lexico-grammatical patterns which signal the hyponymy and meronymy relations of the term building, a key disciplinary concept in a corpus of construction engineering textbooks, using the WordNet database for reference. The linguistic analysis of the repertoire of lexico-grammatical patterns employed brings to the fore the dual role of hyponymy and meronymy as both semantic and metalinguistic discourse-organizing lexical resources, key in the rhetorical organization of the discourse of this discipline.

As the Bologna Process moves forward, changes in European systems of higher education are expected. The introduction of the ECTS focussing on the students’ achievements described in terms of the learning outcomes and competences acquired is one of the innovations. This process, encouraged by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, signifies a change in teaching focus, from an input model to an output one, which promotes self-assessment in a flexible curriculum, in this case adapted to student’s language profile. To illustrate this new approach in language learning, a pilot experience with Technical English mining engineering students is discussed, with special attention to learner reflection and self-assessment practices. Students’ progress in self-assessment, based on the introduction of learning outcomes in specific language courses, is analysed to conclude that personal engagement and clear purpose -specified in terms of learning outcomes- seem to have become relevant components to student's self-assessment practice.

The purpose of this article is to carry out a corpus-based study on the presence of violence in a selection of eight tales by the Grimm's Brothers by looking at the terms which can be said to relate to the semantic field of violence. More specifically, this study will analyse a selection of eight tales in which the frequency of the words cut, dead and blood will be studied in detail. These words have been chosen due to their possible connection to violence after carrying out a quantitative analysis of the frequency of the whole main corpus. My initial hypothesis is that the corpus-based study of those eight tales would support my intuition regarding the high percentage of violence in the Brothers Grimm collection as opposed to the content of violence in a wider variety of texts. The study initially involved the analysis of frequencies of the lexical units in the Brothers' Grimm corpus and, secondly, a comparison of the results obtained in the frequency test to two reference corpora: the British National Corpus and the Cobuild Concordancer. The comparison and its results seem to indicate that there was a higher than average percentage of the use of words related directly or indirectly to violence.

In today’s world, the European Union is searching for a delicate balance between linguistic integration and diversity. Thanks to international knowledge transmission and exchange as well as co-operation and mobility beyond national boundaries, English has now become the preferred option for linguistic unity. It is a language that allows native speakers of different languages to communicate. However, the use of English as a lingua franca should not (and does not) threaten plurilingualism in Europe, as reflected in the many national languages in Europe and the relatively peaceful coexistence of national and minority languages in many European countries. In fact, English, as used for international communication purposes, complements and supplements national languages. This research has been carried out in project FFI2008-06080-C03-01/FILO, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

This article explores some of the dilemmas faced by minority autobiographers when they set out to represent their life stories in writing. While significant benefits may be derived from this self-conscious enterprise, bicultural authors are sometimes unaware of the boundaries -or frames- that the mainstream culture demarcates for their self-portrayals. My analysis of Julia Álvarez’s ¡Yo! (1997) and Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996), which could both be characterized as ‘auto-ethnographies,’ shows how these two Dominican-American writers are subject to some of the principles and rules that have governed the genre since its very inception in the United States. Due to the kind of subjectivities and selfhoods they aspire to develop and represent in their works, and to their readers’ expectations, they are seen to deploy certain patterns and narrative techniques that can hardly be considered new or original in self-writing. Although it should be admitted that these bicultural writers have expanded the boundaries of the autobiographical genre, this article also demonstrates that these authors are dependent on a number of ‘utopian blueprints,’ divided forms of subjectivity, and conventional strategies of cultural critique that were integral to the works of the ‘forefathers’ of the genre in the New World.

Rhetoric has three colours: white, black, and grey. White rhetoric is the Grecian Agoric ideal and black rhetoric is its mockery in the form of cheap point-scoring and open deceitfulness. Both are commonly used and obvious. A third, grey, rhetoric, however, is the most pervasive and devious kind of rhetoric in contemporary political discourse, which has developed in response to changing patterns of journalistic inquisition in the 24/7 news and public affairs era. This paper describes the three types of rhetoric, and argues that the Fourth Estate has an important democratic role in counteracting black and grey rhetoric.

Across the academic world, abstracts may often serve a primary promotional function. However, it has also long been accepted that each academic field has its own perception of exactly what it means to be interesting and authoritative. Although abstracts in many disciplines have been extensively researched, so far those from the academic area of law have received little attention. This paper applies techniques of qualitative and quantitative analysis to 200 abstracts from four academic law journals (two European, two US based), and finds that their structure and language reflect specifically legal discourses of persuasion. Areas of commonality between the abstracts from European and US journals are discussed, while differences are analysed in terms of the underlying legal cultures.

Although social scientists, journalists, and tv presenters have made great efforts to justify the relevance and importance of audience discussion programmes, these programmes have been commonly labelled as “trash television”. Among the most frequent criticisms in the literature are the accusations that these programmes turn serious matters into sensationalist spectacle and indulge emotional outbursts while pretending to offer some kind of public service. The point of departure for the present paper is that a linguistic analysis of conflict talk in an institutional context may throw light on the insights offered by these programmes. More precisely, the present paper argues that conflict talk in an institutional context can build normative legitimacy by exemplifying values and moral obligations – as can be seen in the topics and guests selected for each programme. All in all, this study suggests that conflict talk is not only used as an ideological vehicle for attitude change, but that it also exerts a powerful force of social cohesion on the audience.

This paper discusses the influence of the use of English as a lingua franca in the field of academic research in medicine and its effects on the Spanish medical language, as evidenced after an in-depth revision of the existing literature. The study has been based on the analysis of a medical corpus made up of 311 Conclusion sections of Spanish articles, which correspond to the specialties of Cardiology, Paediatrics and Psychology. Upon justifying the decision of using the English language as essential for academic life and international communication, the discussion focuses on the impact of the specialized literature on professionals whose native language is not English and the inclusion of new vocabulary sometimes justified as the result of a need on the part of scientists to explain new concepts. The massive incorporation of vocabulary has led researchers to deal with the different ways in which neologisms are introduced in the Spanish medical language analyzing the corresponding results, which include: words from other languages which are slightly modified; words from other languages added with or without morphological adaptation; addition of suffixes or prefixes; the use of “false friends” and the use of certain words not registered in the dictionary.

This article investigates the metaphorical conceptualization of terrorism by president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who came into power soon after the biggest terrorist attack in Spain on March 11th, 2004. Specifically, it examines how terrorism is conceptualized via metaphors through the notion of fight, and their conceptual implication in discourse. I will refer to these as Fight Metaphors. The research questions addressed are as follows: 1. What Fight Metaphors are used in the discursive construction of terrorism? 2. How do Fight Metaphors contribute to support Zapatero’s anti-terrorism political agenda? I follow a combination of a cognitive and a pragmatic approach from a corpus-based analysis perspective. The cognitive approach is based on Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1993), and the pragmatic one is based on Charteris-Back’s Critical Metaphor Analysis (2004). The corpus of investigation comprises 58 Spanish political speeches over a three-year period (2004-2007). Findings reveal that Fight Metaphors constitute the pivotal node that simultaneously performs various functions at several levels: cognitive, rhetorical, and ideological in order to promote his anti-terrorism political ideology.