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In the context of the activities aimed to improve and develop the integration and cooperation of new Member States together with the states already belonging to the European Community, EU institutions have carried out a number of measures to increase the coherence of the body of common rights and obligations, binding all the Member States of the European Union (community acquis), for a long time. For this reason, the Commission of the European Community began in 2001 a process of consultation and discussion about the way in which problems resulting from the lack of a correspondence between national contract laws (and related terms) belonging to different legal systems should be dealt with and solved at the European level. These consultations, in particular, have emphasised the need to enhance coherence of the existing acquis in the field of contract law terminology and avoid preventable inconsistencies in new acquis terminology (Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council. A more coherent European Contract Law. An Action Plan. COM.(2003) 68 final - henceforth Action Plan). As it was manifested, terms and concepts created, elaborated or defined by the legislature or by jurists in a given jurisdiction do not necessarily correspond to terms and concepts produced in other legal systems. In fact, culture-bound legal concepts possessing strong regional connotations deserve careful attention when moving from English legal texts to Romance or Slavic languages. This is even more evident in the field of contract law, with common and civilian contract law terminology offering plenty of examples of interlingual ambiguity: problems of synonymy and legal homonyms; difficulties related with a partial overlap of legal meaning; inconveniences caused by ‘false friends’. The aim of this paper is to explore the above-mentioned linguistic problems focusing on the solution prospected by the European Community in terms of the development of standardized contract law terms. In particular, the specialized field of European contract law will be presented as a practicable way of ‘negotiating the non-negotiable’, that is, a feasible example of linguistic contact-zones where people(s), cultures, languages and legal institutions literally and/or metaphorically meet, interact, intersect and effectively communicate.

This paper analyses the automatic email signatures (ASs) of 200 academics. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the ASs reveal that they are often written in one language, and only occasionally in two, English being a frequent choice. The ASs contain information with a primarily identificatory function, and occasionally with a promotional and socialising function. Despite the absence of clearly compulsory components, a typical structure can be identified in the ASs, which includes a specification of the writers’ identity, reference to their affiliation, mention of their achievements, and an indication on how they can be reached. Like other academic texts, the ASs examined are places of self-categorisation and self-identification, tools for presenting one’s professional identity, which are developing as sites of self-promotion.

Research on teacher motivation has recently given evidence of being closely related to several variables such as pre-service and in-service teacher training, educational reform, teaching practice, student motivation, work environment, psychological fulfilment and general health conditions. Taking into consideration the most recent studies on EFL teacher motivation across different disciplines and cultures, this paper aims at sharing the author’s personal experience with colleagues who have taught in CLIL trainee courses for High School content teachers. The results of the project, carried out in university run-courses from 2013 to 2017, have shown that teaching certain linguistic aspects (such as WE and ELF features, or word-forming processes) makes teachers linguistically aware of the plurality of English in communication and education, stimulates them strategically, increases their intrinsic motivation and influences their teaching effectiveness.

Over the last decades, proposals to modernise legislative drafting have been choral and among the specific causes generally mentioned there are sentences of undue length, overuse of archaic expressions, repeated definitions and expressions, partiality of nominalisations, lack of gender neutrality. The aim of this analysis is to explore the legislative techniques adopted by drafters of English-speaking countries over the last decades, who are asked to write legal sentences aiming at gender fair and symmetric representation of men and women. The issue examined from a lexico-grammatical perspective culminates in the proposed questions whether certain techniques used to implement gender-neutral drafting can result in a product that is better than the one had before.

In recent years, English has become the lingua franca of medicine and the language teaching profession has seen the emergence of im- plementing English for Medical Purposes (EMP) courses. The needs of EMP learners are very specific and EMP teachers who are language experts and not medical ones need to develop materials that are in line with EMP learners’ specific needs. In response to recognizing EMP students’ needs, extensive corpus-based research has led to specialized medical wordlists (Chen and Ge 2007; Wang, Liang, Ge 2008; Mungra and Canziani 2013; Hsu 2013; Lei and Liu 2016). Such wordlists have given instructors the opportunity to focus on specific vocabulary facil- itating domain specific learning. Among these medical wordlists, the Medical Academic Wordlist for clinical cases (MAWLcc) seems to fur- nish a good base for medical students, since it identifies the specific lexis of patient care. The aim of this paper is to propose an EMP teaching model for lexi- cal verbs extracted from the MAWLcc. These verbs are used in differ- ent communicative contexts for the development of medical students’ academic linguistic competence in their professional context.

Tre frasi con un comune nucleo semantico, una autenticamente transitiva, una a verbo supporto e una pseudoscissa, vengono messe a confronto per rendere conto di analogie riguardanti il verbo fare e la marca di caso di uno dei sintagmi. Le parziali formalizzazioni fornite indicano che le analogie hanno ragioni strutturali.

A peculiarity of the German language is the extensive use of “pragmatic particles” in spoken language. These particles are generally called Abtönungspartikel (“modulating particles”) and are used to modulate the speaker’s attitude. They have an elusive meaning which is quite difficult for non-native speakers to discern, and they are a challenge to translate into Italian due to the lack of equivalents. Three particularly interesting particles are “denn”, “eigentlich” and “überhaupt”, which are typical of the speech act of asking questions. After a general introduction to the vast field of conversational particles (showing how differently German grammars treat this topic), the present contribution will focus on what kind of pragmatic differences exist between these three words (furnishing, as examples, some paraphrases of “denn”, “eigentlich” and “überhaupt” taken from the Italian translation of a German novel) and how textbooks currently used in Italian high schools deal with them.

The tie linking the English language to economy is twofold. On the one hand it is the conduit channelling international trade, on the other it has undergone changes caused by this international trade. Trade and commerce involve contact and exchange, not only of material goods but also of different realities, ideas and ways of living, and consequently terminology. The lexis of money, together with coins and coinage, becomes an extremely interesting case study, showing how English is a composite language, taking on board loans from many different cultures, most particularly Latin. Anglo-Saxon vocabulary related to money was in fact already enriched by the contact with the Romans, which had brought the circulation of Roman coins and the consequent first transition from a coinless barter society to a monetary one (Green 20002: 219). Also French, from the Normans’ rule onwards, and, to a lesser extent in this specific field, the Scandinavian languages and German contributed to its growth. Once the main stages of English monetary history have been outlined, the paper will offer a lexical and semantic analysis of some meaningful key words, selected from A Thesaurus of Old English (par. 15.01.04 Coinage, money). They will be investigated in both their literal and metaphorical meanings and contexts. Studying words and their related changes is the equivalent of studying the real situations where they are employed and the reasons for their evolution. The present analysis aims at emphasising the constant interaction between different external (historical, social, cultural) and internal (linguistic) facts, which has always characterised the English language. The result is a layered and mixed vocabulary in which perfectly merged Latin and Germanic elements coexist and make the language dynamic and most suitable for adopting, adapting and creating words. The following paper illustrates some partial results of a wider research project and focuses on words for money going back to Old English.

In this paper I intend to discuss some of the theoretical and practical implications of the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in the tertiary level of the Italian education system, with specific reference to the teaching of English for business and economics. In doing so, I intend to describe an approach, or more accurately a series of guidelines which I argue are essential to effective teaching in this specific learning context. I agree with Turner that specialist language teaching needs to have language as its centrality, “especially in written form” (Turner 2004: 95) and that texts need to be intellectually challenging. Consequently, the considerations in the paper refer exclusively to the use of texts in the ESP classroom.

In traduzione la creatività può essere descritta come un tipo di attività di problem-solving applicato a problemi di carattere solitamente aperto, scandita in quattro momenti ciclici: preparazione (fase conscia di comprensione e analisi del testo), incubazione (fase inconscia di riorganizzazione delle idee), illuminazione (elaborazione di possibili soluzioni) e valutazione (scelta della soluzione traduttiva più idonea). Tra le principali abilità cognitive implicate nel processo creativo troviamo il pensiero divergente e l’abilità di produrre in breve tempo numerosi pensieri differenti e associazioni di idee in relazione a un singolo problema dato (‘fluidità di pensiero’). In questa sede si suggerisce che, per favorire lo sviluppo di abilità creative negli studenti di traduzione, la didattica della traduzione dovrebbe mettere in evidenza le fasi del processo creativo e offrire metodi e strumenti in grado di guidare il traduttore verso la risoluzione del problema. In particolare si suggerisce come metodo primario di lavoro la ricerca di ‘isole di stabilità’, intese come categorie astratte derivanti dai principali elementi testuali riscontrati nell’analisi del testo di partenza. L’identificazione di isole di stabilità tramite processi di astrazione, che completa la fase di preparazione, sposta l’attenzione dalla parola a categorie linguistiche-culturali (quali antonimia, specifiche aree semantiche o pragmatiche, figure retoriche). Così facendo, fornisce nuovi elementi che da un lato favoriscono il pensiero divergente e dall’altro creano dei punti di riferimento per le fasi di illuminazione e di valutazione. Infine, fungendo da ponte tra il testo di partenza e quello di arrivo, le isole di stabilità rappresentano un momento di mediazione tra fedeltà al testo di partenza e libertà nella traduzione, elementi su cui viene spesso basato il giudizio esterno.

This paper aims to analyse the phenomenon of synonymy from a corpusbased perspective. Synonymy has been the object of research of many linguists (Cruse 1986; Lyons 1981, 1995; Carter 1998; Pearson 1998; Biber, Conrad, Reppen 1998; Partington 1998; Tognini Bonelli 2001) and many of them agree on the need to consider selection restrictions to identify semantic incompatibilities between apparently synonymous words. In this paper the investigation of synonymy is pursued by studying the behaviour of four adjectives, ‘set’, ‘situated’, ‘located’ and ‘placed’, in the English language of tourism. The data used for analysis are taken from a corpus made up of British Farmhouse Holiday websites. Collocates of the four node words have been identifi ed and grouped into four semantic fi elds that have been labelled General Location, Specific Location, Measured Location and Convenient Location. The semantic fields identifi ed for each collocational profile have been compared and contrasted in order to detect similarities and differences of usage. The results will show that although these four words are apparently synonymous and are reported as such by some monolingual dictionaries, their patterns of association reveal some differences in usage which act as constraints in the substitutability process. A corpus approach to synonymy may have interesting pedagogical implications in that it guides students to understand the importance of considering typical phraseological patterns and contextual relations in the identifi cation of the meaning and usage of words.

This paper aims to analyse the shift in the rhetorical style of the Financial Times’ (FT) editorial section, which, we intend to argue, is developing a more authoritarian and monologic rhetorical style. By monologic we intend communication which focuses on the communicator’s message and not on the audience’s needs. In monologic communication audience feedback is precluded or not wanted. Monological communicators strive to impose their ideas and truths on others, “they have the superior attitude that they must coerce people to yield to what they believe others ought to know” (Johannsen 1996: 69). We intend to analyse the editorial’s use of specific lexico-grammatical features to support our claim and in conclusion to examine certain socio-rhetorical aspects of the discourse in order to propose reasons why this rhetorical shift may be happening. Editorials, sometimes called leaders or opinion sections, are typified by a number of similarities. They are anonymous and typically composed by more than one writer and being unattributable to an individual, become the recognisable voice of the institution. However, they vary in the rhetorical styles and textual strategies they employ in order to establish this distinctive voice. One way in which the FT editorial has established its distinctive voice or personality is by displaying a high level of domain-specific knowledge. We aim to analyse how the FT is able to adopt certain positions in relation to situations and events and to “advance knowledge claims and seek consensus for the claims postulated” (Cortese and Riley 2002: 23). The editorial voice is institutional rather than personal and functions of the voice are economic and political, having to do with the newspaper’s place in the industrial and political arenas of contemporary society.

The chapter investigates ideology in historical foreign policy making discourse using the appraisal framework, and shows how the theory can contribute to raising awareness of potentially problematic aspects of intercultural communication. A qualitative and quantitative appraisal analysis for attitude is conducted on a corpus of British foreign policy documents from the 1950s and 1960s. The documents are mainly internal diplomatic correspondence and reports and relate to the Persian oil crisis and the independence of Kuwait. Analysis for explicit and implicit attitude (authorial and attributed affect, judgement and appreciation, negative and positive) showed the frequency of each type of attitude, both authorial and attributed, and how the British foreign service officials construe themselves and their Persian and Arab interlocutors. The attitudinal profiles which emerge for each group in the British camp conform to cultural / national / racial stereotypes typical of the colonial era which is in transition at the time in question.