Giuliana DIANI - personale UniMoRe

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Giuliana DIANI

Professore Associato
Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali

Pubblicazioni

2023 - Authorial stance and identity building in weblogs by law scholars and scientists [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana; Freddi, Maria
abstract

The paper examines comparatively how law and science bloggers construct their identity while communicating with their disciplinary community. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005a, 2005b) analysis of stance in academic genres, a quantitative and qualitative study is presented based on a small comparable corpus of blog posts written by law scholars and scientists. The study combines corpus methodology with a discourse analytic approach and identifies linguistic patterns of self-mention and authorial stance. The analysis shows that law blogs focus on the technical contents (revealed by the lower frequency of I/me in law compared to science), while science blogs mark subjective assessment explicitly and through a variety of attitudinal verbs. These results point to a more personal style of blogs revolving around the scientist-blogger and his audience vs. a more impersonal style of law blogs where the focus is the ideational content of the court decision, the reasoning and legal argumentation.

2023 - Disseminating legal information on online law forums in English and Italian [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The advent of the Internet has had a significant impact on the transfer of specialised knowledge from experts to non-experts. Over the years, the way in which digital tools such as blogs, forums and websites have been conveying information has had a strong impact on people’s understanding of specialised knowledge: popularisation thus functions as a tool for the “empowerment” of the lay people (Bondi et al., 2019, p. 2). The focus of the present paper is on legal knowledge communication from expert to non-expert online from a cross-cultural perspective. The aim is to investigate the linguistic-discursive strategies deployed by English and Italian law professionals providing legal advice to lay people on online law forums. The contribution of online law forums to legal knowledge dissemination has received scholarly attention in English. Relevant research across languages is still lacking. This paper attempts to help fill this gap, by illustrating and comparing the ways legal information is given on the UK LegalExpert and Italian La Legge per Tutti forums. Adopting a discourse analytical approach, the analysis shows that both British and Italian legal experts give advice using a variety of strategies, ranging from impersonal explanatory to interpersonal and communicative practices. The paper attempts to provide further insights into effective computer-mediated legal discourse for legal professionals and language scholars alike.

2023 - On the metadiscursive dimension of travel blog posts: a cross-linguistic analysis [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English and Italian travel blog posts from a cross-linguistic perspective. Travel blogs pertain to what Dann (1996, p. 143) calls the “on-trip stage” of the tourist cycle: they are web-based travel diary-like accounts written and shared by travellers while they are still on the road and made freely available online (Cappelli, 2006; Dann & Liebman Parrinello, 2007). The assumption in this study is that the personal, ‘diary-like’ nature of travel blog posts makes them ideal territory for an analysis of interpersonal devices. The overall findings reveal that both Anglo-American and Italian travel bloggers place great emphasis on the manifestation of their identity, to establish and demonstrate their credibility for future travellers who will use information from what they consider credible blog posts thanks to their spontaneous writing. The results of the analysis highlight that comparable subjectivity characterises both travel blog corpora. In their subjective narrations, the domains of experience that both Anglo-American and Italian travellers most frequently focus upon include physical entities concerning the attractions visited. Details are attested in the texts as recurrently employed in evaluative expressions, frequently in conjunction with evaluative adjectives. Evaluation emerges as one of the key features of this web-based genre. Emphasis is also placed on readership. Readers – potential tourist/travellers – are very closely engaged by means of second-person pronouns that involve them in the discourse. The strategy of addressing them directly foregrounds the highly dialogic and reader-oriented nature of the travel blog posts analysed, whose main purpose is to involve their readership and create a rhetorical effect of closeness and involvement. These results may be a source for cross-cultural comparison of the language of online tourism advertising (e.g., travel agency websites, online travel companies) where suggestions and recommendations are likewise given.

2023 - Research article abstracts in English and Italian: Generic and cross-linguistic variation over the last 20 years [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The paper examines comparatively and diachronically the generic structure of research article abstracts written in English for international scientific journals and abstracts written in Italian and published in Italian journals in the field of linguistics, with the aim of exploring generic and cross-linguistic variation over the last 20 years. The data consist of two small corpora of English and Italian linguistics research article abstracts spaced at ten-year intervals, namely 1997, 2007 and 2017. The analysis shows that the generic structure and rhetorical organisation of abstracts written in Italian conforms to the international conventions based on the norms of the English academic discourse community. However, they are rhetorically less complex than English abstracts. Diachronic variation has also been observed in the frequency and distribution of every single move across the two language corpora over the decades.

2023 - Stance features in legal blogging [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The paper explores how law bloggers use stance resources to position themselves within the legal community. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005a, 2005b) analysis of stance, a quantitative and qualitative analysis is presented based on a small corpus of blog posts written by law scholars commenting on legal cases relating to US and UK court decisions. The study combines corpus methodology with a discourse analytic approach and identifies stance features marking bloggers’ presence in relation to their arguments and audience. The analysis shows that law bloggers prefer to downplay their commitment to the positions advanced in the posts and convey their authorial stance through boosters and attitude markers, rather than self-mention. This aspect appears in contrast to the distinctive feature generally associated with blogs, i.e. individualistic self-expression. These findings may contribute to a better understanding of the legal practices in web-mediated communication.

2022 - Citation practices in spoken academic English: A case study of student oral presentations [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The paper focuses on a spoken academic genre, the university student’s oral presentation, in which one or more undergraduate or graduate students discuss a research project or a scholarly writing in front of their class as part of their lecture courses. The study is based on oral presentations by native English speaking university students taken from the American database of academic speech, the MICASE corpus (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, Simpson et al. 1999) in the soft domain, namely humanities and social sciences. The study centres on a corpus-based analysis of that-complement clauses as reporting clauses used by native English speaking university students in their oral presentations, which project either the author’s ideas as a source presented by the student or those of the student across the two disciplinary areas. The analysis shows that there is a considerable use of that-complement clauses as reporting clauses in contexts where the student’s position is at issue. The study may offer some implications for the teaching of referencing skills in EAP speaking courses and raise students’ awareness about the importance of discussing sources properly by avoiding plagiarism and making their voice heard clearly throughout their oral presentations.

2022 - Managing discussions in law blogs: from post to comments [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The paper explores “the dialogic action game”, which takes place in law blogs through sequences of posts by law professor blogger and comments by readers, who may be either academics or an interested, non-academic public. The corpus used for this study is taken from a legal blog website: the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Association (UKCLA). The aim is to look at how law professor bloggers interact with readers in their blogs and at how participants manage the debate. By combining corpus methodology with a discourse analytic approach, the overall findings show that the law blog post encourages participants to contribute with different kinds of comments, ranging from agreement to disagreement either with the post or with other comments. The analysis has also highlighted distinctive linguistic features of posts and comments. By addressing the interests of different types of audiences who participate in discussions, law blogs testify the important role they play in the practice of law, as they build a kind of bridge between legal academics and legal practitioners.

2022 - “Hello, my name is Coronavirus”: Popularizing COVID-19 for children and teenagers [Articolo su rivista]
Denti, Olga; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the popularization strategies adopted in texts destined for children and teenagers which deal with COVID-19. It is well documented that the age and the cognitive profile of the target reader have a strong bearing on the structure and nature of a text (Bruti this volume) and that popularization strategies are adjusted in different ways (Turnbull 2015). As Kolucki and Lemish (2011) emphasize, there is a need for communication with children in a way that is age-appropriate and suitable to their needs and interests. Following this research strand, in this paper we analyze the popularization strategies associated with the explanation of coronavirus in relation to the age of the addressee. To this purpose we focus on English booklets and websites dealing with COVID-19 which address two different age groups, children and teenagers. Attention is paid to examples that highlight popularization strategies on the basis of their verbal and visual elements. The basic methodological framework of this study is discourse analysis, with reliance on notions taken from multimodality (Bateman 2014; Kress – van Leeuwen 2020). This provides instruments suitable for identifying cases where the visual mode interacts with the verbal mode to support popularization strategies.

2021 - Disseminating knowledge: the effects of digitalised academic discourse on language, genre and identity [Articolo su rivista]
Lorés, Rosa; Diani, G.
abstract

In this introduction to the special issue Disseminating knowledge: The effects of digitalised academic discourse in language, genre and identity, the authors discuss the impact that digital technologies and the Web have had on academia. They show how this attests to interrelations between new digital platforms of knowledge creation and dissemination and their use within discourse communities as elements of innovation and change in the shaping and reshaping of existing academic practices. The introduction also discusses the various methodological approaches that have been adopted with a view to investigating digital academic discourse. Exploring some current academic discoursal practices and their specific textual manifestations in the form of digitally-mediated genres, the authors highlight the complexities of the study of digital academic communication.

2021 - Popularizing scientific knowledge for children: a multimodal perspective [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The chapter presents an exploratory study designed to map the contribution of educational hypermedia resources that popularize and disseminate specialized knowledge for children. It examines the text-image relations on the ‘Weather and Climate’ web page of the NASA’s Climate Kids website and considers its potential to popularize science for children. The web page under investigation is approached taking into account Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design (2020) and Unsworth’s (2006) categorization of logico-semantic image-text relations. The study provides insights into how a scientific organization like NASA speaks to children by blending verbal and visual modes to give them real examples of scientific evidence of the changes happening on the planet.

2021 - ‘In this post, I argue that…’: constructing argumentative discourse in scholarly law blog posts [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This study is based on the analysis of scholarly law blog posts written by British and American law professors commenting on legal cases relating to US and UK court decisions. The aim is to investigate how law professor bloggers construct their argumentative discourse while communicating with their scholarly legal community. The analysis reveals interesting argumentative strategies and language features which shed light on the argumentative dimension of the genre under examination. More specifically, it emerges that reporting a judge’s or a court’s decision on legal cases is a point of departure for the blogger’s development of his/her argumentative discourse. The overall findings show that bloggers are responding to individual purpose when they engage in the discourse of scholarly legal blogging: while offering personal opinion on legal cases, they try to introduce context of knowledge discussion within the discipline.

2020 - Scientific websites for children: nurturing children’s scientific literacy through the conflation of multiple semiotic resources [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, G.; Sezzi, A.
abstract

Nowadays, knowledge dissemination among children is no longer limited to the classroom and course or information books. It also includes websites explicitly addressed to youngsters who have a different stage of cognitive development and background knowledge compared to adults. However, they are also the first to live in today’s multimodal hypertext environment and have a multimodal and multimedial communicative competence. In web-based educational hypermedia, education and entertainment often converge, relying on different semiotic resources. In point of fact, the term ‘edutainment’ is frequently used to describe such a combination. Edutainment websites are also one of the main accesses to science for children. In particular, explanations of scientific phenomena are frequently intertwined with different kinds of visual material, partly evoking science books. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the verbal-visual interplay in three scientific websites designed for children in English, whose express aim is to popularize scientific knowledge.

2020 - “Health for Kids". Multimodal resources for popularising health knowledge on websites for children [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the ways in which verbal as well as visual elements are exploited in the explanation of health concepts on two websites expressly designed for children aged between 4 and 12, whose express aim is to popularise health knowledge. The two websites under investigation are approached taking into account multimodality. This provides instruments suitable for identifying cases where the visual mode interacts with the verbal mode to support popularisation. The analysis shows how the verbal mode exploits the visual mode to render information more accessible to children and contribute to their understanding. Through ‘human-like characters’, the images relate to real-life experience. They enhance the information transmitted and complete it with realistic details.

2019 - Citation practices and ELF writing: a comparison between Italian- and English-speaking academics publishing in English [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Citation practices have become a popular area of research in written academic discourse. Much attention has been devoted to this issue from a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural/cross-linguistic perspective. A related area of research that has received scholarly attention is the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in academic texts written by non-native English-speaking writers from different linguistic/cultural backgrounds. The present paper sets out to contribute to this research field, focusing on a small corpus of final drafts of unpublished research papers written in English as a Lingua Franca by Italian academics, taken from the SciELF corpus (created at the University of Helsinki, Finland). This corpus is contrasted with a corpus of published articles written by native English-speaking academics. The aim of this investigation is to study whether there are differences in citation practices between Italian academics’ articles and their Anglophone colleagues’ counterparts. The methodology adopted for this study combines a discourse and a corpus perspective. The comparison between ELF and native English citation forms points to similar tendencies rather than highly conspicuous differences.

2019 - English and Italian land contracts: a cross-linguistic analysis [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Legal language has attracted increasing scholarly interest over the last three decades, and the importance of this field is constantly growing. The present chapter examines the textual and linguistic features of a type of legal text, contracts, and in particular land contracts, from a cross-linguistic perspective (English and Italian). Detailed consideration of the form and language of land contracts shows that they exhibit remarkable similarities in the two languages examined, but also differences in the handling of major linguistic strategies such as relativization, nominalization, binomials, or the resources employed to express deontic modality.

2019 - Exploring health literacy: Web-based genres in disseminating specialized knowledge to caregivers. The case of paediatric neurological disorders [Articolo su rivista]
Cavalieri, Silvia; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the discursive practices used in web-based informative materials in the specific context of a chronic disease, i.e. neurological disorders resulting in epilepsy, for liaising with caregivers of paediatric patients. The study centres on a corpus of webpages gathered from the websites of the major foundations dealing with paediatric neurological syndromes. From a methodological perspective, the study makes recourse to existing studies on the discursive practices that in the literature on knowledge dissemination are identified as being used to facilitate the layman’s access to specialized scientific knowledge. The overall results show that knowledge dissemination strategies used in the webpages under investigation offer cognitive tools to parents as caregivers in order to make them informed about their children’s disease. These webpages enhance caregiver health literacy and achieve the goal of caregiver empowerment, giving her/his greater control over decisions affecting her/his child’s health.

2019 - Metadiscourse in web-mediated health communication [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper investigates web-based health communication used for liaising with caregivers of paediatric patients in the specific context of a chronic disease, i.e. neurological disorders resulting in epilepsy. The study focuses on webpages created by parents whose children suffered neurological diseases and written in collaboration with medical experts. The aim of this paper is to explore how the writers of these webpages establish a relationship with their readers by means of metadiscursive devices. The overall findings reveal that writers place more emphasis on the readership than on the manifestation of their identity, showing a participative, dialogic and inclusive way of exchanging specialized information.

2019 - The EU for Children: A Case of Web-mediated Knowledge Dissemination [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The paper examines the communication of institutional information about the European Union focussing on how said information is organised and re-contextualised in order for it to be both comprehensible and precise and/or appealing to readers with little or no competence in the matter (given their stage of cognitive development and their limited background knowledge). In the light of the impact that knowledge re-contextualisation has on several aspects of communication, which range from lexico-syntactic patterns to different discourse strategies, the paper aims to disclose the discursive resources employed to disseminate the concept of the EU in two official websites, Kids’ Corner and Euro Kids’ Corner, both launched by the Commission in 2011 as part of their educational communication expressly addressed to children.

2018 - Popularization of legal knowledge in English and Italian information books for children [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper looks at popularization of legal knowledge targeted at children. The aim is to analyze the popularization strategies associated with the dissemination of legal knowledge in UK English and Italian information books for children aged between 7 and 14 dealing with legal issues: more specifically, the emphasis lies onto the concepts of Parliament and Law. Attention is paid to examples that highlight popularization strategies on the basis of the verbal elements characterizing them. The basic methodological framework of this comparative case study is discourse analysis, with occasional reliance on notions taken from multimodality. This provides instruments suitable for identifying cases where the visual mode interacts with the verbal mode to support popularization strategies. Cross-linguistic analysis suggests variation in the use of popularization strategies adopted by English and Italian writers to communicate and recontextualize legal knowledge to children within information books for them.

2018 - RHETORICAL VARIATION IN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN LAW RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS: A CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS [Capitolo/Saggio]
Cavalieri, Silvia; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The study of academic discourse has become an area of great interest over the last two decades, especially from a genre perspective (e.g. Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 1993, 2004). Research in the field has mainly focused on highly conventionalised written academic genres, such as research articles, abstracts, and textbooks, often combining linguistic and rhetorical analysis. Although not as widely studied as the research article itself or the textbook, the abstract has drawn the attention of a number of genre researchers (Salager-Meyer 1990; Bhatia 1993; Kaplan et al. 1994; Santos 1996; Bondi 1997, 2001; Hyland 2000; Martín-Martín 2003; Dahl 2004; Lorés-Sanz 2004, 2009; Samraj 2005; Pho 2008; Bondi and Cavalieri 2012; Bondi and Lorés-Sanz 2014). Genre-based studies on research article (RA) abstracts have received quite a lot of scholarly attention in English (e.g. Graetz 1985; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Santos 1996; Hyland 2000; Lorés-Sanz 2004; Cross and Oppenheim 2006; Swales and Feak 2009), across different disciplinary fields (Harvey and Horsella 1988; Salager-Meyer 1990; Tibbo 1992; Lindeberg 1996; Anderson and Maclean 1997; Hartley and Benjamin 1998; Samraj 2005; Busch-Lauer 2014; Cavalieri 2014), and across cultures. There are studies comparing English with Spanish (Martín-Martín 2003, 2005; Lorés-Sanz 2009), French (Crosnier 1993; Van Bonn and Swales 2007; Alonso-Almeida 2014; Hatzitheodorou 2014), Portuguese (Johns 1992), German (Busch-Lauer 1995), Swedish (Melander et al. 1997), and Arabic (Alharbi and Swales 2011). One notable exception to date is lack of attention to abstracts written in Italian. The context of this work is provided by a previous study (Diani 2014) which looked at the rhetorical structure of English and Italian RA abstracts in the field of linguistics. The aim of the present study is to extend previous observations to the field of law, with the intent of investigating the rhetorical preferences that characterize the members of the international and Italian scientific communities in this disciplinary field. Within this field, extensive research has been conducted on the analysis of non-academic texts (e.g. Bhatia 1993, 2008; Gotti and Williams 2010; Bhatia et al. 2012). To the best of our knowledge, however, little attention has been paid to the analysis of academic legal texts such as RAs (Feak et al. 2000; Tessuto 2008; Peacock 2011; Sala 2012, 2014; Tessuto 2015), and RA abstracts in particular: in fact, only few studies are known to us (Frey and Kaplan 2010; Tessuto 2012; Hatzitheodorou 2014; Sala 2014; Cavalieri and Preite forthcoming). This paper seeks to fill the gap by providing insights into variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realisations of the rhetorical moves characterizing the abstract genre in the discipline of criminal law.

2017 - Criticism and politeness strategies in academic review discourse: a contrastive (English-Italian) corpus-based analysis [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this paper explores the mitigation strategies used to soften criticism in English and Italian book review articles in the disciplinary field of linguistics. Most corpus-based analyses on academic criticism have focused on the use and function of politeness strategies in English academic review genres, mainly book reviews. Recently, an increasing number of studies on academic book reviews have examined the issue from a cross-cultural perspective. This study attempts to contribute to the area of cross-cultural research on reviewing practices by exploring how criticisms are managed in a somewhat neglected review genre in academic discourse studies – the book review article. Criticisms will be identified on the basis of their lexico-grammatical features and further categorized into “direct” and “mitigated” (Itakura & Tsui 2011, 1369). The mitigation strategies identified in both language corpora mainly involve the use of sequences of speech acts such as praise-criticism, criticism-praise, criticism-suggestion, praise-suggestion, and hedging. However, their distributions reveal differences in the two languages. While praise is prominently used in both English and Italian book review articles, Italian-speaking linguistics reviewers employ a lower proportion of hedges than their English-speaking colleagues and are more likely to opt for suggestions as a form of indirect criticism. The results demonstrate that linguistics reviewers writing in English and Italian deploy a considerable range of linguistic devices when expressing mitigated criticism of peers. Their use and distribution are discussed in relation to national/cultural writing conventions, but also differences between “large” and “small” disciplinary cultures (Holliday 1999). Some implications for EAP learners and practitioners are also considered.

2017 - Disseminating the Florentine Cultural Heritage through Travel Blogs [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The chapter explores how the image of Florence is represented by American travel bloggers. The study combines corpus and discourse-analytic perspectives with the aim of investigating the cultural-specific aspects that represent the Florentine cultural heritage to American travellers through an analysis of the lexis employed to construct and transmit it. The analysis, based on a pilot study of 55 travel blogs, shows that art and gastronomy are the domains of experience that American travellers mostly focus upon in their subjective narrations about Florence, and references to such domains are typically found in recurrently employed evaluative expressions. The study indicates that evaluation is one of the key features used to represent Florence, by which American tourists not only express their comments about the city, but also point out what is potentially desirable for other visitors.

2017 - On the language of Florence art museum websites: the Italian texts of the "virtual tour" [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper investigates the language of the Italian explanatory texts accompanying the artworks displayed on a virtual tour offered by Florence art museum websites. As shown by applied linguistics research conducted over the past twenty years, great attention has been paid to the way museums communicate with their users through a range of genres such as brochures, catalogues, exhibition press releases and announcements, wall captions. Using a corpus and discourse perspective, this study aims at investigating the main linguistic features which are used to disseminate the Florentine cultural heritage through the texts of the virtual tour in museum websites that still remain an under-explored area of linguistic inquiry. Some implications can be drawn from this study for research on the lexis of Italian and other languages referring to Italian cultural heritage.

2017 - The appeal of travel blogs: the image of Italy through American eyes [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Tourism discourse has been the centre of increasing scholarly interest over the last two decades (e.g. Dann 1996; Cappelli 2006; Gotti 2006; Nigro 2006; Antelmi et al. 2007; De Stasio & Palusci 2007; Francesconi 2007, 2014; Fodde & van den Abbeele 2012; Maci 2013). In this chapter I focus on a genre – the travel blog – that has only recently drawn the attention of researchers in applied linguistics research (Gerbig and Shek 2007; Dann and Liebman Parrinello 2007; Cappelli 2008, 2013a; Gerbig 2008; Orlando 2009; Francesconi 2012; Cacchiani 2014; D’Egidio 2014; Denti 2015; Goethals 2015). Travel blogs pertain to what Dann (1996: 143) calls the “on-trip stage” of the tourist cycle: they are web-based travel diary-like accounts written and shared by travellers while they are still on the road and made freely available online (Cappelli 2006; Dann and Liebman Parrinello 2007). Next to more ‘traditional’ written genres such as guidebooks, travel reviews, brochures and institutional web genres (e.g. Castello 2002; Vestito 2006; Francesconi 2007; Santulli 2011; Cappelli 2013b), travel blogs have become increasingly popular both as a form of “digital story-telling” (Pudliner 2007: 46) about travellers’ experiences, and as a source of information on selected places, providing a market potential in the tourism industry (Pan et al. 2007; Akehurst 2009).The present chapter intends to contribute to this line of research by exploring how the image of Italy is represented by American travel bloggers. The focus is that of identifying the cultural-specific aspects that better represent the Italianità to American travellers through an analysis of the lexis that is employed to construct and transmit Italian culture.

2015 - English for Academic Purposes: Approaches and Implications [Curatela]
Thompson, Paul; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has developed rapidly in the past 20 years to become a major force in English language teaching and research. In the EAP domain the notions of corpus and genre have played a central role, with important repercussions on teaching approaches. These notions reflect the two traditions of investigating academic English: ‘genre analysis’ and ‘corpus linguistics’. Genre analysis focuses on the features and structures of textual organization, while corpus linguistics tends to focus on concrete linguistic data and on quantitative data analysis along with its potential for studies of register. In recent years researchers have emphasized the need to combine the two approaches as a way that offers possibilities for enriched analysis (Gledhill 2000; Thompson 2000; Bondi 2001; Henry & Roseberry 2001; Upton & Connor 2001; Swales 2002; Flowerdew 2005; Charles 2007). Integration of genre analysis and corpus-based investigations has been called for in recent EAP publications (e.g. Baker 2006; Biber et al. 2007; Ädel and Reppen 2008; Charles, Pecorari and Hunston 2009; Gotti and Giannoni 2014). This book illustrates the many interlocking concerns that motivate research on EAP and highlights how corpus linguistics and genre analysis can work as complementary approaches. Attention to disciplinary/cultural differences and linguistic features which occur within specific disciplines is a common component in research on EAP, and this is also reflected in the chapters of this book. This book has clear pedagogical implications. The research reported here is driven not just by the desire to investigate features of EAP, but more importantly by the need to translate those discoveries into classroom applications. The volume offers research that can be used and built upon by academics and practising teachers.

2015 - Exploring knowledge dissemination strategies in English and Italian newspaper articles for children: a focus on legal issues [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The proliferation of specialised knowledge inevitably leads to a growing need for dissemination among non-experts or experts in other fields. The speed of knowledge development requires more efficient communicative tools, which should be able to reach an ever-expanding globalised audience. This suggests studying the strategies of disseminating expert knowledge to lay audiences. The case study proposed in this article focuses on addressees at a different stage of cognitive development: children. The aim is to analyse the strategies for successful transfer and effective dissemination of legal concepts in English and Italian online newspaper articles for children aged between 8 and 14. The adoption of cross-linguistic perspective will contribute to identify the main (dis-)similarities in the knowledge dissemination strategies used to promote a better understanding of legal terms and basic legal concepts when translating adult knowledge and expertise into comprehensible knowledge targeted at children.

2015 - I am wild about cabbage: evaluative ‘semantic sequences’ and cross-linguistic (dis)similarities [Articolo su rivista]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The paper investigates the phraseology of evaluation in two comparable corpora of discussions from blogs in Italian and in English. Subjectivity markers are taken as an indication of the significant role that the writer’s ‘self’ plays in the genre, ideal territory for an analysis of the language of evaluation. After considering collocates and grammar patterns of the selected markers, the analysis centres on evaluative ‘semantic sequences’ by aligning typical recurrent surface arrangements with strings of prototypical meaning elements such as ‘entity or process evaluated’, ‘evaluation’ and different ‘sources of evaluation’. Four types of sequences are identified: ‘basic’, ‘framed’, ‘dialogic’ and ‘concessive’. The results attest for substantial semantic similarities over and above lexico-syntactic and inter-linguistic mismatches. Semantic sequences can be shown to be useful tools for cross-linguistic analysis.

2015 - La linguistica dei corpora [Capitolo/Saggio]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Negli ultimi decenni, si è assistito a un vivacissimo dibattito in cui gli studi sulle lingue, oltre a dare il proprio contributo ai settori più tradizionali dell’indagine linguistica, hanno aperto nuovi percorsi di ricerca. La linguistica dei corpora ne è un esempio. L'articolo si propone di collocarne lo sviluppo in un contesto teorico e metodologico, menzionando i risultati più significativi della ricerca raggiunti sia nel contesto scientifico internazionale sia in quello italiano. Partendo dal contributo dei corpora alla ricerca descrittiva (con particolare attenzione al confronto interlinguistico e ai linguaggi specialistici), verranno proposte alcune riflessioni – in prospettiva di educazione linguistica – sull’apporto della linguistica dei corpora alla didattica della lingua in generale (e all’insegnamento/apprendimento del lessico in particolare).

2015 - Politeness [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The notion of linguistic politeness was brought to center-stage with the politeness model proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). However, its definition and the claims for universality have received increased attention since Brown and Levinson proposed their framework (e.g. Hill et al. 1987; Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989; Meier 1995). For the most part, research on linguistic politeness has been carried out in the area of pragmatic and cross-linguistic studies, as evidenced by the publication of numerous books (see e.g. the references in Watts et al. 2005), as well as journal articles. More recently researchers have begun to integrate pragmatic research methods with corpus-based methods in politeness research (e.g. Kohnen 2000; Deutschmann 2003; Jucker et al. 2008). This article aims to take stock of developments in this area. I will review the main directions of recent literature in this field and discuss the suitability of corpus-based methods in relation to research. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this paper will explore the mitigation devices used to soften criticism in Italian and English book review articles. While valuable analyses have already been carried out on the pragmatics of politeness in review genres from a discourse perspective (e.g. Johnson and Yang 1990; Gea Valor 2000–2001; Hyland 2000; Salager-Meyer 2001), corpus-based analyses are still relative rare. From a methodological point of view, the present study adopts a position which shows the need to integrate corpus and discourse perspectives in the analysis of textual data. This allows for an integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, of text and corpus work, as well as of co-text and context analysis.

2015 - Text reflexivity in academic writing: a cross-disciplinary and cross-generic analysis [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The article explores reflexive phraseology across academic genres and disciplines. Employing a corpus-based approach, the study focuses on how metatextual phraseological units vary across academic research articles and book review articles and academic disciplines (business and economics). The study shows that phraseological units can be very helpful signals for the analysis of generic and argumentative structure of academic writing. The findings also demonstrate that convergences and divergences between closely related disciplines and genres help to differentiate different forms of disciplinary discourse.

2015 - Visual communication in applied linguistics conference presentations [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This chapter proposes an analysis of visual communication in academic conference presentations, where the visual mode appears to carry a particularly heavy functional load. Using a large corpus of PowerPoint slides projected during presentations at international applied linguistics conferences, the slides were analyzed to determine their visual typologies and rhetorical structure. The results highlight an array of visual modes (i.e., scriptural, graphical, figurative, numerical), displaying considerable variation in their distribution, while also largely following the traditional structure of written research articles. The study provides insights into how conference presenters blend verbal and visual modes to realize a coherent communicative event.

2014 - Grammar and Institutional Discourse [Voce in Dizionario o Enciclopedia]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Institutional discourse is the specialized discourse used by social actors in various institutional contexts, such as law courts, universities, and public administrations, among others. This type of discourse can, of course, vary widely: it can be written or oral, formal/informal, use various channels (e.g., e-mail,Web site), and exploit various registers and genres. In all these varieties, the discourse is very “managed” in the sense that lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical choices made by speakers and writers are crucial in implementing their goals. The interest in analyzing institutional discourse is evident when we consider the huge amount of scholarly and research work carried out over the past decades (e.g., Sarangi & Roberts, 1999; Thornborrow, 2002; Mayr, 2008). As Roberts (2011, p. 81) puts it: “the study of institutional discourses sheds light on how organizations work, how ‘lay’ people and experts interact and how knowledge and power get constructed and circulate within routines, systems and common-sense practices of work-related settings.” The focus of this entry is to describe the grammatical features of institutional language in both written and spoken mode. More specifically, institutional communication is here analyzed in relation to two contexts: academic and legal. The literature abounds with different definitions of institutional discourse. To our purpose, a brief outline of some seminal definitions is given here with the aim to provide an idea of what is generally assumed in the literature with respect to these concepts, without any attempt at completeness.

2014 - Multivoiced interaction in English and Italian academic review discourse: a cross-cultural analysis [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The study presented in this chapter is based on an analysis of historical book review articles in English and Italian and investigates the way the genre across national academic cultures represents the typical discursive procedures through the activity of the reviewer and of other voices in the texts. The analysis reveals interesting linguistic features which can shed light on the dialogic and argumentative dimension of the genre under examination. As a result of the analysis carried out, it emerges that both English and Italian historical book review articles are characterised by a plurality of textual voices involved in argumentative dialogue with the reviewer – reviewed book author, discourse community, reader. These voices are powerfully active in the interaction and become the reviewer’s partners in a scientific ‘conversation’.

2014 - On English and Italian research article abstracts: genre variation across cultures [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This article compares English and Italian research article (RA) abstracts from linguistics journals in an attempt to investigate whether there is linguistic and rhetorical variation in the abstract genre from a cross-cultural perspective. From this perspective, a comparative dimension of the analysis seems important, one which would allow for the study of genre variation across cultures. While a number of contrastive or comparative studies of abstracts in English and other languages, including the major European languages, particularly Spanish (Valero Garcés & Calle Martínez 1997; Martín- Martín 2005; Lorés Sanz 2006), French (Van Bonn & Swales 2007), Portuguese (Johns 1992), German (Busch-Lauer 1995) and Swedish (Melander, Swales & Fredrickson 1997) have already been carried out, no cross-cultural analyses have been conducted so far between RA abstracts published in English and RA abstracts published in Italian. The results show that the Italian abstracts under investigation largely follow the international conventions based on the norms established by the English-speaking international academic community, i.e. Bhatia’s (1993) model including four rhetorical moves (Purpose, Methods, Results, Conclusion). However, variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realizations of moves. Cross-cultural implications of the genre use are discussed at the close.

2014 - On the phraseological dimension of legal discourse: The case of English and Italian contracts [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Il presente contributo intende avviare una riflessione sull’importanza dell’aspetto fraseologico nel linguaggio giuridico in una prospettiva di confronto italiano e inglese. Come testimoniano le ricerche condotte negli ultimi vent’anni, il linguaggio giuridico è stato al centro di un interesse crescente e il contributo più evidente si è avuto nel campo degli studi sui linguaggi per scopi specifici (LSP). Servendosi degli strumenti di analisi che derivano tanto dalla linguistica dei corpora, quanto dall’analisi del discorso, questo studio si propone di tracciare un profilo fraseologico di un tipo di testo giuridico quale il contratto. L’analisi quantitativa e qualitativa porta a sottolineare come la fraseologia ricorrente possa offrire spunti utili sia per uno studio sulle due lingue a confronto, sia per implicazioni lessicografiche.

2013 - Introduction [Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse] [Breve Introduzione]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The book focuses on aspects of variation and change in language use in spoken and written discourse on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and new methods of utilising small specialized corpora for the description of language variation and change. The sixteen contributions included in this volume represent a variety of diverse views and approaches, but all share the common goal of throwing light on a crucial dimension of discourse: the dialogic interactivity between the spoken and written. Their foci range from papers addressing general issues related to corpus analysis of spoken dialogue to papers focusing on specific cases employing a variety of analytical tools, including qualitative and quantitative analysis of small and large corpora. The volume constitutes a highly valuable tool for applied linguists and discourse analysts as well as for students, instructors and language teachers.

2013 - The construction of academic identity in English and Italian university lectures [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

It is generally acknowledged that academic lectures represent the principal genre of instruction, a crucial means to convey to students the knowledge base of a discipline (Flowerdew 1994; Thompson 1994; Young 1994; Flowerdew/Miller 1997). However, recent research shows that university lectures are more than a genre of knowledge dissemination. They are value-laden discourses in which lecturers not only transfer information to the audience, but they also express their stance towards the topic explained or discussed (Fortanet-Gómez 2004a; Biber 2006) by persuading the audience about the validity of their claims, and at the same time by contributing to the construction of a voice for authorial positioning in the scientific community. Lecturers’ voice or persona (Cherry 1988) is constructed by means of different linguistic devices (e.g. the use of first person pronouns) which help lecturers project an impression of themselves and of how they stand in relation to their knowledge claims, their community, and their students (Benwell/Stokoe 2002; Fortanet-Gómez 2004b; Walsh 2004, 2010; Biber 2006; Crawford Camiciottoli 2007; Salvi 2012). This paper presents the preliminary results of a contrastive analysis of the encodings of identity in university lectures in English and Italian. Using corpus-based methods, the present study attempts to compare the quantitative and qualitative use of first person pronouns used by lecturers to project an authorial identity, which occur in the specific context of English and Italian lectures in the field of economics. Quantitative-qualitative evidence from the corpora in each language is analysed and discussed with special attention for cross-linguistic (dis-) similarities in terms of ‘language systems’ and overall cultural orientation.

2013 - Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse: Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics [Curatela]
Bamford, Julia; Cavalieri, Silvia; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

2012 - CLAVIER 2012: Corpus and Genre in English for Academic Purposes, International Seminar (Modena 12-13 April 2012) [Altro]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Research on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has shown an increasing interest in the developments in corpus linguistics and genre analysis over the last two decades. The major contribution to EAP has come in the description of the specific features of academic discourse. The joint contribution of corpus-based studies and discourse analytical methods can be seen as one of the reasons for the current burgeoning of EAP studies, with important repercussions on didactic approaches. A significant development in this respect is the recent change of focus from EAP teaching to EAP learning. The Seminar focused on such issues in order to provide a better definition of the methods of investigation of academic English, the tools, the approaches, the new perspectives, bringing together two complementary strands of linguistic investigation – corpus analysis and genre analysis. The Seminar described the extent to which the English language and generic resources are creatively exploited in academic discourse, variously responding to or determining new scenarios, with a special interest in technological developments which have radically changed the way knowledge is disseminated across academic communities. This is also the main general objective of the CLAVIER research group (Corpus and Language Variation Research Group), a research centre recently founded by the Universities of Bergamo, Firenze, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Rome “Sapienza”, and Siena, and currently based in Modena. The point of departure is the invaluable contribution of two complementary strands of linguistic investigation – corpus analysis and discourse analysis – to research on language variation in English, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. One of the purposes of the CLAVIER Seminar 2012 was to reinforce national and international cooperation with scholars and research centres that can widen and complement the interest in English academic discourse currently driving research at the centre. The seminar brought together different perspectives on English academic discourse. Plenaries, papers and the round table gave a special insight into the following topics: 1) genre and textual analysis in EAP; 2) corpus analysis in EAP; 3) contrastive EAP rhetoric; 4) pedagogical implications in EAP; 5) English as Lingua Franca in academic settings; 6) translation and terminology in EAP.

2012 - Introduzione [La trasmissione del sapere nelle diverse comunità accademiche: una prospettiva plurilingue] [Prefazione o Postfazione]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

In una società basata sulla conoscenza, e caratterizzata dalla sua rapida proliferazione, la trasmissione del sapere assume un ruolo chiave per lo sviluppo socio-economico e per la crescita culturale delle persone. Come si trasmette un sapere specialistico anche al di là della cerchia degli addetti ai lavori? Cosa vuol dire fare della “divulgazione”? Cosa rende un testo più accessibile anche ai non esperti? Il tema, ampiamente dibattuto ad esempio nella stampa giornalistica, è spesso affrontato in termini di “tradurre in un linguaggio più comprensibile” una conoscenza altrimenti difficilmente condivisa. La comprensibilità è intesa sia come semplificazione linguistico-contenutistica, che come esplicitazione o formulazione secondo le conoscenze dell’interlocutore. Ma cosa vuol dire questo nella pratica concreta della divulgazione? Quali sono le strategie alle quali il divulgatore ricorre al fine di rendere il sapere tecnico e scientifico fruibile per il grande pubblico? Questo volume discute varie forme di divulgazione scientifica nelle diverse comunità accademiche per riflettere sul tema della trasmissione del sapere come mediazione di conoscenza tra i membri esperti della comunità scientifica e il pubblico di non esperti. La riflessione è estesa agli aspetti interlinguistici del discorso divulgativo con l’intento di contribuire ad un approfondimento del rapporto tra trasmissione del sapere e comunità di discorso. La tematica è affrontata in una prospettiva prevalentemente linguistica, secondo linee di ricerca che si fanno sempre più attive anche nel panorama internazionale.

2012 - LINKD 2012 Workshop - Language(s) In Knowledge Dissemination. Modena, 11-13 October 2012. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia [Altro]
Bondi, Marina; Cacchiani, Silvia; Seidenari, Corrado; Sezzi, Annalisa; Sorrentino, Daniela; Diani, Giuliana; Poppi, Franca
abstract

Knowledge Dissemination (KD) has become increasingly important in modern society for the socio-economic and cultural development of citizens. The issue of how experts communicate their specialist knowledge to lay-people has been widely discussed in the press and is often tackled in terms of "translating" otherwise exclusive knowledge into more comprehensible language. Comprehensibility can be seen as a matter of simplification, explicitation or formulation in terms that are suitable to the level of knowledge of the addressee. The issue can also be studied in terms of re-contextualizing knowledge. As the applied linguistics literature on popularising is not extensive, useful indications can come from studies on intercultural communication, when looking at KD as "mediation" of knowledge between members of different communities, each with their peculiar cultural and communicative practices. KD can be seen as an example of "inter-discourse communication" i.e. communication that cuts across the boundaries of discourse communities characterized by different types of knowledge. While the issue of KD has often been studied in relation to sciences that require exclusive expertise - e.g. chemistry or physics, the LINKD workshop would like to consider both "hard" and "soft" sciences. The objective of the workshop is to explore the language processes involved in KD in a theoretical, descriptive and applied perspective. In particular, it aims to provide a clearer definition of the nature of popularizing discourse, by means of an analysis of its strategies across disciplines and languages, also including the discursive construction of professional identity and intercultural communication, a closer lexical investigation of specific domains, the deployment of lexicographic tools and an investigation of the use of visual elements in popularisation. Two complementary strands of linguistic investigation - corpus analysis and genre analysis - will be brought together to ascertain how far KD is actually characterized by intense use of metadiscourse, forms of readers' engagement, systematic use of definitions, reformulation, higher degrees of explicitness, careful use of word-image relationship. The basic strands of analysis concern: i) intralinguistic analysis of the recontextualization process that leads from a specialized texts to its popularization outside the circle of domain-specific experts; ii) multilingual analysis of the internal features of knowledge dissemination, aimed at defining its strategies in different genres, media, domains; iii) thematic exploration of the multiple formats of KD, ranging from introductory readings to scientific reports, travel literature or children's books.

2012 - La trasmissione del sapere nelle diverse comunità accademiche: una prospettiva plurilingue [Curatela]
Diani, Giuliana; Preite, Chiara
abstract

In una società basata sulla conoscenza, e caratterizzata dalla sua rapida proliferazione, la trasmissione del sapere assume un ruolo chiave per lo sviluppo socio-economico e per la crescita culturale delle persone. Come si trasmette un sapere specialistico anche al di là della cerchia degli addetti ai lavori? Cosa vuol dire fare della “divulgazione”? Cosa rende un testo più accessibile anche ai non esperti? Il tema, ampiamente dibattuto ad esempio nella stampa giornalistica, è spesso affrontato in termini di “tradurre in un linguaggio più comprensibile” una conoscenza altrimenti difficilmente condivisa. La comprensibilità è intesa sia come semplificazione linguistico-contenutistica, che come esplicitazione o formulazione secondo le conoscenze dell’interlocutore. Ma cosa vuol dire questo nella pratica concreta della divulgazione? Quali sono le strategie alle quali il divulgatore ricorre al fine di rendere il sapere tecnico e scientifico fruibile per il grande pubblico?Questo volume discute varie forme di divulgazione scientifica nelle diverse comunità accademiche per riflettere sul tema della trasmissione del sapere come mediazione di conoscenza tra i membri esperti della comunità scientifica e il pubblico di non esperti. La riflessione è estesa agli aspetti interlinguistici del discorso divulgativo con l’intento di contribuire ad un approfondimento del rapporto tra trasmissione del sapere e comunità di discorso. La tematica è affrontata in una prospettiva prevalentemente linguistica, secondo linee di ricerca che si fanno sempre più attive anche nel panorama internazionale.

2012 - Reviewing academic research in the disciplines: insights into the book review article in English [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Reviewing academic research plays a significant role in scholarship, supporting both the manufacture of knowledge and the social cohesiveness of disciplinary communities. It could be argued that among all the activities of the academy what academics mainly do is evaluate. Academics are constantly comparing, contrasting, evaluating, and predicting as routine aspects of their work: it represents the nature of academic discourse itself. This book explores how academics publicly evaluate each others’ work. Focusing on a somewhat neglected review genre in English academic discourse studies – the book review article – this work investigates the main functional and formal features of this genre in a corpus of book review articles from the disciplines of economics, history and linguistics. The work investigates the way reviewers construct disciplinary identity through display of their evaluative commentary, the forms of argumentation they employ, and how they represent themselves and their reviewed authors in their texts. In doing so, it aims as well to establish the consistency and the effects of such disciplinary identity by highlighting differences and similarities in textual behaviour across disciplines.

2012 - Text and corpus work, EAP writing and language learners [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Over the last ten or so years, great interest has been shown in the application of corpus linguistics to language teaching (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Melia eds. 1997, 2000; Wichmann, Fligelstone, McEnery, Knowles eds. 1997; Partington 1998; Burnard, McEnery eds. 2000; Aston 2001; Ghadessy, Henry, Roseberry eds. 2001; Kettemann, Marko eds. 2002; Tan ed. 2002; Aston, Bernardini, Stewart eds. 2004; Sinclair ed. 2004; Gavioli 2005; Aijmer ed. 2009). The major contribution of corpus linguistics has been in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The possibility to gather and analyze large quantities of data has made it possible to study the characteristics of different discourse domains and to investigate phenomena of variation. Thanks to the integration of corpus-based approaches with discourse analytical methods, EAP studies have been able to alternate between large-scale descriptions and investigations of more specific aspects (e.g. the language of abstracts in economic research articles). The joint contribution of corpus-based studies and discourse analytical methods can be seen as one of the reasons for the current burgeoning of EAP studies, with important repercussions on “task-based” didactic approaches. A significant development in this respect is the recent change of focus from EAP teaching to EAP learning. The increased familiarity of students with electronic tools for analysis can contribute to the development of their language awareness and can favour learner autonomy. In particular, the available studies on the use of corpora by students (with the aim of elaborating, testing and discussing hypotheses) represent one of the major developments in the field of EAP research. This chapter discusses the relevance of corpus work for learners of English as a foreign language. I describe the work of a group of Italian undergraduate students performing corpus analysis for the development of EAP writing skills. The examples of learners’ work discussed in the chapter provide a pretty clear idea about how students interact with concordance material from EAP text corpora to grasp meanings and issues related to the EAP world of knowledge and how they manipulate it to produce novel texts.

2011 - Identità culturali e identità disciplinari nel discorso accademico storico italiano e inglese: prospettive di analisi cross-linguistica [Capitolo/Saggio]
Cacchiani, Silvia; Diani, Giuliana; Palumbo, Giuseppe
abstract

Il presente contributo intende indagare la costruzione del testo e del discorso in prospettiva cross-culturale con riferimento all’espressione del punto di vista. Lo studio si basa sull’analisi di corpora di discorso accademico privilegiando il discorso storico e, in particolare, book review articles tratti da riviste di storia italiane e inglesi. Obiettivo principale è quello di studiare mezzi coesivi, parole ed elementi fraseologici che caratterizzano non solo l’oggetto del discorso, ma anche e soprattutto gli stili argomentativi e le premesse epistemologiche nelle culture oggetto del confronto, al fine di mettere in luce aspetti che potrebbero risultare problematici, non solo ai fini della comprensione di un testo accademico in Inglese L2, ma anche ai fini della scrittura accademica in Inglese L2. Verranno illustrati i risultati di prospettive e metodologie di analisi diverse la cui integrazione può contribuire a mettere in luce come book review articles inglesi ed italiani realizzino diversi meccanismi di costruzione dell’identità culturale e dell’identità disciplinare. In particolare, un primo approccio prevede l’analisi del punto di vista attraverso gli strumenti dell’analisi dei generi e del discorso e della linguistica dei corpora (tramite l’utilizzo di software quali WordSmith Tools 1998). Particolare attenzione in questa fase verrà dedicata all’analisi di collocazioni (Sinclair 1990), fraseologia e preferenza semantica (Sinclair 1996), ovvero la tendenza della parola a co-occorrere con altre parole e con parole che appartengono ad uno specifico campo semantico. Secondo elemento di riflessione saranno densità lessicale e lunghezza del periodo nei generi e lingue in esame, investigate tramite l’applicazione di misure lessicometriche. A un tale metodo di indagine, privilegiato in passato da studi sulla complessità/marcatezza del testo finalizzati alla preparazione di materiali didattici, verrà affiancata l’analisi contrastiva dei meccanismi coesivi e, in particolare, dei meccanismi di ipotassi e paratassi, analisi più spesso data come complementare allo studio dei meccanismi coesivi in corpora paralleli. Specificamente, questo contributo costituisce un primo tentativo di evidenziare i punti di contatto che si instaurano tra i suddetti approcci al testo, ma si prefigge soprattutto di mettere in luce e sottolineare la possibilità di fornire prospettive complementari su fenomeni correlati all’interno del testo, testimonianza di diverse identità culturali e disciplinari, e discuterne le eventuali implicazioni per lo studio della fraseologia in quanto elemento trasversale alle tre prospettive, ai fini della comprensione e scrittura di un testo espressione del genere accademico in Inglese L2.

2011 - Interpersonal metadiscourse in English and Italian university lectures: a cross-cultural analysis of person markers [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The paper contrastively analyses person markers (i.e. first person pronouns) as metadiscursive features in English and Italian university lectures. The findings offer evidence of cross-cultural variation in the use of person markers and the verbs associated with them expressing stance. In particular, the results indicate that the use of 1st person singular pronoun followed by verbs of stance is a common resource used by both Anglo-American and Italian lecturers in their university classroom, although frequency differences emerge from the two language corpora. The contrastive analysis has also yielded significant differences in the range of verbs of stance accompanying the pronouns.

2011 - Tracking Language Change in Specialised and Professional Genres. International conference. Modena: 24-26 November 2011 University of Modena and Reggio Emilia [Altro]
Poppi, Franca; Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana; Cavalieri, Silvia
abstract

The nature of genres has always been defined as both static and dynamic, functioning as discursive action within particular social, historical and cultural contexts but open to individual and collective creativity and innovation. Corpora can be powerful tools in tracking this kind of change, as clearly shown by a well-established tradition in historical linguistics, where growing interest has been shown in the diachronic analysis of specialized genres. Elements of change, however, can also be seen at work in contemporary discourse. As a consequence, there is an increasing need for diachronic approaches that may help map changes brought about for example by new technologies or globalization. Nowadays, with the recession of the traditional constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements brought about by globalization, new cultural and linguistic interconnections are being established, for example in academic and professional settings. This state of things can account both for the emergence of new ‘globalizing genres’, and for the implementation of a series of adaptations to the existing ones, as possible solutions to guarantee the success and survival of different genres in an era which celebrates the need for a ‘global reach’. The conference intends to focus on such issues in order to provide a better definition of the methods of investigation of language change, the tools, the approaches, the new perspectives, bringing together two complementary strands of linguistic investigation - corpus analysis and genre analysis. The conference purports to describe the extent to which language resources and generic resources are creatively exploited in discourse, variously responding to or determining new socio-cultural scenarios, with a special interest in technological developments which have radically changed the way specialized knowledge is disseminated. In particular, contributions are invited, focusing on textual, intertextual, organizational aspects of genres, as well as on interdiscursivity and other aspects which contextualize genres as reflections of changing disciplinary and professional cultures, investigating how their integrity is negotiated and exploited, in the following domains: Academic Professional Institutional

2010 - CLAVIER 2010: Transferring Knowledge across Disciplines and Academic Communities, International Seminar (Modena, 7-8 June 2010) [Altro]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The interest demonstrated by linguists for forms of knowledge dissemination across academic communities has stimulated a variety of studies in applied linguistics. The role of scientific writing in the social construction of science has contributed to founding numerous historical studies on genres of scientific communication. More recently, a number of studies have combined linguistic and rhetorical analysis and explored variation across disciplines. In a similar way, there has been an attempt to tie textual structures to social and cultural factors which may influence linguistic use, along with increased interest by analysts for knowledge dissemination between experts and non-experts for didactic purposes. The Seminar brought together the latest research of scholars engaged in the analysis of forms of knowledge dissemination across disciplines and academic communities. This is also the main interest of the CLAVIER research group (Corpus and Language Variation Research Group), a research centre recently founded by the Universities of Bergamo, Firenze, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Rome “Sapienza”, and Siena, and currently based in Modena. One of the purposes of the CLAVIER seminar 2012 was to reinforce national and international cooperation with scholars and research centres that can widen and complement the interest in knowledge dissemination from a theoretical, descriptive and applied perspective. The seminar brought together different perspectives on knowledge dissemination across disciplinary communities. Plenaries and papers gave a special insight into the following topics: 1) comparison of academic genres, disciplines and linguistic-cultural contexts; 2) argumentation in academic genres; 3) intercultural communication and academic communities; 4) English as lingua franca in expert/non-expert communication; 5) using corpora as an innovative tool in exploring academic language; 6) implications for language teaching for academic purposes. Plenaries by Ken Hyland (City University of Hong Kong) and Paul Thompson (University of Birmingham). Papers by Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli (Università di Firenze), Vanessa Leonardi (Università di Ferrara), Franca Poppi and Gillian Mansfield (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia / Università di Parma), Micheal Glenn Alessi (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), Giuditta Caliendo (Università di Napoli, Federico II), Julia Bamford (Università di Napoli, L’Orientale), Silvia Cacchiani (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), Davide Simone Giannoni (Università di Bergamo), Maximillian Gold and Claire Wallis (Università di Cagliari), Anthony Baldry and Rosalba Rizzo (Università di Messina), Maria Teresa Musacchio and Giuseppe Palumbo (Università di Padova / Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia) Ágnes Sándor (Xerox Research Centre Europe, France).

2010 - Conveying deontic values in English and Italian contracts: a cross-cultural analysis [Articolo su rivista]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Legal language has been the centre of increasing scholarly interest over the last two decades, and the importance of this field is constantly growing in LSP studies. The present study investigates the deontic values conveyed by legal texts, and in particular by contracts, from a cross-cultural perspective (English and Italian). While valuable analyses have already been carried out on the topic in English legal texts, mainly statutes (Gotti & Dossena eds. 2001), cross-cultural analyses of the issue are still relatively rare in contracts, and often limited to general pragmatic features (Frade 2005). Our interest combines a focus on contrastive rhetoric (Connor 2002, 2004; Mauranen 2001), with an interest in linguistic resources in English and Italian. From this perspective, a comparative dimension of the analysis seems important, one which would allow for the study of linguistic variation across cultures. From a methodological point of view, the study adopts a position which shows the need to integrate corpus and discourse perspectives in the analysis of textual data. This allows for an integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, of text and corpus work, as well as of co-text and context analysis.

2010 - Emphasizers in spoken and written academic discourse. The case of "really" [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The role played by mitigation in academic discourse has been the subject of intense scholarly interest over the last two decades, but interest in the role played by intensifying textual elements expressing evaluation and stance – emphasizers – is a more recent turn. This paper presents a preliminary attempt at capturing the uses of the adverb ‘really’ across spoken and written academic registers. The adverb ‘really’ is examined with an eye to how its frequencies, meanings and uses vary across spoken and written academic discourse. The findings are interpreted in terms of variation across genres and disciplines. A quantitative analysis of this adverb reveals significant distributional trends across both academic genres and disciplines, and a qualitative analysis confirms that these trends are motivated by genre-specific purposes and disciplinary-specific practices, respectively.

2010 - Giornata di Studi "La trasmissione del sapere nelle diverse comunità accademiche: una prospettiva plurilinguistica" (Modena, 9 giugno 2010 - Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia) [Altro]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana; Preite, Chiara
abstract

L’incontro si propone come momento di riflessione sul tema della trasmissione del sapere interna alle diverse comunità scientifico-accademiche attraverso un’indagine plurilingue, che coinvolge alcune delle principali lingue europee (italiano, inglese, tedesco, francese, spagnolo). L’interesse mostrato per le forme di divulgazione scientifica interne alle diverse comunità accademiche da linguisti attenti al contributo di filosofi della scienza, epistemologi, sociologi e storici della scienza ha consentito un grande sviluppo degli studi linguistici teorici e applicati in questo campo di studio. Il ruolo della scrittura scientifica nella costruzione sociale della scienza ha aperto la strada a numerosi studi storici sui generi della comunicazione scientifica. Più recentemente, diversi studi si sono proposti di unire l’analisi linguistica e quella retorica mostrando anche interesse nella variazione tra aree disciplinari. Parallelamente, si assiste anche ad un tentativo di collegare le strutture testuali ai fattori sociali e culturali che possono influenzare l’uso linguistico e ad un maggiore interesse degli analisti per i meccanismi di trasmissione del sapere nella comunicazione fra esperti e non-esperti e nella comunicazione didattica. L’interesse da parte di molti ricercatori si è incentrato anche sulle ricerche nel campo della linguistica dei corpora, enfatizzando il potenziale di una small corpus linguistics per la didattica delle lingue per scopi accademici. Ci si propone pertanto di avviare una riflessione ampia su alcune dimensioni fondamentali della ricerca in questo campo: a) confronto tra generi orientati alla trasmissione del sapere, ambiti disciplinari e contesti linguistico-culturali b) dimensione linguistica dell’argomentazione nei vari generi del discorso scientifico-accademico c) comunicazione interculturale e comunità scientifico-accademica d) inglese come lingua franca nella comunicazione fra esperti e nella comunicazione didattica e) strumenti della linguistica dei corpora nell’analisi del lessico e fraseologia accademica f) implicazioni per la didattica delle lingue per scopi accademici.

2009 - Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings [Curatela]
K., Hyland; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Academic criticism can be highly fraught and face threatening, potentially wounding to the reviewed author and disruptive to the discipline, but it occurs routinely in review genres. This book explores how academics publically evaluate each others’ work. Focusing on blurbs, book reviews, review articles, and literature reviews, the international contributors to the volume show how writers manage to critically engage with others’ ideas, argue their own viewpoints, and establish academic credibility while simultaneously navigating these risky interactions. The book comprises twelve chapters written by experts from eight countries and addresses the following topics:· the role of evaluation and argument in reviews· interpersonal aspects of review discourses· the connections of evaluation to disciplinary cultures and language· the expression of evaluation in different languages· diachronic change in review discourses · the role of power and interest in academic reviews· evaluation of discourse approaches to either student needs

2009 - CLAVIER 2009: Corpora and Language Variation in English Research, International Conference [Altro]
Bondi, Marina; Cacchiani, Silvia; Cavalieri, Silvia; Diani, Giuliana; Palumbo, Giuseppe
abstract

Corpora – principled collections of data in electronic format – have emerged over the last decades as a powerful analytical tool both in applied and theoretical linguistics. They have turned out of particularly significant importance in studies on language variation and language varieties. Indeed, the wealth and amount of data made available through corpus compilation and query tools have increasingly enabled researchers to explore differences across spoken and written discourse, social, diachronic and geographic varieties, age groups, gender, idiolects, etc. The widening of studies on language variation and language varieties, however, still calls for discussion on significant methodological issues, which pose, among others, the following questions: What are the major methodological problems in the research field? What is the role of the comparative perspective? Which tools and methodology best suit research? The conference focuses on such issues in order to provide a better definition of the concepts under investigation and bring together significant and innovative contributions in what is now understood as a widely researched area, thus presenting new tools and perspectives to be investigated. This is also the main general objective of the CLAVIER research group (Corpus and Language Variation Research Group), a research centre recently founded by the Universities of Bergamo, Firenze, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Roma “La Sapienza”, and Siena, and currently based in Modena. The point of departure is the invaluable contribution of two complementary strands of linguistic investigation - corpus analysis and discourse analysis – to research on language variation in English, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. One of the purposes of the 2009 CLAVIER conference is to reinforce national and international cooperation with scholars and research centres that can widen and complement the interest in language variation currently driving research at the centre. Plenaries by Udo Fries (University of Zürich), Anna Mauranen (University of Helsinki), Josef Schmied (University of Chemnitz), Geoffrey Williams (University of Bretagne-Sud). The conference brought together different perspectives on language variation and use. Plenaries and papers gave a special insight into the following topics: a. using historical corpora to investigate diachronic language variation; b. using corpora as an innovative tool in exploring geographic varieties; c. corpus linguistics in the investigation of non-native language use in professional settings; d. corpus linguistics tools, special languages, and specialist lexicography.

2009 - Exploring the polyphonic dimension of academic book review articles in the discourse of linguistics [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper aims to investigate the textual polyphony as manifested by interacting voices in the genre of the academic book review article from a disciplinary perspective. The analysis reveals interesting linguistic features which can shed light on the dialogic and argumentative dimension of the genre under examination. As a result of the analysis carried out, it emerges that linguistics book review articles are characterized by a significant presence of lexicalisations that represent argument as dialogic by making explicit reference to the roles of agreement and disagreement as the most representative in the genre and that contribute to involving the reviewer in an argumentative dialogue with a variety of "textual voices" (Thompson 1996).

2009 - Linguistica dei corpora e EAP: Lingua, pratiche comunicative e contesto d’uso [Articolo su rivista]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Research on EAP has shown an increasing interest in the developments in corpus linguistics over the last two decades. The major contribution of corpus linguistics to EAP has come in the description of the specific features of academic discourse. This chapter reviews the main directions of recent literature in this area, showing how the analysis of large quantities of data has made it possible to study the particular characteristics of different discourse domains and to investigate phenomena of variation. In terms of pedagogy, the chapter considers how the use of corpora has had a considerable impact on EAP teaching and learning. The increased familiarity of students with electronic tools for analysis can contribute to the development of their language awareness and can favour learner autonomy.

2009 - Reporting and evaluation in English book review articles: a cross-disciplinary study [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This study centres on a corpus-based analysis of reporting clauses. It focuses on English book review articles from academic journals across the disciplines of linguistics, history and economics and examines the use of that-clause complementation which project either others’ ideas or those of the reviewer. The study investigates selected reporting verbs in terms of their frequency and capability to act as clues in the representation of ‘consensus and conflict’ in the genre considered (Hunston, 2004), i.e. patterns of agreement and disagreement, as typically in the reviewers’ praise or criticism of the position of the reviewed authors. While it is expected that the consistent use of reporting verbs reflects both the characteristics of the genre and the role it plays within the scientific community, variation in their uses is explored, which may reveal characteristics of the disciplines themselves.

2008 - Authorial identity and textual voices in English review discourse across disciplines [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Based on three small comparable corpora of book review articles from academic journals in the disciplines of linguistics, history and economics, this paper explores from a cross-disciplinary perspective to what extent and in which ways reviewers involved in the evaluation of academic research manifest themselves and their interaction with the various textual voices weaved into the text, with a particular focus on their manifestation and role in the construction of the reviewer’s evaluative discourse. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data reveals significant and systematic distributional trends across the disciplines, and a qualitative analysis confirms that these trends are motivated by genre-specific purposes and discipline-specific practices, respectively.

2008 - Emphasizers in spoken and written academic discourse: the case of ‘really’ [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

The role played by mitigation in academic discourse has been the subject of intense scholarly interest over the last two decades, but interest in the role played by intensifying textual elements expressing evaluation and stance – emphasizers – is a more recent turn. This paper presents a preliminary attempt at capturing the uses of the adverb 'really' across spoken and written academic registers. The adverb 'really' is examined with an eye to how its frequencies, meanings and uses vary across spoken and written academic discourse. The findings are interpreted in terms of variation across genres and disciplines. A quantitative analysis of this adverb reveals significant distributional trends across both academic genres and disciplines, and a qualitative analysis confirms that these trends are motivated by genre-specific purposes and disciplinary-specific practices, respectively.

2008 - Forms of metadiscourse in English academic writing: a cross-disciplinary and cross-generic analysis of meta-argumentative phraseology [Capitolo/Saggio]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper focuses on the role of meta-argumentative phraseology in English academic writing from a cross-disciplinary and cross-generic perspective. Special attention is paid to different types of organizational discourse units: interaction-oriented (meta-discursive) and text-oriented (meta-textual). Drawing in particular on corpus-based approaches to phraseology, the study focuses on how phraseological units vary across academic disciplines (with their variety of languages and approaches) and genres (with their variety of communicative purposes and functions).

2008 - Introductory 'it' patterns in English and Italian academic writing: a cross-generic and cross-cultural analysis [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a cross-generic and cross-cultural analysis of phraseological patterns in academic writing. More specifically, the study looks at the use of the English introductory ‘it’ patterns and its Italian equivalents (i.e. the it v-link ADJ that-clause and it v-link ADJ to-infinitive clause / It is possible that…; it is difficult to see...; E’ vero che…; è possible osservare...), as markers of personal stance in comparable corpora of academic research article openings, i.e. “the opening section up to and including the second paragraph of each article” (Silver and Bondi 2004: 121), and book review articles in English and Italian in the discipline of history. The aim of the paper is to explore whether and to what extent the pattern/meaning associations for these patterns vary across academic genres and cultures. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data reveals significant variation in the distribution of these patterns across both genres and cultures, and a qualitative analysis of the corpora confirms that variation is not arbitrary but motivated by genre-specific purposes and culture-specific traditions, respectively.

2008 - La Corpus Linguistics [Articolo su rivista]
E., Tognini Bonelli; Cacchiani, Silvia; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Questo contributo ripercorre le origini della Corpus Linguistics in Gran Bretagna per poi passare ad un resoconto dei maggiori contributi e settori in cui tale metodologia è stata utilizzata in Italia e infine concludere fornendo un ampio panorama sulle prospettive di applicazione future della stessa.

2008 - Le voci del testo: la rappresentazione dell'argomentare nella scrittura accademica in italiano e in inglese [Capitolo/Saggio]
Bondi, Marina; Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Questo lavoro presenta alcune considerazioni preliminari sugli strumenti della rappresentazione del discorso argomentativo, della sua “proiezione” nel book review article, studiati in prospettiva comparativa italiano-inglese. La proiezione argomentativa verrà analizzata attraverso un elemento chiave quale le voci che argomentano nel testo. Partendo dal discorso disciplinare della storia, si procederà a una riflessione cross-linguistica italiano-inglese sulle strategie argomentative che si realizzano attraverso una rappresentazione dell’argomentare nei corpora in esame. In particolare verranno messi a fuoco gli strumenti linguistici della proiezione argomentativa, e si metterà in luce il rapporto tra le diverse voci che sono rappresentate nei testi. L’analisi si focalizza sui segnali espliciti di riferimento diretto al recensore o all’autore recensito nel testo, identificando le lessicalizzazioni dell’azione verbale associate alle diverse voci, ma rilevando anche la presenza di forme nominali. Particolare attenzione verrà prestata anche ad aspetti fraseologici, attraverso una analisi di specifici elementi lessicali, delle loro collocazioni più rappresentative e dei pattern semantici che costituiscono. L’analisi evidenzia una significativa divergenza nelle forme di riferimento esplicito alle procedure argomentative nelle due culture in esame.

2007 - The representation of evaluative and argumentative procedures: examples from the academic book review article [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper documents some of the linguistic resources used to construct evaluation and argumentation in a corpus of academic book review articles. The study investigates the discursive strategies the reviewer adopts to present his/her evaluative moves in order to highlight the discursive and argumentative dimension of the genre. Particular attention is paid to the pragmatic functions of lexicalisations of argumentative procedures, when they are used to introduce argumentative discourse. More specifically, the analysis focuses on all the reporting expressions that are associated with explicit signals of the reviewer’s positive or negative evaluation of the position of the reviewed book authors, with varying degrees of conflict or convergence. The findings reveal that the genre of the book review article finds its specificity in a combination of evaluative language and reporting. Reporting the ideas an author discusses in his or her book can be thus seen as a point of departure for the reviewer’s development of an evaluative discourse, particularly in sequences where the reviewed author’s reported opinions are presented in a kind of argumentative dialogue that helps the reviewer illustrate his/her views. The reviewer’s argumentative evaluation thus becomes a major element in the representation of the ideas under discussion. Although the most common and generally accepted interpretation of argumentative dialogue is that of a dialogue between an (active) Proponent and a (passive) Evaluator, the analysis shows that evaluation, whether realised explicitly or in subtle and implicit forms, plays an important role in the kind of dialogue that the reviewer and the reviewed author construct around specific arguments.

2006 - Reviewer stance in academic review articles: a cross-disciplinary comparison [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a cross-disciplinary comparison of the expression of stance in the academic book review article genre. The study compares features of stance in two small corpora of English book review articles from academic journals in the fields of linguistics and economics. Special attention is paid to the grammar category of stance adverbials. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data reveals significant and systematic distributional trends in the use of adverbials of epistemic stance (e.g. perhaps, of course) across the disciplines, and a qualitative analysis confirms that these trends are motivated by genre-specific purposes and discipline-specific practices, respectively.

2004 - A genre-based approach to analysing academic review articles [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

Using a genre-based approach, this paper investigates the rhetorical structure of academic book review articles and focuses on what is the most important move in this genre, that is proving praise and/or criticism of the reviewed book. The study looks at how evaluative discourse structures are shaped to achieve meaning and purpose, particularly inside this move. In contrast to what may be expected, the analysis reveals that criticism is expressed rather straightforwardly in the genre, with varying degrees of intensity, one of the most recurrent ways of expressing it being based on the usage of contrastive structures embedding both criticism and praise for the reviewed book.

2004 - Evaluation in academic review articles [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper explores ways in which evaluation is achieved in academic book review articles in the field of linguistics. Evaluation is analysed from a lexical and discourse perspective. From a lexical perspective, evaluation can be associated with meanings inherent in individual lexical terms used by the writer to express opinion about the ‘good-ness’ or ‘bad-ness’ of actions, facts or events. The second perspective is that of evaluation as a feature of discourse. In this view, evaluation does not reside in an individual lexical term but is a category of discourse meaning which can be expressed in many different ways. This paper examines the two main functions that book review articles combine and integrate to achieve evaluation: a) reporting the ideas an author discusses in his or her book as a springboard for a wider evaluation of them and b) discussing the issues they raise and an appraisal of what this means for the community. The assumption is that in a book review article the reviewer can construct his/her own evaluations by using multiple converging voices: his own voice as well as those of other sources referred to in the text. This means that evaluative space is opened up in which the reviewer can specify him/herself as the source of a viewpoint or can cite other authors under review. One strategy by which evaluation seems to be achieved is that of comparing and contrasting these various voices.

2004 - The discourse functions of I don’t know in English conversation [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper discusses the pragmatic functions of I don’t know in examples from the spoken part of the Cobuild Corpus. The study provides an overview of the concept of ‘face’ and explores the potential value of the notion of face and politeness in the interpretation of I don’t know. The occurrences of I don’t know are also studied in order to identify its meaning and function. Particular attention is paid to the role of certain discourse markers occurring in conjunction with I don’t know like oh, you know, I mean, well, each of which adds a particular pragmatic effect. The analysis reveals that the basic semantic meaning of I don’t know underlines all the pragmatic functions, regardless of whether it is used, for instance, as a mitigating strategy avoiding face threats or as a filler for time, to take two extremes.

2001 - Modality and speech acts in English Acts of Parliament [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper presents a pragmatic study of modal verbs in a corpus of present-day British law statutes: they are analysed for socio-pragmatic occurrence and pragmalinguistic realization of potential speech acts. The study suggests a classification in which modal verbs are employed for the purpose of realizing a category of regulative acts, directive speech acts (Searle 1976), the illocutionary point of which is the speaker’s intention to regulate society. The analysis reveals that in legal texts there is a predominance of direct strategies (statements of obligation and prohibition), when compared the observed directives to directive observed in everyday conversation. It was argued that this difference could be ascribed to the external factors of the social situation, rather than to a difference in medium (written vs spoken). Furthermore, it is not just a matter of the English language of the law being more direct than conversational English; it is a question of selecting strategies to express a specific communicative function in a particular sender / receiver relationship condition of the act in question and within the socio-pragmatic requirements of the situation.

2000 - The speech act of agreeing in 20th century dramatic dialogues [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper investigates the speech act of agreeing in a corpus of British dramatic texts, as a response uttered by a second speaker in reaction to a first speaker’s evaluative act, which may consist of either explicit or implicit evaluative assessments or questions of the conductive type or rhetorical questions. Special attention is paid to strategic discursive actions the second speaker can make use of in order to show his/her agreement: on the one hand, repetition by second speaker and the monosyllabic ‘yes’ as prototypical instruments for serving the pragmatic function of agreement; on the other hand, reactive speaker contributions such as re-elaborative responses capable of functioning as highly cooperative. The analysis reveals that agreement involves some type of modification along a scale of intensity, without which its illocutionary force risks misunderstanding.

1999 - The management of disagreement between interviewees in Italian TV multi-interviewee interview shows [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana
abstract

This paper focuses on the role of interviewer and interviewee in a corpus of Italian affairs interview shows, and aims to account for some of the typical turn and sequence structures in the organization and management of disagreement. The study identifies and discusses examples of disagreements in three contexts: following a co-interviewee’s turn, in the midst of a co-interviewee’s turn, and in extended sequences. The analysis points up similarities and differences between the management of disagreement in panel news interviews (as described by Greatbatch, e.g. 1992, and others) and in the presence of a studio audience (as in the Italian data). One important difference is that in the Italian data reviewers do not intervene in direct unmitigated disagreements between interviewees in order to manage an exit from them, but appear to emphasize the dispute rather than to seek reconciliation. The study suggests that this may be due to the presence of the studio audience in this format.

Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

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