Volume 14 of ESP Across Cultures contains a total of 12 papers, the highest number of papers in a single volume since the journal began in 2004. All of the contributors in this volume are scholars working in Italy, and many of the papers explore aspects of specialized discourse where both English and Italian are compared. There are, however, exceptions, as can be seen in the paper by Lucia Abbamonte which opens this volume, where the ‘cross-cultural’ element consists in the racial divide which still exists in the United States. The author focuses on the 2015 Charleston Church massacre where a white extremist entered a church and shot dead nine black people, an episode which gave rise to a “new transformative language of racial confrontation, with its own lexicogrammar” where the black community reacted to the massacre by using words of forgiveness and healing rather than words of vengeance and hatred, an aspect that the media were quick to highlight and which the author analyses from a sociolinguistic perspective. In her paper, Barbara Cappuzzo compares medical metaphors in economics news articles in English and Italian which were investigated in two corpora drawn, respectively, from the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore. The results show that the Italian corpus tends to use medical terms metaphorically more frequently with respect to the English corpus, ultimately highlighting the fact that “health/medical-related matters are a crucial source of inspiration in the conceptualization of English and Italian economics news discourse.” Mariagrazia De Meo analyses the challenges of subtitling art from English into Italian in the field of English for Art Purposes by focusing on the translation strategies used in the Italian subtitles in the art documentary Goya: visions of flesh and blood (2016). Through the leitmotif of the art exhibition, “the narration is presented through a variety of voices, from those of art curators and critics to the voice of the artist himself,” and in the commentary, the connotative charge of lexical items and figurative language convey the communicative aim of emotionally engaging the viewer through a language that is accessible and aesthetically pleasing. Paolo Donadio provides a cross-cultural analysis of British and Italian tourists’ online accounts using a corpus downloaded from Tripadvisor, comparing the feedback of Italian tourists visiting the British Museum with that of British tourists visiting the Museo Archeologico nazionale in naples. The author shows that the category of tourist feedback, shaped in the web genre of the review, is conceived and achieved differently by British tourists with respect to Italian tourists, especially in terms of implementing different cultural frames and constructing mental spaces. Antonio Fruttaldo and Marco Venuti offer a cross-cultural discursive approach to news values in the press in the US, the UK and Italy by examining the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, and focusing on whether analysing news values can help identify differences and similarities in constructing newsworthiness. The authors show how Italian newspapers tend to represent the event in terms of the news values of Eliteness, Impact, and Timeliness; the UK press stresses those of negativity, Impact, and Timeliness/Superlativeness; whereas the US press privileges those of Impact, Eliteness, and negativity. Alba Graziano looks at how food is marketed through translation in her study of menus from the Lazio region. Belonging to the genre of info-marketing communication, the restaurant menu has not been widely studied in terms of its semiotic and multimedial features. The author examines the morpho-syntactic and lexical structure of the texts highlighting their informative and persuasive functions. She also analyses to what extent the English versions use the same strategies, concluding that, despite the traditional emphasis on culture-bound features of food language, the pragmatics of such texts is established by the combination of syntactic order and sensory-metaphorical lexis. Pietro Luigi Iaia investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic strategies of hybridization, simplification and reformulation in English and Italian multimodal popularized discourse in a corpus of English and Italian scripts from the TV shows 1000 Ways to Die, Curious and Unusual Deaths, and Rare Anatomy, which mix journalistic, documentary and humorous discourses with reality-TV and docudrama genres. The analysis focuses on the interaction between the extralinguistic features and verbal characteristics of audiovisual scripts with the aim of describing multimodal popularization. Adriano Laudisio examines the adaptation of legal Culture-Specific References (CSRs) in cross-cultural rewriting in legal drama, the fictional genre concerning the professions of lawyers, judges and police as well as law enforcement. As a form of FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel, i.e. ‘Fiction with Professional Background’) it plays a role in language learning and in popularizing legal-specific contents and terminology for non-experts. The study analyses two corpora, made up of the original scripts in English and the Italian fan-made translations of three legal dramas. The results show a tendency to substitute CSRs with references drawn from the Target Culture. Anna Franca Plastina focuses on online health promotion and the cross-cultural construction of biopedagogical discourses of childhood obesity by exploring how such discourses are mediated across US and Italian health cultures. The author investigates how cultural schemas contribute to organizing information and situating the meaning of childhood obesity cross-culturally, revealing distinctive discourse patterns. A comparative analysis of US and Italian web-based texts is carried out by using cultural schema theory. The paper highlights the diverse approaches to constructing biopedagogical meaning across health cultures, and on differences in conceptualizations of health. Virginia Pulcini and Matteo Milani analyse neo-classical combining forms (CFs) in English loanwords using evidence from Italian in the word-formation of compound terms in the technical and scientific domains. In their examination of Anglicisms containing CFs, the authors observe that the number of borrowings from English is relatively small, despite the strong influence of English in specialized vocabulary. This is due to the fact that most CFs derive from Latin and Greek and, Italian being a Latin-based language, they are felt to be familiar and integrated into the language. Thus, in the area of composition with neo-classical CFs, Italian tends to favour the combination with domestic elements rather than with English ones. Margaret Rasulo explores the theme of terrorism through the language of colouring books, looking at how this genre in the US is used to shape reality from a specific cultural stance. She argues that the conventions of colouring books have been recreated to offer an anti-terrorist response to the incitement of terrorist groups whose online magazines are used to recruit and radicalize young Muslims worldwide. By comparing the colouring books and the terrorist magazines, and by underlining their divergent aims, the author shows “the stimulus/response pattern underlying their communicative action” whose aim is to create their own version of the truth. The final paper in this volume is by Giorgia Riboni who undertakes a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study of English and Italian makeup tutorials, focusing on the generic, rhetorical and linguistic practices of English- and Italian-speaking ‘makeup gurus’ and highlighting how the language and discursive strategies are used in different cultural contexts, within the same virtual platform and using the same generic resources. The author examines the verbal element of makeup video tutorials and compares the rhetorical, discursive and lexical preferences in the language in which this genre originated (English) and within a new linguo-cultural environment (Italian). She concludes that there is “an ongoing tension between the global and the local dimension of YouTube makeup culture.” As can be seen from this brief synopsis of the papers constituting this volume, the rich variety of topics and methodological approaches to the study of English in specialized discourse from a cross-cultural perspective bear witness to the fact that this field of study is thriving and capable of providing new insights which, it is hoped, will prove to be of value to scholars of applied linguistics.
ESP Across Cultures
Milizia, D.;
2017-01-01
Abstract
Volume 14 of ESP Across Cultures contains a total of 12 papers, the highest number of papers in a single volume since the journal began in 2004. All of the contributors in this volume are scholars working in Italy, and many of the papers explore aspects of specialized discourse where both English and Italian are compared. There are, however, exceptions, as can be seen in the paper by Lucia Abbamonte which opens this volume, where the ‘cross-cultural’ element consists in the racial divide which still exists in the United States. The author focuses on the 2015 Charleston Church massacre where a white extremist entered a church and shot dead nine black people, an episode which gave rise to a “new transformative language of racial confrontation, with its own lexicogrammar” where the black community reacted to the massacre by using words of forgiveness and healing rather than words of vengeance and hatred, an aspect that the media were quick to highlight and which the author analyses from a sociolinguistic perspective. In her paper, Barbara Cappuzzo compares medical metaphors in economics news articles in English and Italian which were investigated in two corpora drawn, respectively, from the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore. The results show that the Italian corpus tends to use medical terms metaphorically more frequently with respect to the English corpus, ultimately highlighting the fact that “health/medical-related matters are a crucial source of inspiration in the conceptualization of English and Italian economics news discourse.” Mariagrazia De Meo analyses the challenges of subtitling art from English into Italian in the field of English for Art Purposes by focusing on the translation strategies used in the Italian subtitles in the art documentary Goya: visions of flesh and blood (2016). Through the leitmotif of the art exhibition, “the narration is presented through a variety of voices, from those of art curators and critics to the voice of the artist himself,” and in the commentary, the connotative charge of lexical items and figurative language convey the communicative aim of emotionally engaging the viewer through a language that is accessible and aesthetically pleasing. Paolo Donadio provides a cross-cultural analysis of British and Italian tourists’ online accounts using a corpus downloaded from Tripadvisor, comparing the feedback of Italian tourists visiting the British Museum with that of British tourists visiting the Museo Archeologico nazionale in naples. The author shows that the category of tourist feedback, shaped in the web genre of the review, is conceived and achieved differently by British tourists with respect to Italian tourists, especially in terms of implementing different cultural frames and constructing mental spaces. Antonio Fruttaldo and Marco Venuti offer a cross-cultural discursive approach to news values in the press in the US, the UK and Italy by examining the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, and focusing on whether analysing news values can help identify differences and similarities in constructing newsworthiness. The authors show how Italian newspapers tend to represent the event in terms of the news values of Eliteness, Impact, and Timeliness; the UK press stresses those of negativity, Impact, and Timeliness/Superlativeness; whereas the US press privileges those of Impact, Eliteness, and negativity. Alba Graziano looks at how food is marketed through translation in her study of menus from the Lazio region. Belonging to the genre of info-marketing communication, the restaurant menu has not been widely studied in terms of its semiotic and multimedial features. The author examines the morpho-syntactic and lexical structure of the texts highlighting their informative and persuasive functions. She also analyses to what extent the English versions use the same strategies, concluding that, despite the traditional emphasis on culture-bound features of food language, the pragmatics of such texts is established by the combination of syntactic order and sensory-metaphorical lexis. Pietro Luigi Iaia investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic strategies of hybridization, simplification and reformulation in English and Italian multimodal popularized discourse in a corpus of English and Italian scripts from the TV shows 1000 Ways to Die, Curious and Unusual Deaths, and Rare Anatomy, which mix journalistic, documentary and humorous discourses with reality-TV and docudrama genres. The analysis focuses on the interaction between the extralinguistic features and verbal characteristics of audiovisual scripts with the aim of describing multimodal popularization. Adriano Laudisio examines the adaptation of legal Culture-Specific References (CSRs) in cross-cultural rewriting in legal drama, the fictional genre concerning the professions of lawyers, judges and police as well as law enforcement. As a form of FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel, i.e. ‘Fiction with Professional Background’) it plays a role in language learning and in popularizing legal-specific contents and terminology for non-experts. The study analyses two corpora, made up of the original scripts in English and the Italian fan-made translations of three legal dramas. The results show a tendency to substitute CSRs with references drawn from the Target Culture. Anna Franca Plastina focuses on online health promotion and the cross-cultural construction of biopedagogical discourses of childhood obesity by exploring how such discourses are mediated across US and Italian health cultures. The author investigates how cultural schemas contribute to organizing information and situating the meaning of childhood obesity cross-culturally, revealing distinctive discourse patterns. A comparative analysis of US and Italian web-based texts is carried out by using cultural schema theory. The paper highlights the diverse approaches to constructing biopedagogical meaning across health cultures, and on differences in conceptualizations of health. Virginia Pulcini and Matteo Milani analyse neo-classical combining forms (CFs) in English loanwords using evidence from Italian in the word-formation of compound terms in the technical and scientific domains. In their examination of Anglicisms containing CFs, the authors observe that the number of borrowings from English is relatively small, despite the strong influence of English in specialized vocabulary. This is due to the fact that most CFs derive from Latin and Greek and, Italian being a Latin-based language, they are felt to be familiar and integrated into the language. Thus, in the area of composition with neo-classical CFs, Italian tends to favour the combination with domestic elements rather than with English ones. Margaret Rasulo explores the theme of terrorism through the language of colouring books, looking at how this genre in the US is used to shape reality from a specific cultural stance. She argues that the conventions of colouring books have been recreated to offer an anti-terrorist response to the incitement of terrorist groups whose online magazines are used to recruit and radicalize young Muslims worldwide. By comparing the colouring books and the terrorist magazines, and by underlining their divergent aims, the author shows “the stimulus/response pattern underlying their communicative action” whose aim is to create their own version of the truth. The final paper in this volume is by Giorgia Riboni who undertakes a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study of English and Italian makeup tutorials, focusing on the generic, rhetorical and linguistic practices of English- and Italian-speaking ‘makeup gurus’ and highlighting how the language and discursive strategies are used in different cultural contexts, within the same virtual platform and using the same generic resources. The author examines the verbal element of makeup video tutorials and compares the rhetorical, discursive and lexical preferences in the language in which this genre originated (English) and within a new linguo-cultural environment (Italian). She concludes that there is “an ongoing tension between the global and the local dimension of YouTube makeup culture.” As can be seen from this brief synopsis of the papers constituting this volume, the rich variety of topics and methodological approaches to the study of English in specialized discourse from a cross-cultural perspective bear witness to the fact that this field of study is thriving and capable of providing new insights which, it is hoped, will prove to be of value to scholars of applied linguistics.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
