'Languaging' and interculturality in EU domains

The main aim of this volume is to analyse linguistic features, cultural and discursive practices within the genres investigated in order to challenge the hypothesis of a levelling English monoculture in the global era. Comparative and contrastive analyses have been carried out by adopting an approach which includes Critical Discourse Analysis, pragmatics, translation studies, sociolinguistics and Corpus linguistics. Particular attention has been given to cross-cultural components, mainly within texts examined in parallel versions (English and Italian / French / German). The project is set in the current studies on multimodal textuality due to new technologies and hybridization of traditional genres through new forms of online communication. The study of the international image of the European Union constructed through commercials and the website, a huge containers of texts and hypertexts on the European Community policies, aims at verifying to what extent the use of English at the international level is manifested as cultural homogenizing or as interculturality, contamination of local cultures and/or coexistence of professional identity values. The contributions included in the volume are on varied domains of specialized discourse and explore ‘languaging’ strategies, verbal, visual, multimodal, mainly in comparative / contrastive analyses which highlight the dynamics of cultural encoding and/or re-encoding in texts. Contributions of: Nicola Borrelli / M. Giovanna Pistillo, Cristina Pennarola, Fabrizia Venuta, Amelia M. Cava, Adrian Bedford. The analysis carried out by Nicola Borrelli / M. Giovanna Pistillo aims at exploring the degree of Euro-scepticism among European citizens and the language used by the EU institutions in the communicative process with citizens. The analysis is carried out on the script of a video released by the EU Audiovisual Service and is based on translation studies and Hofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions. Cristina Pennarola explores the way in which humanitarian activities promoted by the European Union Humanitarian Department (ECHO) are presented to the public through a wide-circulation document, ECHO’s 2004 Annual Review. A macro- and micro-analysis have been carried out in the light of Critical Discourse Analysis aiming at exploring the underlying principles of Community-driven humanitarian action, in particular, the analysis of lexical networks and verbal patterns. The study conducted by Fabrizia Venuta focuses on anglicisms in the language of Economics and investigates aspects of phonetics, morphology and semantics through ‘multi-words units’ as instances of cross-linguistic evolution in two European languages, English and Italian. Amelia M. Cava examines the social campaign sponsored by the European Union – Help for a Life without tobacco, consisting of three commercials broadcast in 25 EU Member States. The analysis of the commercials online investigates differences between English and Italian, visual metaphor and humour focusing on textual features including colour, rhetoric and narrative. Adrian Bedford’s study examines two texts as examples of the statute genre in English in an attempt to show to what extent the cultural matrices of the statutes (the British Parliament’s and the EU’s) influence the form of the documents.