Carmen Sancho Guinda

Interpersonality in legal genres

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as interpersonality. This construct offers ample terrain for new research, since it can be viewed using a range of diverse theoretical frameworks, employing a variety of analytical tools and social perspectives. Studies on the relationship between writer/reader and speaker/audience in the legal field are still scarce, dispersed, and limited to a narrow range of genres and a restricted notion of interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. This volume is meant to help bridge this gap. Its chapters show the realisation and distribution of interpersonal features in specific legal genres. The aim is to achieve an expansion of the concept of interpersonality, which besides modality, Grice’s maxims and other traditionally interpersonal features, might comprise or relate to ideational and textual issues like narrative disclosure, typography, rhetorical variation, or Plain English, among others.

Proximal Positioning in Students’ Graph Commentaries

Visual data pervade disciplines and genres. Graphs, diagrams and tables illustrate and complement verbal contents in textbooks, exams, research articles or class notes across the academic field and may even stand as independent texts, especially in the hard sciences. Despite this ubiquity, however, the receptive and productive abilities they involve are acquired disjointedly and intuitively. We learn how to decode graphics during the early high school years (Myers, 2003), along with the language of the specific subjects and texts in which they are embedded, but normally do not verbalize them until later at university, if not once in the professional arena. This is the plight of many Spanish graduates. Technology people, in particular engineers, do not need to interpret visuals unless they interact with other communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) for whom the graphic information presented is abstruse or alien to their shared repertoires.

THE EMOTIONAL PROSODY OF U.S. FATAL AIR-ACCIDENT DOCKETS ONLINE: RISKING RISK COMMUNICATION?

Risk communication is grounded in both rationality and emotion (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Bo-holm & Corvellec 2014). Recent investigations have proved that emotions do affect risk and danger percep-tions by functioning as ‘mediators’ (Xie et al. 2011) and become important in decision-making. My study explores how emotion is induced by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short) to influence the mentalities and behaviours of its broad mixed audience and thus increase risk prevention. With that research purpose in mind, I examine an electronic corpus of over 500 online samples of fatal aviation dockets issued yearly online by the NTSB between the time span 2010-2015 and contained in its website databases. The emotional engagement deployed to mediate the perceptions of risk and danger by the general public constitutes a unique genre among all other world transportation agencies, since through informative vividness it pursues to activate the processes of memory, inference (i.e. judgement) and decision-making. I take Stubbs’ (2001) concept of ‘discursive prosody’ as point of departure and resort to a blended theoretical framework that combines Narratology, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Proximisation (Cap 2013) and Positioning (Harre & van Langenhove 1999) Theories. I will show that the NTSB’s emotional prosody is more rhetorical than lexical and that the narrative strategies of focalisation and speech representation play a salient role. To conclude I will reflect on some of the possible consequences of over-exploiting emotional engagement in risk communication.

Introduction: Making Essential Competencies Visible in Higher Education

This introductory chapter states the motivation underlying the present volume, describes its goals and structure, and examines the challenges posed by the Bologna Process with regard to the encouragement of lifelong competencies in English-medium instruction within the European Higher Education Area. In addition, the editors justify their choice of critical thinking, creativity, learner autonomy and motivation as essential competencies, highlight their interconnection, and explain the educational premises that bind the collection together, which is intended to inform and inspire not only European lecturers, but also university teachers all over the world. Finally, the implications of fostering lifelong competencies in English as a second language or lingua franca are discussed. These include, along with linguistic proficiency, mastering the genres and discourses of the discipline and their associated stylistic conventions and rhetorical variants, as well as methodological changes for ensuring interactive learning and making language more salient that when teaching in the first language. Lastly, a closing reflection on pedagogical options and dilemmas is provided.