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Michael S. Boyd

Università degli studi Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia, Faculty Member +1UNINT Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma, Department of translation and interpreting, AdjunctUniversità degli studi Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia, Faculty Member

Translation and Interpretation +33

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Papers

From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial

Transmedia Crime Stories, 2016

This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian jus... more This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualise and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case.

Afterword : The Changing Role of the Interpreter Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards: A Way Forward*

La Deconstruccion De Raza E Identidad En El Discurso Presidencial De Barack Obama

Critical discourse analysis and politics

Chapter from the Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (2018), John Flowerdew and John... more

From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial

This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian jus... more This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualise and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case.

Participation and recontextualisation in New Media: Political Discourse Analysis and YouTube

From Text to Political Positions, 2014

Regrammaticalization as a Restrategizing Device in Political Discourse

Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2009 2009 Pag 246, 2009

Afterword : The Changing Role of the Interpreter Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards: A Way Forward*

La Deconstruccion De Raza E Identidad En El Discurso Presidencial De Barack Obama

Critical discourse analysis and politics

Chapter from the Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (2018), John Flowerdew and John... more

From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial

This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian jus... more This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualise and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case.

Participation and recontextualisation in New Media: Political Discourse Analysis and YouTube

From Text to Political Positions, 2014

Regrammaticalization as a Restrategizing Device in Political Discourse

Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2009 2009 Pag 246, 2009

The Changing Role of the Interpreter

The Journal of Environmental Education, 1984

(New) participatory framework on YouTube? Commenter interaction in US political speeches

Journal of Pragmatics, 2014

Enemies of the People. A Multimodal Critical Analysis of Populism, the Popular Press and the Judiciary in Post-Brexit Britain

The article provides an in-depth critical analysis of an article published by the UK mid-market p... more The article provides an in-depth critical analysis of an article published by the UK mid-market press newspaper the Daily Mail criticizing the role of High Court judges for ruling that Parliamentary approval was necessary to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and formally leave the EU. It argues that the article and the newspaper itself can be considered populist through the discourse strategies that they adopt to represent the pro-Brexit voters and public positively and negatively the three judges involved in the High Court decision. The investigation is based on a fine-tuned multimodal analysis of the newspaper report and demonstrates that textual means are combined with visual means to denigrate the three judges responsible for the decision but further expanded to the entire judiciary and pro-Remain supporters and to legitimize the voice of the “people” of the Daily Mail or those 17.4 million Britons who voted to leave the UK in the referendum of June 2016.

Palatalization and coronalization in Russian and Czech: A non-linear approach /

Chapter 12. Preaching from a distant pulpit

Migration and Media, 2019

From Text to Political Positions

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 2014

Politics,(con) text and genre: applying CDA and DHA to interpreter training

This study proposes the application of a number of important tenets from Critical Discourse Analy... more

From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial

Transmedia Crime Stories, 2016

This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian jus... more This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualise and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case.

Afterword : The Changing Role of the Interpreter Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards: A Way Forward*

La Deconstruccion De Raza E Identidad En El Discurso Presidencial De Barack Obama

Critical discourse analysis and politics

Chapter from the Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (2018), John Flowerdew and John... more

From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial

This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian jus... more This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualise and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case.

Participation and recontextualisation in New Media: Political Discourse Analysis and YouTube

From Text to Political Positions, 2014

Regrammaticalization as a Restrategizing Device in Political Discourse

Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2009 2009 Pag 246, 2009

Afterword : The Changing Role of the Interpreter Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards: A Way Forward*

La Deconstruccion De Raza E Identidad En El Discurso Presidencial De Barack Obama

Critical discourse analysis and politics

Chapter from the Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (2018), John Flowerdew and John... more

From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial

This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian jus... more This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualise and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case.

Participation and recontextualisation in New Media: Political Discourse Analysis and YouTube

From Text to Political Positions, 2014

Regrammaticalization as a Restrategizing Device in Political Discourse

Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2009 2009 Pag 246, 2009

The Changing Role of the Interpreter

The Journal of Environmental Education, 1984

(New) participatory framework on YouTube? Commenter interaction in US political speeches

Journal of Pragmatics, 2014

Enemies of the People. A Multimodal Critical Analysis of Populism, the Popular Press and the Judiciary in Post-Brexit Britain

The article provides an in-depth critical analysis of an article published by the UK mid-market p... more The article provides an in-depth critical analysis of an article published by the UK mid-market press newspaper the Daily Mail criticizing the role of High Court judges for ruling that Parliamentary approval was necessary to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and formally leave the EU. It argues that the article and the newspaper itself can be considered populist through the discourse strategies that they adopt to represent the pro-Brexit voters and public positively and negatively the three judges involved in the High Court decision. The investigation is based on a fine-tuned multimodal analysis of the newspaper report and demonstrates that textual means are combined with visual means to denigrate the three judges responsible for the decision but further expanded to the entire judiciary and pro-Remain supporters and to legitimize the voice of the “people” of the Daily Mail or those 17.4 million Britons who voted to leave the UK in the referendum of June 2016.

Palatalization and coronalization in Russian and Czech: A non-linear approach /

Chapter 12. Preaching from a distant pulpit

Migration and Media, 2019

From Text to Political Positions

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 2014

Politics,(con) text and genre: applying CDA and DHA to interpreter training

This study proposes the application of a number of important tenets from Critical Discourse Analy... more

Applying CMT and CDA to simultaneous interpreting in US presidential debates

by Michael S. Boyd and claudio bendazzoli

In Moral Politics Lakoff (2002) maintains that US political divisions are shaped and subsequently... more In Moral Politics Lakoff (2002) maintains that US political divisions are shaped and subsequently framed by competing idealized interpretations of family-based moral systems, which are enacted linguistically through the NATION IS A FAMILY natural conceptual metaphor and its various entailments. Politicians, it is argued, draw upon the models to articulate a unifying system of moral and family values in their political rhetoric, which are expressed through lexical, grammatical and pragmatic linguistic realizations. Working under this assumption, the paper is interested in how the models are reflected in the political discourse in the genre of presidential debate in a source text/culture (ST/C) and an interpreted target text/culture (TT/C).

The empirical data are taken from the third 2008 US presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, and focus specifically on the turns which mention “Joe the Plumber”. The figure was invoked to varying degrees as an embodiment of two opposing worldviews shaped by the liberal and conservative ideologies of the two candidates (Lakoff 2002). It is posited that Family-based metaphors combine with pronominal use and other pragmatic features in the candidates’ discourse as a reflection of the two models.

While the paper is primarily an attempt at extending the claims made in Boyd (2013) to Italian interpreter-media TT data, it also intends to provide a test case for the translatability of “systemized ideology” (Chilton & Schäffner 2002: 29) from one language and culture (English) into another (Italian) and how such remappings reflect conflicting realizations of the NATION IS A FAMILY metaphor.

Multimodality and the representation of a terrorist: Applying Social Semiotics and Text World Theory to the “Boston Bomber”

On July 17, 2013 Rolling Stone published a photograph of Dzhohar Tsarnaev, one of the two brother... more On July 17, 2013 Rolling Stone published a photograph of Dzhohar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombings of 15 April 2013, on its cover. The cover and the magazine immediately became the target of a large protest movement on various social networks including Facebook. But what exactly were users protesting? The picture had been used by Tsarnaev himself on the Internet and had appeared on the cover of the New York Times months earlier to no overt criticism. In this case, it was thought by many that by using an ostensibly positive picture of Tsarnaev on its cover, Rolling Stone was promoting a terrorist to rock-star status.

This paper is focused on this specific media portrayal of Tsarnaev and the subsequent reception by the public. Firstly, the work considers the various modes of presentation adopted by the text producer: the photograph, the associated text on the cover and the verbal forms used in the accompanying articles. Secondly, and more importantly, the discussion focuses on the importance of reception factors in the visual and textual communication process through the analysis of two small corpora taken from Facebook: a semi-public one involving a “conversation” between the author and other users and another public one taken from Rolling Stone’s Facebook page.

On a theoretical plane, the paper draws on social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), text world theory (Chilton 2004; Gavins 2007; Werth 1999), and multimodal metaphor theory (Forceville 2009). Crucially, it is assumed that viewers interpret the visual input on the Rolling Stone cover according to their discourse- and text-world alignment (Goffman 1981). Furthermore, it is argued that the Tsarnaev Rolling Stone cover represents a multimodal metaphor, which either glorifies or puts into question Tsarnaev, depending on the recipient’s alignment. Moreover, the relationship between different participants in the visual process, or what Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) call “interactive” and “represented” participants, are considered. Finally, the analysis of the empirical data serves to demonstrate that visual communication can indeed create and reinforce interaction between the producer and the image recipient.

References
Chilton, P. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London/New York: Routledge. Forceville, C. 2006. “Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agenda for research”. In: C. Forceville & E. Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 19-42.
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kress, G. & T. van Leeuwen's. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Gavins, J. 2007. Text World Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Werth, P. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.

Who/where is Joe the plumber? Interpreting conceptual metaphor and personal pronouns in the US presidential debate

"In the third 2008 presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain “Joe the Plumber” was... more "In the third 2008 presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain “Joe the Plumber” was featured repeatedly. Although based on a real person (Joe Wurzelbacher, from Ohio) the figure was invoked to varying degrees as an embodiment of two opposing worldviews shaped by the liberal and conservative ideologies of the two candidates. Using the source language video and transcript from the debate and two Italian interpreted target texts, the work provides further empirical evidence for the existence of these two distinct morality models in the English source text as well as the interpreted Italian target text. Specifically, the paper is interested in comparing the various metaphorical conceptualizations that emerge in the debate and if they are maintained in the TT.

From a theoretical perspective, the work is grounded in Lakoff’s seminal Moral Politics (2002), which maintains that US political divisions are shaped and subsequently framed by competing interpretations of family-based moral systems realized through the NATION AS FAMILY conceptual metaphor. These practices create fundamentally different moral models for conservative and liberal politicians to articulate their values and worldviews in their discourse practices. It is further argued that while the use of these metaphors create a certain textual coherence that reflects ‘a systematized ideology’ (Chilton and Schäffner 2002), pronominal use further consolidates this conceptual coherence (Boyd 2013). The work aims to demonstrate the various cognitive and pragmatic factors that may trigger certain linguistic choices at a pronominal level (Wales 1996) especially in relation to the MORAL ACTION AS FAIR DISTRIBUTION metaphor. Furthermore, it is argued that it is precisely the hybrid nature of the genre of the debate that favours the emergence of the two models. Finally, the Italian data aim to demonstrate the complications involved in the remapping of these often conflicting realizations of the ST forced by both linguistic differences and a divergent application of the NATION AS FAMILY conceptual metaphor."

Sifting through the Trolls: 'Hating' in YouTube Political Commenting

While originally a forum to broadcast amateur video, YouTube has recently become a powerful means... more While originally a forum to broadcast amateur video, YouTube has recently become a powerful means for (re)broadcasting institutional texts and genres. An example of the successful exploitation of YouTube for political purposes is clearly represented by Barack Obama, whose widespread use of the medium began during the 2008 presidential and primary elections and continue to this day. This strategy has been particularly useful in reaching a wider public. For a politician to be successful on YouTube, however, users must be allowed to interact freely, both positively and negatively, with the medium. By allowing users to comment on to his videos, Obama and his team have clearly embraced this apparent openness with all of the risks this entails. A cursory glance at the comments to almost any video will in fact reveal examples of obscene, discriminating and racist language.

Text commenting is one of the YouTube affordances that foster user participation and co-creativity in both positive and negative ways. On the one hand, comments encourage the creation of ‘technologically-mediated public spaces’ (Wodak and Wright 2006) in which users can share ideas and opinions and interact with each other in constructive ways. On the other, since much of what is done on YouTube is anonymous, comments allow users total freedom of expression often with little self-control and respect for typical politeness strategies leading to what I call disruptive commenting. Such strategies include hating (Lange 2007), flaming and trolling and can be use for varying purposes.

This study focuses on disruptive behavior in the comments to the YouTube version of Barack Obama’s “Inaugural Address” (January 2009). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of two corpora drawn from the comments of the speech are aimed at uncovering instances of disruptive commenting and determining its role within the overall “conversation” (Herring 2010). The quantitative analysis is based on a 1.8 million word corpus and focuses on the obscene, discriminatory, homophobic and racist lexical items. A smaller corpus (500 comments) was also compiled to determine if and how disruptive commenters interact with other users, the video and/or Obama. Thus, the study is concerned with the ways in which such disruptive commenting affects participation and its roles in conversation. While some of the obscene language is clearly used “playfully” other examples would appear to purvey “racist, sexist, and extreme nationalist ideas and other forms of hate speech” (Thornborrow 2006).

Herring, S.C. 2010. “Computer-mediated conversation: Introduction and overview”. Language@Internet, 7. Retrieved 27 June 2011 from http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2010/2801/index_html/
Lange, P. 2007. “Commenting on comments: Investigating responses to antagonism on YouTube”. Paper presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology Conference. Tampa, Florida. Retrieved 27 June 2011 from http://sfaapodcasts.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/update-apr-17-lange-sfaa-paper-2007.pdf
Wodak, R. & S. Wright 2006. The European Union in Cyberspace. Journal of Language and Politics 5(2). 251–275.
Thornborrow, J. 2006. Media: Analysis and methods. In Brown, Keith (ed.) Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 616-623.

Recontextualization and (Mis)representation of Justice: Media Depictions of the Amanda Knox Case

"News reports by their very nature rely on extensive recontextualization of elements taken from o... more "News reports by their very nature rely on extensive recontextualization of elements taken from other texts, genres and discourses. The choice of these elements are determined by the goals, values, and interests of the journalist and newspaper (text producer). Recontextualization, then, can be seen as what Bell (1991) calls “layering” of earlier events according to the priorities of the current situation (in Fairclough 1995). This process, however, can be complicated when unfamiliar norms and systems (and their relevant frames and scripts), such as a foreign judicial system, and translations from a foreign language are involved (Cf. Schäffner & Bassnett 2010).

The murder of British exchange student, Meredith Kercher, in November 2007 and the subsequent conviction (December 2009) and acquittal (October 2011) of American, Amanda Knox, provide an interesting case study to analyze recontextualization on various levels for a number of different reasons. First, due to the sensationalism of the crime, it was discussed at length in both the US and UK press. Secondly, many of these reports are drawn on clearly nationalistic lines with the US press on Knox’s side and the UK against her. Thirdly, while the reports are often critical of the Italian judicial system, they do not always demonstrate a clear understanding of it workings and its differences from the Anglo-American system. A corpus-assisted empirical study is aimed at uncovering examples of recontextualization on various levels. From a theoretical point of the view, the work proposes a multi-level application of recontextualization that fully embraces the importance of translation.

References
Bell, A. 1991. The language of news media. Blackwell: London.
Fairclough, N. 1995. Media Discourse. Arnold: London.
Schäffner, C. & S. Bassnett. 2010. “Introduction – Politics, Media and Translations: Exploring synergies”. In Schäffner & Bassnett (eds.), Political Discourse, Media and Translation, 1–30. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars."

(New) Participatory Framework on YouTube? Commenter interaction in US Political Speeches

Although YouTube is often associated with the more playful aspects of new media due to its focus ... more Although YouTube is often associated with the more playful aspects of new media due to its focus on amateur and rebroadcast videos, recently it has become a powerful medium for (re)broadcasting institutional texts and genres, such as political speeches. An example of the successful exploitation of the medium for political purposes is represented by Barack Obama, whose team has made wide use of YouTube to disseminate various political genres.

As most new media, YouTube offers a number of affordances that allow users to interact with the medium as well as with each other. One of these, text commenting, expands the potential for text production (Savoie 2009) making it possible for the co-creation of distinct participatory roles and the reshaping of linguistic and social practices (Cf. Boyd Forthcoming). This article focuses on how roles are defined and (political) positions delimited through linguistic and non-linguistic means in these comments. Specifically, it addresses the different types of production/reception roles (Cf. Goffman 1981 & Levinson 1988) exploited by users for communication and how they differ from the traditional ones, the notion of ‘ratified’ and ‘unratified’ participants in the medium, and the ways in which the medium YouTube affects participation.

The empirical data are drawn from a sample of 502 threaded comments from Barack Obama’s “Inaugural Address” (January 2009) and are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. A quantitative analysis exhibited a high frequency of conversation-like features, such as first- and second-person pronouns, terms of address and addressivity, such as @ (Honeycutt & Herring 2009), user names and examples of “hating” (Lange 2007). A subsequent qualitative analysis of the corpus determined a high incidence of multi-participant ‘conversations’ (76.5%), with an average of 3.4 participants/conversation. The comments were further classified according to two general strategies: constructive and disruptive. While the former comments appear to be more focused on establishing political positions, encouraging/maintaining conversation and addressing individual users and the public in general, disruptive strategies include hating, flaming and/or trolling. From a theoretical perspective, the work proposes a reworking of the traditional participatory framework categories on the basis of new media. Thus, while the original speech and speaker (Obama) are seen to represent the primary level of production, the comments are seen as a secondary level. In between these two levels we can find the reception roles, which are exploited to various degrees by YouTube participants. Although these receptive roles consist of both ratified and unratified participants, the overwhelming majority remain on the periphery as mere watchers or ‘lurkers’. Finally, the work highlights the importance of the distinction between constructive and disruptive commenting, which is seen as crucial for the description of the participatory framework in new media.

References
Boyd, M.S. Forthcoming. “Participation and recontextualization in new media: political discourse analysis and YouTube”. In B. Kaal, E. Maks, & A. Van Elfrinkhof (Eds.), From text to political position: State-of-the-art approaches to estimating party positions.

Goffmann, E. 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Honeycutt, C. and S. Herring. 2009. “Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter”. Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.

Lange, P. 2007. “Commenting on comments: Investigating responses to antagonism on YouTube”. Paper presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology Conference. Tampa, Florida. Retrieved 27 June 2011 from http://sfaapodcasts.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/update-apr-17-lange-sfaa-paper-2007.pdf

Levinson, S. C. 1988. “Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman´s Concepts of Participations”. In: Drew, P. & Wootton, A. (Eds): Erving Goffman. Exploring the Interaction Order. Oxford.

Savoie, H. 2009. “John McCain gets Barackroll’d: Authorship, culture and community on YouTube. Proceedings from YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

English for Law: Theory and Practice, 2nd Revised Edition

English for Law: Theory and Practice, 2nd Edition, NelDiritto Editore, Molfetta, Italy, 2021

Since the publication of the first edition of English for Law in 2018 the world that we live in h... more Since the publication of the first edition of English for Law in 2018 the world that we live in has undergone a great many transformations. From the Trump presidency in the United States of America to the pandemic that still holds its deathly grip on much of the world at the time of writing, we have been living through strange and challenging times. One the most important of these changes, however, that has particularly affected Italy, the European Union and the entire world, has been the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. When the first edition was published the final outcomes of the Brexit process were still unknown. Over the course of the last three years agreements were reached that will have far-reaching effects for many years to come. While the UK no longer falls under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, it remains a contracting State under the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Despite rumors and fears of the contrary, English still remains one of the official languages of the EU sharing the position of “procedural language” together with French and German. While the future of English within the EU and its institutions is unknown, it is safe to say the language will remain a lingua franca within EU institutions and in its Member States for many years to come. Moreover, the UK’s almost fifty-year presence in the EU has left its mark on the language of the EU and the institutions themselves. The same could be said of the UK considering that most EU legislations was converted into UK law before the official withdrawal.

In this new edition I have attempted to correct the mistakes that remained in the first version. I would like to thank the attentive readers who pointed out many of these to me hoping that I have managed to rectify all of these shortcomings in the new edition. Secondly, I have updated some sections in the theoretical part of the book to address the changed role of the UK in the European Union. Thirdly, an entirely new section about the main differences between the common law and (European) civil law has been added. Finally, I have expanded the section on contracts. It is hoped that these additions will be useful to Italian learners who would like to learn more about the Anglo-American legal system but through the lens of their own legal system and that in the European Union. The methodology of the book remains unaltered: the theoretical sections are complemented by the practical chapters in the second part of the book. During the preparation of this second edition I continued to draw inspiration from all of my students and colleagues in Italy and in Europe.

English for law: Theory and Practice, 1st Edition

NelDiritto: Molfetta, 2018

The book provides an introduction to many important theoretical aspects of English legal language... more

The Changing Role of the Interpreter: Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards

by Michael S. Boyd, Marta Biagini, Christina Schäffner, Annette Miner, Şebnem Bahadır, Eugenia Dal Fovo, carlo marzocchi, and Helle Dam

The Changing Role of the Interpreter: Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards, Marta Biagini, Michael S. Boyd & Claudia Monacelli (Eds.), Routledge, 2017

This volume provides a critical examination of quality in the interpreting profession by deconstr... more This volume provides a critical examination of quality in the interpreting profession by deconstructing the complex relationship between professional norms and ethical considerations in a variety of sociocultural contexts. Over the past two decades, the profession has compelled scholars and practitioners to take into account numerous factors concerning the provision and fulfilment of interpreting. Building on ideas that began to take shape during an international conference on interpreter-mediated interactions, commemorating Miriam Shlesinger, held in Rome in 2013, the book explores some of these issues by looking at the notion of quality through inter-preters' self-awareness of norms at work across a variety of professional settings, contextualising norms and quality in relation to ethical behaviour in everyday practice. Contributions from top researchers in the field create a comprehensive picture of the dynamic role of the interpreter as it has evolved, with key topics revisited by the addition of new contributions from established scholars in the field, fostering discussion and further reflection on important issues in the field of interpreting. This volume will be key reading for scholars, researchers and graduate students in interpreting and translation studies, pragmatics, discourse analysis and multilingualism.

From news to comment: Tracing text trajectories in news reporting about the Amanda Knox trial

Transmedia Crime Stories The Trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the Globalised Media Sphere, Lieve Gies & Maria Bortoluzzoi (eds.)

This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian jus... more This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualize and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case.

Preaching from a distant pulpit: The European migrant crisis seen through a New York Times editorial and reader comments

On 18 September 2015, in the midst of the greatest movement of refugees and migrants that Europe ... more On 18 September 2015, in the midst of the greatest movement of refugees and migrants that Europe has seen since the Second World War, The New York Times published an editorial entitled “Europe should see refugees as a Boon, not as a Burden”. It should come as no surprise that the article received well over 450 comments from readers reflecting the myriad of opinions about the complex issue of (European) migration and refugees. This paper is interested in the discourses about (European) migration that emerge from both the editorial and reader comments, an important interactive feature of today’s online media ecology.
From a theoretical point of view the discussion is underpinned by two underlying notions: first, the news producers influence public discourse and “reinforce beliefs” among readers (Richardson, 2007, p. 13) and, second, news texts and the issues and discourses portrayed in them are received by the wider public “in ways which correspond to the concerns, priorities and goals of the current stage [of the news cycle]” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 48). The work is also partially inspired by Text World Theory and its claim that discourses result from “a deliberate and joint effort on the part of producer and receiver to build up a ‘world’ within which the propositions advanced are coherent” (Werth, 1995, p. 95). Such an approach can be useful in explaining the linguistic construction of multiple representations of society (Filardo-Llamas, 2014) emerging in text comment conversations.
By focusing on reader comments, the study attempts to determine readers’ varying opinions about the issue and how this reflects and/or diverges from the view(s) presented by the editorial. Through comments users can react to or interact with an overt opinion genre, thereby providing insight into how discourses about migration are perceived and recontexualized by a wider readership. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the two sets of empirical data (the editorial and reader comments) aim to demonstrate the various representations of society inherent in online newspaper discourse. In particular, the analysis focuses on the linguistic means adopted by text producers to align themselves with (proximization), or differentiate themselves from (distancing), different discourse/text worlds.

References
Fairclough, N. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Arnold.
Filardo-Llamas, L. 2014. Between the Union and a united Ireland: Shifting positions in Northern Ireland’s post-Agreement political discourse. In: B. Kaal, I. Maks & A. van Elfrinkhof, eds. From Text to Political Positions: Text Analysis Across Disciplines. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 207-224.
Richardson, J. E. 2007. Analysing newspapers: An approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Werth, P. 1995. ‘World enough, and time’: Deictic space and the interpretation of prose. In: P. Verdonk & J. Weber, eds. Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 181-206.

Towards a common model of Political Discourse Analysis

by Michael S. Boyd and Laura Filardo Llamas

CADAAD [Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines

Recent years have seen an upsurge of different approaches to discourse analysis, which could be d... more Recent years have seen an upsurge of different approaches to discourse analysis, which could be described as ranging from traditional discourse studies (mainly based on philosophical and sociological theories) to pure discourse analysis grounded in linguistic analysis. Although quite different at first sight, it can be argued that all these models share some common ground, which can be explained by establishing relations between the perspective of political discourse addressed in each model (Cf. Chilton & Schäffner 2002), the CDA stage that is most prominent (Cf. Fairclough 1989), and the communicative meta-function at the core of the analysis (Cf. Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). After presenting an overview of some of the most common approaches to the study of political discourse (based on Boyd & Filardo, forthcoming), in this paper we present our own proposal for a comprehensive approach to Political Discourse Analysis (PDA). The model, already drafted in Boyd & Filardo (forthcoming), envisions a three-tiered approach to PDA which considers (1) text-related features; (2) representation and (3) interaction. We argue that such a model is better suited to today's highly wired new media ecology in which text receivers play an increasingly important role in the dissemination process of (political) text and genre. Through the use of online features users react to and interact with political texts and the various genres they becoming a powerful force in reshaping linguistic and social practice.