Le metafore della crisi nella stampa economica spagnola e italiana: un'analisi corpus-based

La crisis financiera y económica que estalló en Europa en 2008 ha sido un auténtico campo de pruebas para recurrir a todo tipo de recursos expresivos, a la hora de explicar la compleja naturaleza de la coyuntura económica. De esta manera, lejos de ser un artificio de la ornamentación retórica, la metáfora adquiere un sentido simbólico que permite expresar conceptos de forma natural y a veces descontada. El objetivo de este estudio es analizar la utilización de las metáforas en la prensa económica española e italiana en el discurso sobre la crisis en Europa, a través de un análisis basado en corpus. Además, se intenta descubrir semejanzas y diferencias a la vez que se destacan aspectos originales en ambos idiomas. La hipótesis general, de acuerdo con investigaciones previas sobre las metáforas económicas, es que cabe esperar una frecuente utilización de las metáforas. La tésis está dividida en cuatro capítulos. En el primer capítulo se desglosan las principales teorías elaboradas acerca de la metáfora, desde un enfoque clásico hasta una visión cognitivista que se desarrolla a partir de la Teoría de la Metáfora Conceptual propuesta por Lakoff y Johnson (1980). El segundo capítulo se centra en la metáfora económica y los estudios basados en corpus sobre la metáfora, para comprender los diferentes dominios fuente utilizados en el discurso económico y financiero. En el tercer capítulo se proporciona toda información relativa al método de creación y a la metodología de análisis de los corpus, llevada a cabo a través de una minuciosa recolección de artículos de la prensa italiana y española en los diarios Il Sole 24 Ore y Expansión. Los artículos han sido analizados a través del programa informático AntConc. Finalmente, en el cuarto capítulo se presenta el análisis de las metáforas detectadas en los dos corpus periodísticos y los resultados obtenidos, en lo que respecta a semejanzas y diferencias en los dos idiomas. Por esta razón, se seleccionan cuatro dominios fuente: dos más frecuentes (medicina; naturaleza) y dos menos frecuentes (construcción; mecanismos). Además, se hace hincapié en algunos ejemplos del uso de metáforas muy utilizadas, o bien de casos novedosos o creativos en ambos idiomas, con miras a descubrir los principales dominios fuente y los contextos de uso en la cobertura de la crisis. Los resultados que surgen a raíz del análisis muestran una profunda difusión del dominio fuente de la medicina y de la naturaleza en ambos idiomas y una consiguiente creatividad metafórica. En general, el corpus italiano presenta una mayor creatividad metafórica y cadenas metafóricas 138 con respecto al corpus español, a raíz de los hapaxes detectados. Asimismo, el corpus español presenta más casos creativos en el dominio de la construcción con respecto al italiano. El análisis ha permitido confirmar de forma empírica la hipótesis de gran uniformidad en el uso de la metáfora en los distintos periódicos, aun considerando algunas diferencias entre los dos idiomas. Cabe reconocer que, debido al tamaño limitado de los corpus creados, dicho estudio representa un campo de pruebas ampliable y los resultados presentados abren una puerta a nuevas oportunidades de investigación en el discurso económico y financiero o incluso en la enseñanza de la economía.

Occupational titles and supposed gender-neutrality : A corpus-based diachronic study on gender-neutral occupational titles in American English

Traditionally, some occupational titles have been explicitly marked for the gender of the group dominating the occupation. For example, in male-dominated occupations, titles often end with -man. However, since the second-wave feminist movement, several of the previously gender-biased titles have been supplemented by new, gender-neutral titles. Previous research has shown a discrepancy between researchers regarding the implications of these new titles. Some argue that the gender-neutral titles are only used for female referents, whereas others claim that gender-neutral titles, especially for male- dominated occupations, tend to still presuppose maleness. In the present paper, a corpus-based study is conducted on a few selected occupational titles. The aim is to investigate whether the gender-neutral alternatives have increased in usage over time, and whether the gender-biased ones have decreased. In addition, the study aims at examining whether the gender-neutral forms tend to be used primarily for women or men. The present study is corpus-based, examining the particular terms in the TIME Magazine Corpus. The results of the study show that there has been an increase of the gender-neutral forms since their introduction to English, and that they are primarily used when there is no explicit gender referencing. Proposed explanations for these results are that it may depend on the type of work involved in the selected occupations, as well as them being male-dominated. Furthermore, the results indicate that the gender- neutral terms are opted for when gender is either unknown or irrelevant for the context. 

A corpus-based analysis of transfer effects and connected speech processes in Vietnamese English

This paper presents a corpus-based descriptive analysis of the most prevalent transfer effects and connected speech processes observed in a comparison of 11 Vietnamese English speakers (6 females, 5 males) and 12 Australian English speakers (6 males, 6 females) over 24 grammatical paraphrase items. The phonetic processes are segmentally labelled in terms of IPA diacritic features using the EMU speech database system with the aim of labelling departures from native-speaker pronunciation. An analysis of prosodic features was made using ToBI framework. The results show many phonetic and prosodic processes which make non-native speakers’ speech distinct from native ones. The corpusbased methodology of analysing foreign accent may have implications for the evaluation of non-native accent, accented speech recognition and computer assisted pronunciation- learning.

Political discourse analysis from the point of view of translation studies

Political discourse very often relies on translation. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA), however, has not yet taken full account of the phenomenon of translation. This paper argues that the disciplines of Translation Studies (TS) and PDA can benefit from closer cooperation. It starts by presenting examples of authentic translations of political texts, commenting on them from the point of view of TS. These examples concern political effects caused by specific translation solutions; the processes by which information is transferred via translation to another culture; and the structure and function of equally valid texts in their respective cultures. After a brief survey of the discipline of Translation Studies, the paper concludes with outlining scope for interdisciplinary cooperation between PDA and TS. This is illustrated with reference to an awareness of product features, multilingual texts, process analysis, and the politics of translation.

The discourse of climate change: a corpus-based approach

Based on Goffman’s definition that frames are general ‘schemata of interpretation’ that people use to ‘locate, perceive, identify, and label’, other scholars have used the concept in a more specific way to analyze media coverage. Frames are used in the sense of organizing devices that allow journalists to select and emphasise topics, to decide ‘what matters’ (Gitlin 1980). Gamson and Modigliani (1989) consider frames as being embedded within ‘media packages’ that can be seen as ‘giving meaning’ to an issue. According to Entman (1993), framing comprises a combination of different activities such as: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Previous research has analysed climate change with the purpose of testing Downs’s model of the issue attention cycle (Trumbo 1996), to uncover media biases in the US press (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004), to highlight differences between nations (Brossard et al. 2004; Grundmann 2007) or to analyze cultural reconstructions of scientific knowledge (Carvalho and Burgess 2005). In this paper we shall present data from a corpus linguistics-based approach. We will be drawing on results of a pilot study conducted in Spring 2008 based on the Nexis news media archive. Based on comparative data from the US, the UK, France and Germany, we aim to show how the climate change issue has been framed differently in these countries and how this framing indicates differences in national climate change policies.

A new venture in corpus-based lexicography: towards a dictionary of academic English

This paper asserts the increasing importance of academic English in an increasingly Anglophone world, and looks at the differences between academic English and general English, especially in terms of vocabulary. The creation of wordlists has played an important role in trying to establish the academic English lexicon, but these wordlists are not based on appropriate data, or are implemented inappropriately. There is as yet no adequate dictionary of academic English, and this paper reports on new efforts at Aston University to create a suitable corpus on which such a dictionary could be based.

A corpus-based investigation of junk emails

Almost everyone who has an email account receives from time to time unwanted emails. These emails can be jokes from friends or commercial product offers from unknown people. In this paper we focus on these unwanted messages which try to promote a product or service, or to offer some “hot” business opportunities. These messages are called junk emails. Several methods to filter junk emails were proposed, but none considers the linguistic characteristics of junk emails. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic features of a corpus of junk emails, and try to decide if they constitute a distinct genre. Our corpus of junk emails was build from the messages received by the authors over a period of time. Initially, the corpus consisted of 1563, but after eliminating the duplications automatically we kept only 673 files, totalising just over 373,000 tokens. In order to decide if the junk emails constitute a different genre, a comparison with a corpus of leaflets extracted from BNC and with the whole BNC corpus is carried out. Several characteristics at the lexical and grammatical levels were identified.

Talking at cross-purposes? The missing link between feminist linguistics and translation studies

Following decades of feminist linguistic activism, and as a result of a greater awareness of the vital role that non-sexist language plays in achieving social equality, different campaigns were launched in many countries leading to a more frequent use of so-called inclusive language. Bringing this together with current theoretical approaches to translation studies which have been defining translation as an ideological act of intercultural mediation since the 1990s, this article seeks to examine to what extent feminist linguistics have had any influence on translation studies. My purpose is to assess whether particular feminist linguistic interventions in vogue when writing ‘original’ texts within the realm of the source language are also adopted when (re)writing ‘translated’ texts in the target language, bearing in mind the double (con)textual responsibility that translators have towards the source and the target (con)texts. I will examine the arguments for and against the use of inclusive language in (literary) translation through an analysis of the ‘ideological struggle’ that emerged from two ideologically disparate rewritings of gender markers into Galician of the British bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon (2003), focusing on the ideological, poetic and economic pressures that (still) define the professional practice of translation. It is my contention that the close scrutiny of these conflicting arguments will shed light not only on the existing gap between the theory and practice of translation, but may be also indicative of a possible ‘missing link’ between feminist approaches to linguistics and to translation studies.

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed.