IBERICA

Academic blogs have become increasingly important as a means of disseminating research and attracting wider non-academic audiences or likeminded peers to new areas of scholarly activity. The heterogeneity and unfamiliarity of the audience means that writers need to present information in perhaps unfamiliar ways, creating interest and encouraging readers to engage with the topics. In this paper, we explore academics' perceptions of this challenge and particularly how they go about establishing a relationship which will hook and then persuade these new readers. Based on semi-structured interviews with 22 UK academics from a variety of disciplines, we explore the perceptions and practices of writers and how these differ from when they are engaged in writing research papers. We also compare their perceptions with academics who routinely read blogs as part of their scholarly work. The results show key ways in which writers go about interacting with readers and how they seek to draw t...

This volume originates from the editors' interest in one of the most relevant fields of research these days: Intercultural and International Business Communication. The needs of the business world to communicate effectively at an international level in order to overcome language differences have proved to be a fascinating topic for many scholars. International business discourse is culturally-situated and therefore context-dependent, and all three -- discourse, culture and context -- play a key role in the communication process. The present contributions analyse this topic under the perspective of theory, research and teaching. Different scholars have offered their views on the subject, presenting contributions on different areas related to business communication all over the world.

espanolEste articulo describe y reflexiona sobre la tarea de desarrollar, disenar y evaluar un proyecto educativo para mejorar la competencia de lectura academica en ingles de los alumnos de primer curso de universidad en Ghana. El estudio, realizado en el marco de la investigacion de diseno educativo (EDR por sus siglas en ingles), describe el desarrollo de un proyecto en tres areas de conocimiento diferentes: Literatura, Quimica y Linguistica. El estudio demuestra que encontrar soluciones para los problemas identificados es un proceso altamente complejo que se esta fuertemente influenciado por factores contextuales como la motivacion de estudiantes y docentes, las instalaciones en las aulas o la calidad de los materiales docentes. Tras varios ciclos de evaluacion formativa, solo el diseno del curso de Linguistica fue totalmente efectivo en terminos de diseno, evaluacion y desarrollo experimental y produjo una mejora significativa de la competencia en lectura academica de los alumn...

Resumen: La atenuación en artículos de revisión odontológicos en español: estudio exploratorio.(Morales, Oscar Alberto; Cassany, Daniel y González Peña, Carolina) Resumen Describimos el uso de estrategias de atenuación en 40 artículos de revisión (AR), publicados en español en revistas iberoamericanas entre 1994 y 2004.

This paper addresses the interrelationship of languages and cultures in the process of learning/teaching English in Translation Faculties in Spain. The fact that languages cannot be separated from their social and cultural contexts of use is widely recognised nowadays. In addition, for the last decade, intercultural language learning has been highlighted as a main objective of language acquisition, the term �intercultural� implying a back-and-forth movement across languages and cultures, a development of an understanding of one�s own language and culture in relation to a second one. Building on a comprehensive review of the literature in the field of culture in language teaching, intercultural competence, and intercultural learning and teaching, the present paper aims at providing a framework for designing a curriculum for intercultural language learning and cultural mediation in Translation Faculties in Spain

espanolLa emocion forma parte de todas las formas de la experiencia humana, y, como tal, juega un papel importante en todos los tipos de discurso, incluyendo el discurso profesional. En el siglo xxI mas que en ninguna otra epoca, la canalizacion y expresion apropiadas de las emociones en entornos laborales se ha convertido en un signo de inteligencia emocional, gran liderazgo e (inocuas) habilidades de persuasion. a pesar de ello, la persuasion se puede usar tambien para manipular las emociones de las personas. Meibauer (2018) explica que la mentira y el engano juegan un papel importante en los negocios y el comercio, lo cual es obviamente el caso del negocio de las noticias falsas (o mejor dicho, falseadas) o “fake news”. En este articulo investigamos el genero de las noticias falseadas a traves del analisis cualitativo sociopragmatico de ejemplos de este tipo de noticias en ingles, y mostramos como esta forma de periodismo apunta a la manipulacion de las emociones de los lectores,...

Previous quantitative studies suggest that the burden researchers who use English as an additional language perceive when writing research articles (RAs) for publication in English (as L2) is 24% greater than the burden they perceive when they write RAs for publication in their L1. It remains unclear precisely which aspects of research article (RA) writing in English present these writers with the greatest challenge and just why they perceive this increase in difficulty. A structured questionnaire comprising thirty-seven questions about researchers' publication experiences in scientific journals in English and in Spanish was designed and sent out to all (n = 8,794) Spanish postdoctoral researchers at one research-only institution and four universities in Spain, yielding responses from 1,717 researchers. Our first results show that the discussion is the section that is perceived as more difficult to write for English-medium journals, across the four broad knowledge areas in a way...

This paper presents a rhetorical analysis of the Introductions of Computer Science (CS) research articles from a specialized corpus with reference to "Announcement of Principal Findings" and "Statement of Value" steps within the framework of the "Create A Research Space" (CARS) model (Swales, 2004), conducted through corpus-based techniques. The results show that discoursal practices in CS are result-oriented and in various ways highlight the writers' contribution. The results are explicitly described with embedded "value" statements in the elaborate explanations of the nature of the present research. The common linguistic indicators used for this purpose are "contribution", "efficient" and "novel". The discussion concludes with the suggestion to amend the CARS model for CS writers.

Metaphor has been shown to play an important role in business science discourse. Yet, previous corpus-based studies only investigated a pre-selected list of metaphoric expressions, potentially rendering the analysis incomplete. Furthermore, some studies which only focused on lexis did not analyse how the lexical items may construct business concepts in terms of scenarios. The purpose of this research is to investigate metaphor used to construct business concepts in business research articles. 42 business research articles published in 2009-2010 from five journals ranked in the top-ten according to the 2007 journal impact factors (Thompson Reuters, 2008) constitute the data of this study. Semantic annotation software USAS (Rayson, 2008) was used to assist in the retrieval of metaphoric expressions. Furthermore, manual analysis of concordances was done to find metaphorical expressions that had not been captured by the semantic tags. The analysis of these metaphoric expressions was bas...

This paper describes research carried out through electronic surveys of three groups of translators working in different areas of expertise (legal, medical and technical) that aimed to discover their socio-professional profile, their opinions both on corpora and other documentary sources, and the use they make of them. Certain characteristic features emerged from the analysis of data on the three population groups, regarding years of experience, documentary sources used and most usual clients. For example, even if legal translators seem more satisfied with the documentary sources available, medical translators never use translation memories, and technical translators often refer to thesauri. In any event, regardless of their area of activity, most subjects feel the need for a specialized corpus combining formal, terminological-lexical, macrostructural and conceptual aspects, as well as contextual information. That is the reason why the GENTT 3.0 Corpus is believed to meet the expect...

espanolEste articulo describe y reflexiona sobre la tarea de desarrollar, disenar y evaluar un proyecto educativo para mejorar la competencia de lectura academica en ingles de los alumnos de primer curso de universidad en Ghana. El estudio, realizado en el marco de la investigacion de diseno educativo (EDR por sus siglas en ingles), describe el desarrollo de un proyecto en tres areas de conocimiento diferentes: Literatura, Quimica y Linguistica. El estudio demuestra que encontrar soluciones para los problemas identificados es un proceso altamente complejo que se esta fuertemente influenciado por factores contextuales como la motivacion de estudiantes y docentes, las instalaciones en las aulas o la calidad de los materiales docentes. Tras varios ciclos de evaluacion formativa, solo el diseno del curso de Linguistica fue totalmente efectivo en terminos de diseno, evaluacion y desarrollo experimental y produjo una mejora significativa de la competencia en lectura academica de los alumn...

The explicit use of metaphor in the EFL classroom has been documented to enhance the communicative skills of learners (Cameron & Low, 1999; Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Low, 1999; Littlemore & Low, 2006). ESP learners with a technical background, however, are not usually trained on the presence of metaphor in their knowledge field, or on its use. The aim of this paper is to analyze the unprompted use of metaphor in the verbal responses given by a group of Spanish civil engineering undergraduates when depicting visuals related to their area of expertise. The responses of the students were obtained from a questionnaire completed in the classroom which was later crosschecked with the answers given by a group of professional civil engineers. This was done to compare the occurrence of metaphor as a descriptive verbalizer in the academic and the professional contexts. The results confirm the use of general metaphor in both groups, and the use of field-specific metaphor particularly in the profes...

While the typology of metonymy has remained relatively stable in the literature, there is still ongoing discussion about metaphor varieties and their distinction from the former. Some theorists (Radden 2003; Chen and Lai 2012) have argued that language must be approached as stages along a continuum, with literal and metaphoric uses at both ends, and metonymy somewhere in the middle. However, in L2 contexts, particularly in specialised domains, the nature of such figurative uses can be obscure to learners, as they often follow the received models in their fields of study, and language tends to be perceived as primarily literal. This actually distorts the position of language elements within the metonymy-metaphor continuum, and it prevents linking figurative and non-figurative uses into a more comprehensive use of language as a richer tool for communication. Using a three-dimensional taxonomy for metaphor, which takes into account communicative, conceptual and linguistic factors, and ...

El gran acontecimiento historico del descubrimiento de America coincidio con la fecha de publicacion de la primera gramatica castellana de Elio Antonio de Nebrija en 1492. A partir de ese momento, la lengua espanola comenzo a expandirse y a ganar importancia en el terreno economico, diplomatico, politico, literario, etc. Con el paso del tiempo estas mismas razones hicieron que la preponderancia de esta lengua fuera transfiriendose a la lengua inglesa, lengua de mayor relevancia en la actualidad. No obstante, existen en la actualidad mas de 400 millones de personas que tienen el espanol como lengua materna, siendo asi, tras el chino mandarin, la segunda lengua mas hablada del mundo. Por otro lado, es tambien la segunda lengua mas estudiada despues del ingles, y es uno de los seis idiomas oficiales de la ONU. Es asi que en la actualidad existe un gran numero de manuales para la ensenanza del espanol como lengua extranjera. Entre ellos destacan los dedicados al espanol general y un cre...

The last 20 years have seen increasing interest in the way in which meaning is made in different professional and academic disciplines. Central to this issue is the notion of disciplinary values, that is, qualities which define what is prized or stigmatised by different professional communities. In the present paper, the notion of disciplinary values is used to examine the way legal writers communicate meaning in different genres. To this end, six adjective/adverb sets which have a prominent place in legal discourse ("clear/ly", "important/ly", "reasonable/ly", "appropriate/ly", "correct/ly" and "proper/ly") are identified. Their collocates and semantic preferences are studied in four 500,000-word corpora consisting of texts from the area of commercial law: academic journal articles, case law, legislation, and legal documents. Although the frequency and use of "clear/ly" and "important/ly" appear not to ...

This paper addresses academic disciplinary writing practices, and how these are affected by changes in the landscape of Higher Education in the UK. After exploring the definition and understanding of the notion of 'discipline', the paper presents research from an ESRC-funded research project studying academics' everyday writing practices, working closely with academics across different disciplines and different kinds of higher education institutions. The changing context of Higher Education in the UK is presented, in particular the emergence of new kinds of managerial practices which shape and co-ordinate the everyday writing work of academics. The paper shows that while some disciplines, such as History and Pure Mathematics, are associated with clearly-defined writing practices, while others are more diverse. It discusses how managerial practices, particularly those driven by centralised national research evaluations, affect different disciplines in different ways.

This study was an attempt to investigate the English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) needs of Iranian non-native speakers of English (NNSE) researchers. To this end, a questionnaire, semi-structured interview, and a corpus of the referees' comments were used. The corpus comprised 621 comments drawn from 78 reviews on 45 full-length manuscripts from three broad disciplinary groups, i.e. engineering, science, and humanities. The results of corpus analysis suggest that, regardless of discipline, Iranian NNSE researchers, as off-network researchers, seem to have more problems with the use of language than with technical contents when writing a scientific manuscript. Moreover, the results of corpus analysis show that coping with syntactic and lexical use of English was much more problematic than discourse and rhetoric. Whereas science researchers believed in the primacy of lexis and syntax over discourse and rhetoric due to the existence of some definite moves in their paper...

In the I Faculty at the University of Rome �La Sapienza� Medical School, one of the several methodology courses aims at developing approaches by physicians to patient queries. One such course comprises several disciplines: Pathology, Immunology, Medical Statistics, Internal Medicine and English, with the specific aim of furnishing students, all Italian speakers, with skills for searching and evaluating the medical literature for answers to patient queries regarding risks and effectiveness of therapy. This paper describes the integration of English into a Methodology Course and delineates how the language component uses a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach to train students to write the highly specific genre of journal abstracts for medical experimental research articles. A corpus of student writing is presented and discussed with the aim of furnishing one didactic model for language teaching within the Italian Medical Curriculum.

The enormous number of anglicisms used everyday in Spanish language generates lexical interference between both languages. This paper provides a semantic analysis of the changes in lexis this language contact brings about, through the different linguistic mechanisms of inter-language adaptation involved. When these anglicisms come from the current trend to include English words in Spanish discourse, we also add appropriate equivalents which could avoid the excess of redundant neologisms. A glossary of the most habitual terms derived from interference in English and Spanish in the economic field is included as a result of this study. Resumen Los anglicismos económicos: Adaptación al sistema lingüístico español La ingente cantidad de anglicismos que cada día entran en el idioma español a través del inglés en el ámbito económico produce una serie de interferencias entre ambos idiomas. En este artículo se realiza un estudio semántico de tales interferencias a través de los mecanismos li...

Much of the research into the topic of financial crises has centered mainly on verbal metaphors whereas a visual and multimodal aspect of the phenomenon has remained rather underrepresented. Within the theoretical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis pertaining not only to verbal (Charteris-Black & Musolff, 2003; Charteris-Black, 2004) but also to pictorial and multimodal discourse (Forceville, 1996 & 2008; Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009), in this paper we focus on both linguistic and pictorial realisations of the euro currency which pertain to the broader topic of the Eurozone crisis. Closely modelling our methodology on Bounegru and Forceville (2011), we analyse seven covers of the weekly magazine The Economist published in the period 2010-2012 which relate to the Eurozone crisis and belong to the LIQUID and MOVEMENT domains respectively. The purpose of our investigation is to answer the following two questions: (1) how do verbal and visual modes of metaphorical representatio...

Researchers in the area of marketing and market research in Spanish universities have a special preference for the publication of their articles in international journals. The language used by most of these journals is English, which often represents a further difficulty for researchers, since it is not only the quality of the research that is going to be assessed by the referees of the journals, but also the accuracy in the use of the English language. For this reason, the analysis of the academic English used in articles has become a field of research both for the area of marketing and market research, and for the area of English philology. The aim of this paper is to identify the specific traits

The purpose of this article is to direct the attention of the specialists towards the notion of linguistic register in order to promote new systematic methods of analysing its current span of variation. Despite its still unclear definition and frequent amalgamation with other varieties, the movement across registers is one of the most effective and frequent communicative tools that a language has to adapt itself to the diverse private, social andprofessional settings. However, this type of variation is one of the most difficult to be perceived, learnt and correctly used by foreign speakers and, in general, all non-effective communicators. As this article shows in the first part, the existing theory and models of analysis need to be reviewed and updated in order to provide clearer distinctions and more practical parameters of research. The second part of the article proposes a basic method of approaching current register variation systematically, emphasizing the most controversial as...

Previous quantitative studies suggest that the burden researchers who use English as an additional language perceive when writing research articles (RAs) for publication in English (as L2) is 24% greater than the burden they perceive when they write RAs for publication in their L1. It remains unclear precisely which aspects of research article (RA) writing in English present these writers with the greatest challenge and just why they perceive this increase in difficulty. A structured questionnaire comprising thirty-seven questions about researchers� publication experiences in scientific journals in English and in Spanish was designed and sent out to all (n = 8,794) Spanish postdoctoral researchers at one research-only institution and four universities in Spain, yielding responses from 1,717 researchers. Our first results show that the discussion is the section that is perceived as more difficult to write for English-medium journals, across the four broad knowledge areas in a way tha...

The need to name and communicate to others new concepts in specific domains of human activity leads to the formation of new terms. However, many of the technical words in English are not new from the point of view of form. They rather derive from the common stock of general language: new lexical units are built from already existing forms and/or meanings. The original form is used for naming a new concept by adding a distinctive specialized lexical feature while keeping some semantic features of the original concept. In this paper, we aim at explaining and visualizing the nature of some of the processes that allow for the construction of new senses in technical words through a branching and expanding process, as explained in the lexical constellation model. The analysis is performed on three words widely used in telecommunication English: "bus", "hub" and "chip". The understanding of the process may be of great help for learners of ESP in general and te...

En el presente estudio describiremos el género de los diarios de viaje escritos por particulares. Empezaremos por situar los diarios de viaje en la taxonomía de textos turísticos elaborada en Calvi (2010). Luego describiremos más en detalle las diferentes dimensiones discursivas del género: los objetivos comunicativos, los movimientos retóricos más típicos, y la manera en que son presentados los participantes en el evento comunicativo. Los materiales empíricos provienen de un corpus piloto de diarios de viaje sobre Bélgica, escritos por turistas hispanohablantes, y publicados en el blog de comunidad <Losviajeros.com>.

One of the objectives of the so-called cyberpragmatics is to determine the inferential strategies of contextualisation which Internet users perform when they produce and interpret other users’ messages. Leaving aside a static view of context, according to which communicative exchanges take place in a pre-determined spatial-temporal location, today’s view of context is much more dynamic, of inferential nature, and which starts immediately after the linguistic input has been decoded. Besides, there are multiple sources from which the inferential system can gather information, whose activation is guided by the general search for relevance to which human minds are constantly geared. In previous research, this dynamic view of context has been useful in order to explain communicative strategies such as the ones taking place in chat rooms or through e-mails. In this paper, our attention will be focussed on strategies of contextualisation which are intended to form and stabilise the user’s ...