Unit III : Naples

Unit III - NAPLES

DI MARTINO Gabriella

The Naples Research Unit aims at analysing self-promotional discourse features alongside with informative and advertising strategies enacted by the European Union to address its target audience within specific contexts.

Particular attention is given to identification of discursive practices used by the EU to directly communicate with its citizens, and investigation of the English language in its diverse realisations.

Different text and media types have been selected dealing with the thematic areas related to social policies, education, Union enlargement, and the European Constitution. Within each thematic area the Local Research Unit collects and stores both web pages meant for a wider general audience and those addressed to an ever more specialised readership. Data (handbooks, leaflets, posters, information and advertising publications, TV ads, videos, etc.) have been collected from the EUROPA website and local EU information centres.

The Research Unit therefore focusses on setting up a critical model which, on the basis of the collected data, allows an evaluation of the strategies used by the European Union in publishing and promoting initiatives set up in favour of its citizens. Such semiotic and linguistic model takes into consideration not only the informative and advertising aspect of the process, but also the semantic, pragmatic and ideological implications due to the presence, within a wide audience, of specific professional identities.

Moreover, a statistical survey by means of a questionnaire will be set up in order to detect the perception of the European community image in Great Britain where the concept of European identity necessarily clashes with the historical and well established idea of a supranational identity other than Europe. Such collective identity is, as matter of fact, part of the polysemic adjective British, which exemplifies the slow and complex national multicultural transformation of Britain.