Unit IV: Rome IUSM

Unit IV- ROME IUSM

EVANGELISTI ALLORI Paola

The general aim of the Rome Research Unit is to verify whether and to what extent the native linguistic and cultural patterns influence text written in English by Italian legal practitioners involved in international activity or, alternatively, whether and to what extent English may have a backwash effect on the texts produced in Italian by the same practitioners. The objective is to identify those textual, semantic, pragmatic and pragmalinguistic features in the legal genre ‘Award' which may be indicative of altered or contaminated cultural identity in intercultural communication.

More specifically, our focus is on the linguistic and cultural traits inherent in the production of English/Italian awards in legal sports texts and on the linguistic devices indicative of cultural negotiation between the two systems.

For this purpose a specialised corpus has been assembled, consisting of English awards issued by the International Arbitration Tribunal and of Italian awards issued by the CONI Chamber of Conciliation and Arbitration.

The linguistic investigation includes:

a) a conceptual analysis of terms expressing key concepts in the specific genre;

b) a pragmatic analysis in terms of the rhetorical functions (moves and sub-moves) typical of the genre;

c) a pragmalinguistic analysis for the identification of the thematic structure in the two sets of texts.