Unit III: Naples

MINISTERO DELL’ISTRUZIONE, DELL’UNIVERSITÀ E DELLA RICERCA 

PROGRAMMI DI RICERCA SCIENTIFICA DI RILEVANTE INTERESSE NAZIONALE 

RESEARCH PROJECT ON A NATIONAL LEVEL 

Anno 2002 - prot . 2002104353 

INTERCULTURAL DISCOURSE IN DOMAIN-SPECIFIC ENGLISH 

Project of the University of Naples 

Interculturality and re-encoding within the E.U. 

This project comes out of a settled tradition in ESP research in which the members of the Local Unit have been engaged producing results in the study of English in various domains: law, politics, economics and the media. 

Notably, parliamentary communication within the E.U. will be investigated as a discoursive practice from a pragmalinguistic viewpoint with particular reference to the crosscultural component within texts in parallel versions and the hermeneutic-interpretative issues related to sociopolitical and legal matters in the speeches/debates selected. An analysis of adaptation and translation devices will be needed alongside with contextualising the speeches/debates in the corresponding codes. 

The centralising role of English as an instrument of “global” communication is apparently matched by the specific nature of cultural and discoursive practices. The aim of this project is to highlight cultural and discoursive practices within the genre under scrutiny and to invalidate the hypothesis of a levelling English monoculture. 

To this purpose, the texts which constitute the corpus will be contextualised as expressions of intercultural and interlinguistic mediation within the discoursive practices in the E. U., following an approach which is both theoretical and practical as it draws from recent developments in translation studies and discourse analysis as well as the results achieved by some members of the local unit as translators/interpreters in the E.U.