The present study starts from the observation that there are Islamic concepts of Finance, such as ‘Riba’ which is to be explored here, that are totally inaccessible to Western students of Finance. The study introduces a cognitive-functional approach (Halliday 1985) to the analysis of three selected mini-corpora of academic texts on Finance in English. This analysis is aimed to highlight the varying degree(s) of discourse hybridization, this implying a focus on acceptable concepts and textual structures for the prospective Western readers of the texts.

The present study investigates the hybridization processes in a corpus of advertisements in English that point to the popularization of the scientific/technical discourse of the sports shoes or ‘sneakers’. Hybridization involves a two-level process of discourse popularization (cf. Gotti 1996), and the method adopted is based on a comparative critical analysis of a corpus of popularizing text-types, which aims at considering the communicative functions realized by the language resources in the promotion of this particular product, Nike ‘sneakers’.

This paper introduces a socio-cognitive enquiry into the analysis of a corpus of academic textbooks on Islamic Finance in English addressing Western university students. The focus is on the ongoing process of hybridization between conflicting Western and Islamic generic norms (cf. Swales 1990; Hyland 2000) taking shape in the academic discourse of Islamic Finance. A comparative critical analysis (cf. Halliday 1985; Fairclough 1995, van Dijk 2008) will be therefore carried out on the structure of this emerging academic genre with the objective to identify (a) specific cross-cultural ‘identity differences’ and (b) degrees of ‘hybridization’

This chapter reports a case study examining a corpus of English texts used to promote tourist facilities and local products on the web, in a perspective that identifies as luxury and refinement in the typical aspects of Salento not only the quality of the food, the beauty of the landscapes and of the tourist accommodation facilities, but also the amount of time required to fully enjoy them, the local traditions and the exclusivity of the whole experience. This chapter focuses on those conceptual, metaphorical and linguistic aspects that refer to the notions of “slowness”, “tradition” and “exclusivity” found in the total experience enjoyed by the tourist, highlighting the best examples of product advertising and explaining the persuasive intent of the linguistic devices which can make them competitive in international contexts. Within the same perspective of international competition, the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is examined, as it is considered here as a communicative (explanatory and persuasive) tool among non-native English speakers. Thus, its main aim is to enable communication through its conceptual and emotional leverage effects, which are manifested in the cognitive and communicative aspects of the message.

The present study examines a corpus of legal texts from the EU regarding Immigration and Political Asylum, that refer to the administrative practices and the procedures for claiming asylum, which involve immigrants and asylum seekers between the European Member States. At the core of the study, there is the awareness that these specialized text-types are mainly built on pragmatic strategies which mainly reflect Western routines. Such an issue is thus thought to be the main cause of misunderstandings between the EU and the mediators and the migrants, especially in terms of the ELF dynamics that are involved in the legal processes of discourse interpretation. Hence, the need to activate processes of hybridization in the form here of written reformulations, aimed at making the texts more accessible (Widdowson 1979) to the empirical receivers of the documents. As for the methodology, a Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995) is applied in order to point out the possible incongruities of the original statements, and thus to propose new reformulations.

The paper introduces a socio-cognitive enquiry into the hybridization processes occurring in the academic discourse of Islamic Finance as represented in a corpus of recently-published textbooks written in English as a ‘specialized lingua franca’ dealing with financial topics (cf. Iqbal and Mirakhor, 2011). Hybridization involves the structural, textual and pragmatic choices identified in such textbooks reflecting as they do a specific attempt on the part of the text producers to make financial concepts informed by Shariah practices accessible (Widdowson, 1991) and acceptable to Western/International university students, especially those from the expanding circle. Therefore, facilitating strategies such as definitions, periphrasis and repetitions of noun phrases shall be explored as triggers for Western students’ processes of schema redefinition, of cross-cultural revision of textuality standards (de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981) and of simplification rules (van Dijk, 1980) which actually define a specialized ELF variety of hybrid academic discourse.

This paper explores the socio-cultural and linguistic characterisations of a group of migrant workers in both original English and Italian dubbed/subtitled versions of the migration movie It’s a Free World... (In questo mondo libero..., Ken Loach, 2007). Scenes are selected on the basis of their relevance to the main objective of the study, i.e. to analyse the pragmalinguistic aspects of the perception of the migrant workers in their work context characterized by power-asymmetry relationships between high-status SE speakers and low-status immigrants. It is argued that in this movie ELF variations should be identified not only in the lexico-syntactic properties of the language, but in the asymmetrical relations identified in the dialogic ‘moves’ (Guido, 2008) and distinctive traits of the speech (brevity of sentences, disfluency of rhythm) also within a comparative-discourse framework (cf. Brown & Yule, 1983; Provenzano, 2008) as well as in relation to the perlocutionary dimension of the dubbing translation, since the source and target scripts of a number of selected interactions shall be analysed in order to enquire into the Italian translation strategies for the dubbing and subtitles. In fact, the dubbed version resorts to Italian lingua-franca reformulation strategies by means of specific lexical and structural features deviating from standard uses (Seidlhofer, 2011), consistent with the original illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions (Austin, 1962). Subtitles, instead, because of spatial and temporal constraints (Díaz Cintas, 2005; Neves, 2009), condense the original utterances (Bogucki, 2011) and retextualising the features of the ELF variation adopted into standard Italian, providing a target version that is not the pragmalinguistic equivalent of the source script.

This paper enquires into the scripted ELF variation adopted in the English subtitling of Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994). The target script reformulates the original interactions through Lingua-franca Italian by means of hybridization processes between spoken Italian lingua franca uses and written ELF rendering that are seen as enabling/failing to realize the complex unequal encounters in contexts of specialized (legal-bureaucratic) communication between low-status Albanians and high-status Italians. The analysis of the spoken interactions rendered into ELF subtitling involves three different, yet complementary dimensions of analysis: the register dimension in the perspective of Halliday’s (1978) functional approach and of van Dijk’s (1980) processes of deletion, construction and generalization in rendering the original social interactions into ELF subtitling, respecting the technical limits and facilitating accessibility and acceptability of culture-bound concepts either between the participants in the interaction and in the international audience of the subtitled movie; the phonopragmatic dimension (Sperti, 2014) of the spoken interactions to explore the socio-pragmatic processes accounting for illocutionary and perlocutionary implications (Searle, 1983), and the rendering of such dimensions characterizing the cross-cultural unequal encounters into equivalent written forms of ELF; and the functional dimension involving the standard and scripted ELF variations used in the subtitles, analysed through the application of a causal model of translation (Chesterman, 2000; Bogucki, 2011), enquiring into the cognitive and pragmatic features of the translator’s retextualizations, characterised by relevant lexical and syntactic choices in the attempt to render the participants’ status asymmetries. ELF in this case may thus represent a new hybrid mode of spoken lingua franca rendered into written forms in situations of difficult intercultural communication due to power/status asymmetries between the participants.

Marketing researchers employ the Five-Factor Model to describe branded products through attributes used for human personality. Marker attributes used to elicit brand personality dimensions can also influence consumers’ intention to purchase. Two connected studies, carried out on two samples of 91 and 557 subjects, respectively, show that brand personality-marker attributes predict intention to purchase, but only to the extent that such attributes are vivid and, in particular, when they elicit emotional responses (i.e., when they are emotionally interesting). These findings have several implications for people involved in developing strategies for persuasive communication.