This investigation is an attempt to show that language is phraseological, both general language and specific language – European legal discourse in the case in point – and that text is nothing but phraseology of one kind of another. Individual words are yielded and then the clusters that these individual words create are looked at. Finally key-clusters are extracted, referencing the Lisbon Treaty against a corpus of general English (the British National Corpus was chosen as a reference corpus), thus arriving at what is the typical phraseology of European legal discourse. The importance of parallel corpora is also highlighted, providing a range of possible translation equivalents already verified by actual translation usage.

This paper is an analysis of the words and phrases in the language of the European Union Treaties, with a special focus on the latest document, the Treaty of Lisbon, into force since 1 December 2009. Wordlists and keywords lists are first analysed, and after looking at the most frequent individual words, it is soon apparent that most of them create meaning mainly or only in combination with other words, corroborating the assumption that phrases – both in general language and in specialised language – are much better at explaining meaning than single words.The English clusters and key-clusters are then compared to the Italian version of the Treaty, to ascertain how they are rendered in Italian.

ESP Across Cultures publishes theoretical, descriptive and applied studies on varieties of English pertaining to a wide range of specialized fields of knowledge, such as agriculture, art and humanities, commerce, economics, education and vocational training, environmental studies, finance, information technology, law, media studies, medicine, politics, religion, science, the social sciences, sports, technology and engineering, tourism, and transport. The journal addresses a readership composed of academics, professionals, and students interested in English for special purposes particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. The aim of the journal is to bring together scholars, practitioners, and young researchers working in different specialized language domains and in different disciplines with a view to developing an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to the study of ESP.

This paper investigates keywords and key-phrases in the speeches of the former and of the current administration of the United States of America. A comparison is carried out referencing George W. Bush’s corpus against Barack Obama’s corpus, to unveil the words and the clusters that the former presidency used frequently and the new one has, partially or totally, dropped. The opposite procedure is also applied. The aim is to unveil the words and phrases which can be regarded as the “signature” of the two Presidents, and in particular of Barack Obama, in order to understand what persuaded the people, even those who disagreed with him, eventually vote for him, whether the co-occurrence of certain words or rather the way in which they are delivered, or both.

Abstract – It cannot be denied that Britain is normally seen as an awkward partner in EU affairs (George 1994), and in many ways the British have always been half-in: in the two-speed Europe slogan, Britain is seen as a slow traveller (Musolff 2004), as a member that makes slow progress, it if is at all on the European path. The purpose of this paper is to try and unveil, with evidence at hand, the sentiment of the British leaders with respect to the European Union. Interestingly, the current government includes both Conservatives and Lib-Dems leaders, and it is well known that the former have been, more often than not, against Europe whereas the latter are highly passionate about their pro-Europeanism. Interviews, statements and speeches proper are thus analysed and compared: first wordlists are generated, then keywords lists and finally key-clusters lists (Scott 2012), with the purpose of identifying "aboutgrams" (Warren 2010; Sinclair, Tognini Bonelli 2011), and see what the two governments have in common, but mostly what differentiates them with regard to the European Union, i.e. what is prioritized in one administration and was not in another, clearly signalling a change in priorities (Cheng 2004; Cheng et al. 2006; Cheng et al. 2009). The study is a diachronic analysis, in the attempt to see how previous discourses have been reinterpreted, given that forty years after joining the Union the British are still reluctant Europeans who still consider Europe "abroad", thus slowing the "ever-closer union" envisaged in the Treaty of Rome, and who still have been calling for referendums, even more so after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Keywords: European Union, UK, Political Speeches, Opt Out, Aboutgrams.

This paper analyses n-grams and concgrams in the speeches of Tony Blair and George W. Bush delivered from the beginning of 2005 till June 2007. The focus of the study is first on the single word climate, which is found to figure top of the list by referencing one million words spoken by the (now former) British Prime Minister against five million words spoken by the American President, and then on the cluster climate change, in that change was also picked up as key and was always found in company with climate. The issue of climate change clearly reflects Blair’s leading themes of the years under investigation. This work is an attempt to corroborate the assumption that phrases, in the form of n-grams and concgrams, namely in contiguous and non-contiguous sequences, are usually much better at revealing the “aboutness” of the text than individual words.

The book starts from the assumption that the attraction between words is a matter of convention, that is, certain words significantly prefer each other’s company whether in adjacent or in discontinuous phrasal frameworks, other words just do not co-occur because they have no relationship with each other, and certain words are prohibited from co-occurring for no apparent reason other than habit. Thus, the investigation concerns not only those phrases which are obviously conceived as idiomatic, but also those which are not intuitively felt as such and which co-occur more often than chance would predict. This study highlights clearly that lexis and grammar are closely interdependent and that patterns, collocations, phraseology are the norm in language and not the exception, the core and not the periphery. After a short introduction to Corpus Linguistics and to how this applied discipline can illuminate language teaching, and after a brief account of the several different kinds of corpora that we rely on in our classrooms, this work presents a detailed investigation of some structures that appear very frequently in spoken political discourse, as well as in general spoken discourse, but are nevertheless somewhat overlooked in traditional reference texts. It also analyses first the most recurrent clusters in the speeches of British and American politicians, and then the most common as well as the most typical phrasal verbs, so frequently used by native speakers yet so commonly “avoided” by non-native speakers. The book is aimed at students, as well as at teachers and researchers, with the attempt to help provide some domain-specific insights on the teaching of political language as well as of general language. It tries to answer these basic questions: how idiomatic is language? How aware are students of such idiomaticity? How far do traditional reference books and dictionaries tend to be from the language which is taught in class? How useful are corpora in the classroom? All the examples provided are uttered by political leaders in the UK and in the USA from 2001 to 2011.

Phrasal verbs and phrasal units: political corpora within the walls of the classroom In questo articolo l’autore analizza discorsi, dichiarazioni, conferenze stampa e interviste rilasciate dai politici americani e italiani al governo e all’opposizione. L’attenzione è concentrata su quelle unità composte da più parole, in particolar modo su quei verbi composti da più parole noti come “phrasal verbs”. I phrasal verbs sono una caratteristica della lingua inglese non particolarmente amata dagli studenti: i dizionari ne riservano un trattamento particolare, e i libri di grammatica sembrano a volte voler contenere delle scuse per la sola ragione che tali verbi esistono (Sinclair 1991). I due software usati per la presente ricerca sono WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott 2009) e ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves 2009). Lo studio inizia con l’analisi dei verbi lessicali più frequenti in politica, per proseguire poi, con l’aiuto dei software, con i verbi composti da due, tre e quattro parole. I phrasal verbs sono quasi una “piaga” per gli studenti italiani che cercano, se e quando possibile, di evitarli, facendo ricorso a verbi più rari e talvolta anche goffi e inusuali; al contrario, i native speaker non solo li usano con disinvoltura, ma sembrano preferirli ai corrispondenti verbi composti da una sola parola. Quindi, qualora uno studente debba scegliere tra vote down, turn down, shoot down e reject, certamente la scelta cadrà su reject. Tuttavia, uno studio diacronico dimostra che, nello sviluppo della lingua inglese, la tendenza è stata quella di sostituire le singole parole con le ‘phrases’, e nel nostro corpus di riferimento, per esempio, sono state trovate 43 frequenze di turned down the Lisbon Treaty contro sole 8 di rejected the Lisbon Treaty. La linguistica dei corpora ha dimostrato che la fraseologia è onnipresente nella lingua e che gli elementi fraseologici hanno la precedenza su quelli lessicali. Se gli studenti talvolta avvertono che l’idiom principle può sembrare ostico e di difficile comprensione, non appena essi cominciano a comprendere che ciascun phrasal verb opera come un’unica unità di significato, le difficoltà scompaiono del tutto e non si aspettano più che, per esempio, turn e down abbiano ciascuno un significato proprio, perché le due parole che ricorrono insieme così spesso sono state riposte nel cervello come un’unità olistica (Mauranen 2004). A questo proposito non può non esser citato Searle (1975), quando afferma che c’è una massima che recita come segue: “Parlate in maniera idiomatica, a meno che non ci sia una ragione speciale per non farlo”. ITALIANO

Although the passive voice is extensively covered in grammar books, some structures are regarded as a stumbling block for students, mainly those where a straightforward Italian equivalent is missing. Starting from the assumption that whatever is discovered to deviate significantly from native-speaker usage should be prioritized in the classroom (Nesselhauf 2004), the emphasis of this paper shall not be on structures where a perfect Italian counterpart is available, e.g. No one at the Justice Department was suggesting that torture is allowed, or Money has been allocated to local schools, but on structures such as It is said that when the United States sneezes, the United Kingdom catches cold and the north-east of England gets pneumonia, or The EU is the most effective way that Britain can make its voice heard on global issues, or Progress is being made in Iraq. This last structure, where the English verb is marked for combination of aspect and voice, that is when the perfect aspect, and particularly the progressive aspect, occur together with the passive voice in various combinations, causes quite a few problems to Italian learners. The perfect aspect is fairly common in Italian too, whereas the progressive passive is missing altogether; thus when students have to deal with a sentence such as In the meantime all these innocent people are being killed and the country is being destroyed, they inevitably tend to associate it with the closest of the structures they are familiar with, i.e. the perfect aspect: In the meantime all these innocent people have been killed and the country has been destroyed. The difficulty, then, lies in the translation of this structure, hence on the proactive use of it, which students, understandably, tend to avoid. In their groundbreaking grammar based entirely on authentic language, Biber et al. (1999) maintain that today voice and aspect combinations are possible but, in actual usage, the perfect passive is only moderately common, while the progressive aspect is rare. It is probably for this reason that the structure remains almost unexplored in traditional course books. Yet, many instances were found in ABC, the spoken political corpus we rely on in our classes that includes, at the time of writing, 14 million words, as uttered by American and British politicians. This paper attempts to show, that even though authenticity in the classroom is still a controversial topic among linguists and didacticians (Römer 2004), it is worth bringing into the classroom real and attested language: it is “an absurd notion that invented examples can actually represent the language better than real ones” (Sinclair 1991), as well as “just nonsense” from a semantic point of view (Firth 1957). What is argued here is that natural language should form the basis of our teaching rather than invented and contrived examples, given that more often than not what we tend to find in textbooks is a simplified, non-authentic English. Thus, along with Berry (1999), it is easy to get facts wrong when the rights ones are not available.

This paper focuses on phraseology used within the domain of politics, both in written and spoken discourse. We concentrate on the lemma terror and on the recurrent sequences in which it is embedded, reflecting how native speakers, both American and British, tend to use it in preferred environments making routinized blocks of language. The data come from two corpora: the spoken corpus includes the speeches of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and the written corpus is made up of articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Since text is nothing but phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2005), our attempt here is to uncover which of the two varieties lends itself more willingly to creating phrases that are handled like single units. The two pieces of software used to retrieve n-grams and concgrams are WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004), and ConcGram (Greaves 2005).

This paper is part of a larger project that investigates the language of American, British and Italian politicians, with a special focus on words and phrases, key-words and key-phrases as uttered at the government and at the opposition. The present work in particular is a diachronic analysis of keywords first and key-clusters after as uttered by the previous and by the current American administrations: thus, speeches, statements, press conferences and interviews delivered by Barack Obama are referenced against those delivered by George W. Bush to uncover the main concerns of the new government that were not prioritized in the old administration. The opposite procedure is also carried out, to unveil the concerns of the previous government that today have been overcome or that simply no longer figure at the top of the agenda, clearly signaling a change in priorities. There are several different concepts of keywords (Stubbs 2010: 21). The procedure used for identifying keywords and key-clusters in this research is the one devised by WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott forthcoming) and is based on simple verbatim repetition. The wordlists and clusters list generated in the two administrations are analysed and then compared, and the items that emerge are those whose frequency (or infrequency) in the study corpus is statistically significant when compared to the standards set by the reference corpus (Bondi 2010: 3). The topics that both governments deal with will not surface in the comparison, and issues such as Israel or Afghanistan, for example, will not stand out as prominent, namely as key, whereas those where there is a significant departure from the reference corpus – such as Iraq, freedom, terror, war, Saddam, or health, care, Libya, to name but a few – become prominent for inspection (Scott 2008), regarded as pointers which suggest areas which are worth mining (Scott 2010: 51). Relying on the assumption that the unit of language is “the phrase, the whole phrase, and nothing but the phrase” (Sinclair 2008), and that phrases, or aboutgrams (Warren 2010: 113), are a better means for uncovering the “ofness” of the texts, three-, four- and five-word clusters as uttered in the Democratic corpus are then referenced against those found in the Conservative corpus: the key-clusters emerging from the comparison are indicative not only of the “aboutness” of the text but also of the context in which they are embedded, relating to the major ongoing topics of debate (Partington 2003). Thus, it is unveiled that the war on terror, which was regarded as the signature in Bush’s speeches, is not the main concern in Obama, whose priorities are instead the recovery act, health care reform, clean energy economy, among others. Bearing in mind that phraseology is not fixed and that, in political discourse in particular, some phrases have a relatively short “shelf life” compared to others (Cheng 2004), the aim here is to track the language change from the old to the new administration, unveiling the aboutgrams which are prioritized today but were not an issue in the previous government. The other piece of software used to carry out the analysis is ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves 2009).