Suchergebnisse

Politicians often deploy analogies to shape public discourse. If picked up by the media, these references to the past can powerfully shape how political events are perceived. This article examines why some analogies became popular through an exploration of the creation and development of the analogy comparing Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa, to Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, during South Africa's transition. Tracing the evolution of the Buthelezi–Savimbi comparison through an analysis of media reports indicates that analogies that possess predictive power are likely to gain traction in public discourse and become effective tools for policy advocacy.

Radiophonic art could not have emerged at the end of the 1920s without an intense period of experimentation across the creative fields of radio, new music, phonography, film, literature and theatre. The engagement with sound recording and broadcast technologies by artists radically expanded the scope of creative possibility within their respective practices, and more particularly, pointed to new forms of (inter-)artistic practice based in sound technologies including those of radio. This paper examines the convergence of industry, the development of technology, and creative practice that gave sound, previously understood as immaterial, a concrete objectification capable of responding to creative praxis, and so brought about the conditions that enabled a radiophonic art to materialize.

I outline some of the challenges for teachers and researchers of ESP in this period of prolonged economic crisis from the perspective of someone who has taught English for law students and political science students for many years, is editor of the journal ESP Across Cultures, and is Head of the Language Centre of Foggia University. I focus on three issues: 1) teaching LSP at university level in a context of contradictory pressures coming from ministerial insistence on internationalization of Italian universities in an increasingly globalized world while drastically reducing funding at all levels; 2) research in ESP, where I outline the vibrancy of ESP studies despite the economic hardships, but I surmise that this is partly the result of a shift towards providing practical language skills for future professionals in line with the marketization of tertiary education; 3) the emerging role of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), where in Italy it is now law to provide part of secondary school tuition of a non-language subject in a foreign language: I outline the ways in which ESP and CLIL can mutually complement each other. I conclude by arguing that the future looks bright for ESP studies despite the economic crisis.

As is well known, the Plain language movement has been influential in a number of areas of public life over the last few decades. Within the legal sphere it has raised general awareness concerning the need to make legal matters and legal documents more comprehensible and accessible to non-experts, particularly in today's digitalized world where information is freely available to the general public. In this paper my aim is to provide an overview of the way the Plain language movement has evolved in the legal sphere since the 1970s. In particular, I will highlight the following points: (1) the reasons why the Plain language movement came into being; (2) the major successes of plain language in the legal sphere over the last 40 years; (3) the areas where legalese still predominates, and the reasons for the resistance to change; and (4) the way the Plain language movement has adapted to the digitalized world and the implications for future development. My observations will be mainly restricted to the English-speaking world, including international organizations where English is one of the official languages, but I will occasionally make reference to other plain language organizations outside the English-speaking world where this seems relevant. I also provide a list of the major organizations involved in promoting plain language in English in the legal sphere today as a reference guide.