Keynote speakers

Ruth Breeze

Ruth Breeze is Full Professor at the University of Navarra and the PI of the Public Discourse research group (Instituto Cultura y Sociedad, Universidad de Navarra, Spain). She specialises in discourse analysis, specialized communication, corpus linguistics, and educational linguistics. Her work in the field of legal, political and media discourse has been published in many books, articles and book chapters and widely cited. Her most recent publications include Corporate discourse (Bloomsbury, 2015), Teaching English Medium Instruction courses in Higher Education (Bloomsbury, 2021), and the co-edited volumes Pandemic and crisis discourse: Communicating Covid-19 and public health strategy (Bloomsbury, 2021), and African migrations. Traversing hybrid landscapes (Lexington, 2024). In addition, Ruth Breeze is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Revista Ibérica, the journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes (AELFE).

Abstract

Researching emotions in discourse: How can corpus linguistics help?

Although we often think of emotions as something experienced by the individual, emotions are learned through processes of socialization and are experienced in particular social environments, in alignment with socially-shaped “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 2012). Sociologists have described how the “affective-discursive practices” associated with particular social settings can be accessed through language and multimodal semiotics (Wetherell et al., 2013). Since corpus linguistics is best suited to studying recurrent patterns in language, it offers potential in detecting and analysing the affective-discursive practices occurring in particular social contexts. However, this is complicated by the fact that the relationship between language and emotion is far from straightforward. We can use language to talk about emotion (“emotion talk”) or to express emotion (“emotional talk”) (Bednarek, 2008). But we can also use language to provoke emotion in others, without explicitly mentioning or expressing any emotion ourselves. In this plenary, I will use examples from political discourse (news, speeches and social media) to illustrate how corpus linguistics can help us to detect patterns that shed light on the way affective-discursive practices are produced and reproduced. In addition to considering the role of lexical and semantic frequency, keyness and collocations, I look at some ways of complementing quantitative results with qualitative exploration. I will end by looking at how we could study emotions in academic and professional language, suggesting some ways that academic and professional genres can be seen as embodying certain “feeling rules” that can be accessed through corpus linguistics.

Milan Ferenčík

Milan Ferenčík is Full Professor and Director of the Institute of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Prešov, Slovakia. His research interests encompass English Stylistics, Pragmalinguistics (Politeness Theory), Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis, English as a Lingua Franca, World Englishes, Linguistic Landscape and Geosemiotics. He has contributed significantly to these fields through numerous presentations and publications (e.g. in Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, Prague Journal of English Studies, Brno Studies in English, Discourse and Interaction, Topics in Linguistics, Human Affairs, Slovo a slovesnost, Jazykovedný časopis, Slovenská reč). He published the monograph Doing (im)politeness in the media. A study of sociolinguistic (im)politeness in a radio phone-in interaction (2011), several textbooks: English Grammar in Discourse. A Course in Systemic-functional Grammar (in collaboration with Z. Nováková, 2022), English stylistics as discourse analysis (2016), and recently co-authored A handbook of research methods in linguistics and translation studies (2024).

Using public signage as a resource for learning pragmatics

Abstract

Public spaces across the world are sites of meaning-making, where actors involved in semiotic processes control space through discourses that evoke values, express ideologies, and negotiate norms of interaction. Visible public signage, as a ubiquitous layer of urban landscapes, offers a rich resource for language classrooms by providing authentic illustrative material well-suited to enhancing learners’ communicative—including pragmatic—competence. In my talk, I draw on data from public signage in various globalized spaces of the world to demonstrate how it can be used to explore all the canonical topics of pragmatics established in its componential view: entailment, presupposition, implicature, speech act theory, deixis, reference, and politeness. Using authentic examples of regulatory signs, the talk presents public signage from as both a rich site of linguistic inquiry and a valuable pedagogical tool for exploring the interface between language and society.