DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVES ON DOMAIN-SPECIFIC ENGLISH - LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS 40

This volume reflects the results of a workshop on the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, held within the 15th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes (‘New Trends in Specialized Discourse’, Bergamo 2005). The articles deal with developments from the late medieval period to the present day, and the book encompasses studies in which the long-established tradition of domain-specific English is highlighted. The fields of contributions range from scientific to legal to political and business discourse. Special attention is given to argumentation, in an attempt to assess the time-depth of typical rhetorical strategies. Some methodological innovations are introduced in corpus linguistics. Numerous contributions bring new materials to scholarly discussion, as recently released or in-progress ‘second-generation’ corpora are used as data. Recent changes in present-day legal and scientific writing are also discussed as they witness fast adaptation to new requirements, due to the advent and growing familiarity of new technologies, international law and changes in academia.

The Editors: Marina Dossena is Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests focus on the features and origins of British varieties of English and the history of specialized discourse. Recent publications include Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology, co-edited with Roger Lass (2004), Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations, co-edited with Susan Fitzmaurice (2006) and Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary (2005).
Irma Taavitsainen is Professor of English Philology and Director of the Department of English, University of Helsinki, and Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contact and Change in English at the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä. Her research interests cover historical pragmatics, development of specialized discourse, and register and genre studies. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics. Her recent publications include an electronic corpus Middle English Medical Texts (co-compiled with Päivi Pahta and Martti Mäkinen, 2005), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English 1375-1500 (co-edited with Päivi Pahta, 2004), and Dialogic Language Use: Address in Focus (co-edited with Juhani Härmä and Jarmo Korhonen, 2006).