The Discourses of Dispute Resolution (Linguistic Insights)

This volume presents some of the findings from a project on various aspects of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), including conciliation, mediation, and arbitration. To study the discursive practices of ADR today, an international initiative has been undertaken by a group of specialists in discourse analysis, law, and arbitration from more than twenty countries. The chapters in this volume draw on discourse-based data (narrative, documentary and interactional) to investigate the extent to which the ‘integrity’ of ADR principles is maintained in practice, and to what extent there is an increasing level of influence from litigative processes and procedures. The primary evidence for such practices comes from textual and discourse-based studies, ethnographic observations, and narratives of experience on the part of experts in the field, as well as on the part of some of the major corporate stakeholders drawn from commercial sectors.

The Editors: Vijay K. Bhatia is a Visiting Professor of English at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests are: Genre Analysis; ESP and Professional Communication; simplification of legal and other public documents; cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary variations in professional genres. Two of his books, Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings and Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based View, are widely used in genre theory and practice.
Christopher N. Candlin is Senior Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney. His research interests encompass discourse analysis and pragmatics, and their application to workplace and professional-client communication in the fields of law, dispute resolution, medicine and healthcare, and in disciplinary variation in academic discourse.
Maurizio Gotti is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Research Centre on Specialized Languages (CERLIS) at the University of Bergamo. His main research areas are the features and origins of specialized discourse. He is a member of the Editorial Board of national and international journals, and edits the Linguistic Insights series for Peter Lang.