marianna lya zummo

Social media interactions represent an accessible way for young people to get health information and provide a form of public discourse about health. It is against this backdrop that experts and other health professionals have turned to digital platforms (e.g., TikTok) to share educational content about timely or touchy topics, and to spread awareness, specifically among younger users. This paper aims to explore these digital platforms where professionals provide health information that is specifically tailored for a young audience and attempts to explore the discursive negotiation of healthcare and health accessibility in digital social settings. In light of a social media critical discourse perspective, this study explores the creative shifts in the process of accommodating a product to a target audience and questions what meanings, in terms of accessibility and/or discrimination, these products carry for their audience.

The widespread representation of older people in popular culture as passive and inert has been challenged in a range of recent studies and publications (Nussbaum / Coupland 2004, Caprara et al. 2013). In view of the increasing number of older adults in today\u2019s society, the notion of aging has received significant attention in the public sphere where common assumptions and stereotypes are challenged and potential scenarios are presented. As it has been discussed from different academic perspectives over the past twenty years, older people\u2019s collective condition is undergoing important sociological and cultural changes, making the elderly - among other things - an enticing political reservoir of votes and a pivotal segment of the active electorate. Guided by this evidence, many political actors have devoted specific communication strategies to such age- groups, providing both ad hoc political messages and policy activities. This study builds on previous research (Schneider /...

Blogs are extensively used for personal accounts and news reports. In particular, health blogs can be considered as both information sources and communication channels be- tween Science and Society, since they face the growing need for information among non-insiders. This study is concerned with the dimension of reality portrayed in blog comment en- tries; focusing particularly on participants'' representation of facts and their commit- ment to the truth of the proposition. The framework for this study has been shaped by the typologies in Chafe (1986), Willett (1988), Van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), Plungian (2001), Mar\uecn (2002, 2004). Data are taken from three health and science we- blogs dealing with health issues. Following literature, markers of evidentiality and epis- temic modality were selected in order to assess the writer''s attitude towards the stance (epistemic modality); its reliability and the qualification of source-of-information (evidence of pe...

Considering that learners engage in the creation of new educational scenarios, often using digital media, travelogues have been analysed because they represent the digital development of a well-established genre within tourism discourse. This study focuses on the discursive construction of expats as 1) integrated tourist and 2) travelogue writers. I consider the occurrence of an Us as opposed/assimilated with a Them in the expression of values, behaviors and spaces by analyzing a corpus made up of articles taken from the most accessed travel webzines for expats at the time of the research. Then I analyse the thematic structures and techniques of this textual typology. The paper may help to address pedagogical issues such as critical genre awareness and identity construction.

Set in the tradition of studies that look at digital interactions, this paper aims to explore the dimension of illness as referred to by informal caregivers in online exchanges. The research attempts to a) describe posts as mediated illness stories by comparing them to the storytelling in interaction model (Mishler), and b) explore what is revealed about the writer. A data set of 7371 posts (including sub-replies) has been studied as personal narratives in non-clinical therapeutic exchanges by means of Digital Conversation Analysis (Giles et al.), and investigated as written emotional disclosure (Pennebaker). Posts are found to convey explicit and implicit messages to be understood and incorporated into health promotion efforts, beliefs and issues. The paper makes a contribution to the field of medical humanities by proposing online posts as third-person accounts of illness experiences, and as the linguistic manifestation of caregivers' (CGs) state of mind. Although digital sett...

Nel 2009 i media riportano di un caso sportivo che suscita scalpore a livello internazionale: Caster Mokgadi Semenya, atleta sudafricana, dopo aver vinto la medaglia d\u2019oro negli 800 metri femminili ai Mondiali di atletica leggera di Berlino, viene accusata di essere un uomo. A partire da quell\u2019anno, numerosi commenti, articoli e interviste si sono succeduti toccando una questione discussa nella letteratura sulle differenze di genere

Translation or Transcreation? Discourses, Texts and Visuals presents us with an apparent dilemma: is translation primarily a form of transfer or a form of creation? This dilemma harks back to a series of questions about the nature of creativity which are at the heart of Western philosophy and aesthetics: what distinguishes an original from a reproduction? What is original in every “translation” and what has already been translated in every “original”? While these questions have been theoretically debated in the past fifty years mainly in the contexts of French and American deconstruction, contemporary communication practices bring them back on the table with renewed urgency. The global flows of information and culture, the digitalisation of reading and writing, and the increasingly multimodal character of new media are radically transforming the very notion of “text” – let alone that of an “original text”. Against this background, the dilemma between translation as transfer and tran...

Translation and transcreation can both be considered as practices carried out by professionals trained in the communication of languages, cultures and situational settings. However, a growing number of internet users resort to the Internet to equip themselves with language knowledge, exploiting the collaborative setting the Internet provides. Online collaboration is based on the new culture of openness and engagement, which is negotiated via interaction with the final aim of providing a possible good, and \u201cprofessional-like\u201d, translation. As stated by Guyon (2010, 33), coordination and discussion between participants are part and parcel of the translation process. Although fora have thoroughly been discussed as a locus of empowerment (Zummo 2015, Alfer 2017), this collaborative setting has received little attention in language contexts from scholars. After a brief literature review, I introduce the corpus and methods, and then present my findings. My discussion focuses on the interactions among website users dealing with some generic and specialist words to be translated in the English/Italian cultural, social or professional contexts. Data for analysis were gathered from Wordreference, a popular website dealing with languages, with the aim of studying community practices involved with the mediation and collaboration processes, when negotiating meanings of culturally ambiguous words. Findings show that the collaborative nature of fora contributes to finding the best translation output as a result of the negotiation of meanings between different speakers belonging to different cultures and different professional backgrounds

This study looks at the communication between users concerning health risks, with the aim of exploring their use of fora and assessing whether participants establish a niche with like-minded users during these exchanges. By integrating a corpus linguistic approach with content analysis and multiple studies on computer mediated health discourse, this study analyses the intense attention paid to the correlation between the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, as an example of elaboration of the message and risk of emotive amplification, with fora working as echo chambers. Results include: a) a qualitative analysis of the content of posts and their qualification, b) a focus on the type of concerns questioners raise, and c) a comparison of the qualifier proportions between the posts and the responses they get. The comparison between posts/responses investigates whether the forum works as an amplification station of emotions, or as a locus to establish a belief niche.

This article investigates the way politicians use social networking sites as effective communication platforms to discursively enhance authenticity, sincerity and (self --)connection to what can be defined as the “People” (followers/lurkers/net users). Within the framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, and using tools c oming from Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the paper analyses the multi semiotic elements used by different political leaders (i.e. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Matteo Salvini), to connect with the “People,” and discusses the politainment product as a perso nalised way to skip the institutional mediation channels of politics.

This paper analyses the dialogic structure occurring in an asynchronous discussion forum taken as a talk-in-interaction venue, and a confirmation niche.I employ a conversation-analysis based approach adapted to online written texts (Antaki et al. 2005; Herring, 2013; Giles et al. 2015) and studied in the context of forum participative writings (Stommel and Lamerichs, 2014) as an interactional event (Herring 2007), and confirmation site (Quattrociocchi and Vicini, 2016).Results show that the exchange is construed by adapting conversation-like concepts within an asynchronous and written mode of communication, and that the participatory framework is the ground where opposing groups interact and build a personal confirmation niche, which represents a relevant barrier to a critical discourse attitude.-

The paper argues that everyday exchange of business emails produces a development in the work-group relationship, which, in turn, makes new communication styles possible and acceptable by the users' habit to computer-mediated forms, even in unbalanced professional exchanges. The focus is on the (spoken) discourse features of email messages in a self-compiled corpus of selected computer-mediated business emails, produced by five participants over three months (October 2015 – February 2016). The exchange, involving the use of English by non-native speaker interactants (in particular, Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF)), as well as language adjustments in a computer-mediated exchange, takes the form of a ‘written dialogue’, and closely resembles the features of the spoken discourse. Results confirmed that, despite being the oldest computer-mediated communication technology, emails constitute a ‘not yet conventionalized’ communication mode that is influenced by the push emai...

The notion of reality has been reanalyzed since the post-structuralism era as something socially and linguistically constructed. Language shapes reality, allowing the communication of ideas, theories and emotions through words. Through discourse, information is transferred and/or modified in the passages between addresser and addressee. In fact, the speaker may modify information in the transfer process by expressing commitment to the reality of his/her statement. Subjectivity thus becomes the key factor needed in order to understand reality as it is expressed in discourse. The data for this study is online texts drawn from the two major online newspapers and two football teams'' official netpages, with a total of 66 articles and 41,061 words. The corpus consists of editorials and news reports taken from The Guardian online, The Times online and from the official web sites of West Ham and Manchester United. Eleven news reports were selected from the first link available on each page of The Times (6,555 words) and The Guardian (7,818 words). From the comments section, we selected eleven articles from each The Times (8,901 words) and The Guardian (8,962). Eleven texts from the official pages of two popular football teams were taken from the internet, namely from the West Ham official web site (4,646 words) and the Manchester United official web site (4,179 words). This paper is intended to explore the following issues: 12The presence and patterning of various dimensions of evidentiality and epistemic modality within two subgenres: sport editorials and sport reports, 12The identification and patterning of evidentiality and epistemic modality on sports websites, 12 Any similarities and differences between these patterns in subgenres

Considering that learners engage in the creation of new educational scenarios, often using digital media, travelogues have been analysed because they represent the digital development of a well-established genre within tourism discourse. This study focuses on the discursive construction of expats as 1) integrated tourist and 2) travelogue writers. I consider the occurrence of an Us as opposed/assimilated with a Them in the expression of values, behaviors and spaces by analyzing a corpus made up of articles taken from the most accessed travel webzines for expats at the time of the research. Then I analyse the thematic structures and techniques of this textual typology. The paper may help to address pedagogical issues such as critical genre awareness and identity construction.

Medical dictionaries represent, among the other things, an important pedagogic genre (Swales 1995, Bhatia, 1997, Hyland 2000) within academic education, since they are the means through which professional writers talk about their disciplines and address to scholars. The preface sections are of the utmost importance since, among several functions, they (should) attract and orient the readers (Azar, 2012). This paper describes the macro structure of preface sections in fourteen English dictionaries related to the field of medicine and investigates on the rhetorical and discursive devices employed in these texts to establish the importance of the author's work. In addition, the paper questions on the nature of dictionaries readership and, as such, addressing moves are analysed. The preface sections were extracted from the fourteen dictionaries published between 1719 and 1949 in order to assess the potential reader to whom these manuals are addressed and to identify the moves, the r...

Blogs are extensively used for personal accounts and news reports. In particular, health blogs can be considered as both information sources and communication channels be- tween Science and Society, since they face the growing need for information among non-insiders. This study is concerned with the dimension of reality portrayed in blog comment en- tries; focusing particularly on participants'' representation of facts and their commit- ment to the truth of the proposition. The framework for this study has been shaped by the typologies in Chafe (1986), Willett (1988), Van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), Plungian (2001), Mar\uecn (2002, 2004). Data are taken from three health and science we- blogs dealing with health issues. Following literature, markers of evidentiality and epis- temic modality were selected in order to assess the writer''s attitude towards the stance (epistemic modality); its reliability and the qualification of source-of-information (evidence of perceptual markers and beliefs, and evidence of inference and reasoning)

This book deals with the linguistic resources used in e-heath, in particular in the dialogue between specialists and e-patients as well as among users in e-forums. Traditional d/p exchanges have self-adapted to create new forms, and have evolved into a different product entirely. After establishing the area within the concept of e-health and the reasons why it is important to talk about this phenomenon, the book reports some analyses that show different aspects of these online exchanges. Starting from genre, linguistic features and dialogic markers, it continues on considerations on role postions and credibility as well as on legitimation of trust

This study analyses the troubled talk occurring in an exchange of business emails between an Italian manufacturing company's general manager, his staff and their Pakistani consultants. The exchange is a communicative event in which conflicts (i.e. troubles) arise due to a variety of causes: the computer-mediated communication, the use of English as a Lingua Franca, the cultural differences between interactants and the stressful nature of the situation. Set in the tradition of studies which look at issues of intercultural differences in communication, (Katan 2006; Cucchi 2010; Manca 2016), this research addresses the question of the ongoing adaptation between high context and low context communication preferences (Hall, 1976) embraced by the Italian and the Urdu speakers. Politeness strategies have already been studied in the context of email writings (e.g. Poppi, 2012) and as an interactional event (Herring 1996; Baron 1998, 2003; Cho 2010; Gimenez 2000, 2002; Giles, et al., 201...

Integrating a corpus linguistic approach with content analysis and studies on computer mediated health discourse (Harvey and Koteyko, 2013), this study analyses the role of technology in healthcare communication and considers the evolutions in the doctor-patient exchange. Considering interactional norms, and the new literacy of online forum users (Jensen, Fage-Butler, 2014), this study investigates the trends and the linguistic patterns as well as the nature of digital doctor-patient exchanges in online question/ answer format frames, since specification of roles has changed and linguistic exchanges have evolved into different outcomes. In addition, the medium imposes its norms and a totally different communicative product has emerged. A corpus of online d/p exchanges has been consequently formed and investigated for linguistic and thematic items, in particular a) computer-mediated politeness features and stylistic care; b) medical terminology awareness and information construction; c) qualification of users\u2019 questions and doctors\u2019 attitudes. Results suggest the new patient/ consumer\u2019s expertise together with the computer-mediated nature of these exchanges modify the language and consequently the relationship between the doctor and the net-user. The online consultation in q/a written frames does not offer a medical diagnosis as it is expected by users but must be construed as something different. As a conclusion, it is suggested that a new kind of communication skills from doctors must be at use to meet the new patient\u2019s online demand

This study analyses posts and comments on a popular social network (Facebook) in order to investigate how web-users take advantage of participative platforms to post ideologically-driven comments, and how the exchanges create echo chambers. In particular, the study addresses populism expressed in online debates concerning migrants and used as a pretext to show group identities and ideologies. Facebook is thus taken as an example and considered a participatory platform (Boyd 2014) of political (populist) activism and the milieu for consensus-finding. The dialogic structure of comments is studied within Conversation Analysis adapted to online written texts (Antaki et al. 2005; Giles et al. 2015) as participative writings. The content of the posts is studied according to the proximisation theory (Cap 2013; 2017), to show how political/public actors seek legitimation by addressing virtual external threats. As a result, the paper increases our understanding of the participatory framework as the ground where opposing groups interact and where people build a personal confirmation niche (Quattrociocchi and Vicini 2016), which represents a relevant barrier to a critical discourse attitude.

This study is intended to provide new insights into web-based discourse on medical exchanges in doctor-patient communication. The global net system have certainly played an important role in the increase and the following modification of communication dynamics. However, in particular situation such as doctor-patient interviews, computer mediated communication is still a limit. This paper is based on two lines of research in language studies, namely the studies of language corpus and studies of communication in health encounters. The corpus is formed by the medical entries that appeared in biomedical/health service sites. The samples collected were analysed in order to find discourse patterns for structure and organization of moves together with their functional meaning. For each move, grammatical and lexical items were identified in order to assess the dimension of evidentiality, modality, and affect in online counseling. The framework of this study has been shaped by the typologies in Chafe (1986), Willett (1988), Van Auwera and Plungian (1998), Plungian (2001), Fitneva (2001) and Mar\uecn Arrese (2002, 2004) on the roles and expression of evidentiality and modality in English. Emotive load is studied through the lexical analyses of emotions expressed in first person following the Appraisal Framework by Martin and White (2005)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand caregivers’ discursive constructions and responses to their unwanted (family and social) role as resulting in exchanges on social media. Online group platforms are understood as particularly suitable for the expression of intimate feelings among adults, for meeting and exhibiting stigma issues, and for the circulation of information and support (Suler, 2004; McCormack, 2010; Pounds et al., 2018). Design/methodology/approach This paper draws from digital Conversation Analysis (Giles et al., 2015), and considers data after combining quantitative (corpus analysis) and qualitative methods, from a critical discourse analysis perspective. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske et al., 2002) is used together with collocation analysis to understand categorisations, which ultimately result in a defence strategy (Assimakopoulos et al., 2017) to negotiate the Self and the Others (Tannen, 1992). Findings Considering that the digital environme...

This paper questions the nature of the communicative event that takes place in online contexts between doctors and web-users, showing computer-mediated linguistic norms and discussing the nature of the participants’ roles. Based on an analysis of 1005 posts occurring between doctors and the users of health service websites, I analyse how doctor–patient communication is affected by the medium and how health professionals overcome issues concerning the virtual medical visit. Results suggest that (a) online medical answers offer a different service from that expected by users, as doctors cannot always fulfill patient requests, and (b) net consultations use aspects of traditional doctor–patient exchange and yet present a language and a style that are affected by the computer-mediated environment. Additionally, it seems that this new form leads to a different model of doctor–patient relationship. The findings are intended to provide new insights into web-based discourse in doctor–patient...

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based study which investigates the genre of medical eexchanges between doctors and medical website users. Three conversational routines (greetings, politeness, formal and informal linguistic features) are analyzed. The framework of the study is what some researchers refer to as net linguistics (Posteguillo 2003), consisting of the linguistic study of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). The findings indicate that health posts are a relatively informal type of d/p interaction which is largely influenced by e-mails and chat conventions.

The purpose of this paper is to understand caregivers' discursive constructions and responses to their unwanted (family and social) role as resulting in exchanges on social media. Online group platforms are understood as particularly suitable for the expression of intimate feelings among adults, for meeting and exhibiting stigma issues, and for the circulation of information and support (Suler, 2004; McCormack, 2010; Pounds et al., 2018). Design/methodology/approach This paper draws from digital Conversation Analysis (Giles et al., 2015), and considers data after combining quantitative (corpus analysis) and qualitative methods, from a critical discourse analysis perspective. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske et al., 2002) is used together with collocation analysis to understand categorisations, which ultimately result in a defence strategy (Assimakopoulos et al., 2017) to negotiate the Self and the Others (Tannen, 1992). Findings Considering that the digital environment allows a discursive negotiation of identities, data suggest that these interactions are expressions of membership construction, group solidarity and empowerment, that normalise and legitimise emotions with the ultimate goal of (self-)acceptance. Originality/value This study provides a basis for further research on caregivers' selfpositioning in power-relations with others.

Set in the tradition of studies that look at digital interactions, this paper aims to explore the dimension of illness as referred to by informal caregivers in online exchanges. The research attempts to a) describe posts as mediated illness stories by comparing them to the storytelling in interaction model (Mishler), and b) explore what is revealed about the writer. A data set of 7371 posts (including sub-replies) has been studied as personal narratives in non-clinical therapeutic exchanges by means of Digital Conversation Analysis (Giles et al.), and investigated as written emotional disclosure (Pennebaker). Posts are found to convey explicit and implicit messages to be understood and incorporated into health promotion efforts, beliefs and issues. The paper makes a contribution to the field of medical humanities by proposing online posts as third-person accounts of illness experiences, and as the linguistic manifestation of caregivers' (CGs) state of mind. Although digital settings have already been studied in the context of medical exchanges, this is the first study involving informal caretakers' exchanges.

This article investigates the way politicians use social networking sites as effective communication platforms to discursively enhance authenticity, sincerity and (self-)connection to what can be defined as the "People" (followers/lurkers/net-users). Within the framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, and using tools coming from Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the paper analyses the multi-semiotic elements used by different political leaders (i.e. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Matteo Salvini), to connect with the "People," and discusses the politainment product as a personalised way to skip the institutional mediation channels of politics.

This paper is concerned with how an (institutional) political identity is constructed on a Social Network (SN) wall, which represents the political identity of the party as designed in digital interactive contexts, and where political image constructions are eventually accepted or negotiated by the digital audience. Like other political parties, the Labour Party resorts to online platforms for official accounts and political message dissemination (Gerbaudo 2014; Boyd 2014) and constructs its (online) identity. Since interaction is seen (Baumann 2000; De Fina 2011) as the most important locus for the production of identities, this study looks at Facebook boards as interactional sites where the Party (the Opening Posts, OPs, Smithson et al. 2011) and the citizens (the threads resulting from comments and replies to OPs) produce political identities in discourse. The discursive constructions (Wodak 1996; Bamberg/ De Fina/Schiffrin 2011) are used by voters to identify with and respond to the political institution, mirroring or rejecting the political group identity. Posts, comments and replies posted in July 2018 on the page of the Labour Party are taken as examples of (group) identity construction and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively (Partington 2003; Reisigl/Wodak 2009), to find discursive practices and to show how group identities are negotiated.