This volume widens the scope of Legal Linguistics from the traditional focus on performative texts like statutes to the popularization of legal knowledge for different purposes. The chapters, written in English, German or French, discuss the theoretical basis and methods and investigate popularization efforts by national institutions, law firms and community websites. The objects of study cover a variety of modes and media from different national contexts reaching from print folders over online written texts to YouTube videos and movies.

This book provides an integrated approach to cognitive-linguistic mediation, with aims toward the efficiency of knowledge transfer and acquisition. Problems are approached through the prism of cognitive modelling, and mapped to such fields as intercultural and interdisciplinary communication, and second language teaching. The novelty lies in the synergies between linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, culture, and industry. These fields come together through ontological and metaphorical modelling and the attempts to automate such. This text provides a theoretical background for research on mediation, covering cognitive and communicative perspectives, metaphoricity of terms, and the ontologization of human knowledge. It includes detailed descriptions of methods for different types of cognitive modelling and is intended for students and researchers concerned with terminology, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, literature studies, morphology, syntaxis, and semantics.

In this volume, scholars explore and discuss current issues in Theoretical Legal Linguistics (TLL) and Applied Legal Linguistics (ALL), contributing to the growing body of international research in the field. Focus is placed on the interconnected skills, tasks and approaches to the study of legal language in its plethora of facets as presented at the first international conference and the second International Legal Linguistics Workshop (ILLWS19) of the Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics. The articles present research in the areas of contract interpretation, bijuralism, the European Reference Language System, clear language and communication in legal settings, issues in legal semantics, plain legal language in multilingual legislative drafting, legal language teaching, light verb constructions in legal German, forensic linguistic expert testimony, deontic modality in legislative drafting, migration and legal language, appeals in Russian and their qualification as language crimes, and graduation in the use of force statutes. The concepts, methods, and findings offer valuable insights into current research in legal linguistics.

Comunicación especializada y divulgación en la red: aproximaciones basadas en corpus adopta un enfoque basado en corpus para analizar los principales rasgos discursivos de la divulgación y de la comunicación especializada en español. El volumen presenta un modelo teórico para el estudio de la divulgación en los géneros digitales y lo aplica a una serie de estudios de caso que analizan diferentes rasgos (entre otros, la metáfora, la polifonía o los encuadres discursivos) que permiten caracterizar cómo se comunican contenidos especializados a un público lego. La investigación se basa en el corpus WebLesp, que contiene distintos géneros digitales en cuatro ámbitos sectoriales: medicina, derecho, economía y ciencia. El volumen se dirige a investigadores expertos y principiantes, así como a alumnado y profesorado, interesados en la lingüística española, el análisis de género, el análisis del discurso, el español para fines específicos y la lingüística de corpus. Comunicación especializada y divulgación en la red: aproximaciones basadas en corpus presents a corpus-based approach to the study of the key features of popularization and specialised communication in Spanish. Providing a theoretical framework for the study of popularization in web genres, this book proposes a series of case studies exploring a range of features (including metaphor, polyphony and discourse frames) that contribute to characterise how specialised knowledge is communicated to lay audiences. The research is based on the WebLesp corpus, containing different web genres pertaining to four major domains: law, economics, medicine, and science. This will be of particular interest to researchers and advanced students in Spanish Linguistics, Genre Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Spanish for Specific Purposes and Corpus Linguistics.

This collection elaborates an innovative analytical framework for knowledge communication, bringing together insights from a range of professional settings to highlight how a cross-disciplinary approach can promote a new view of knowledge that emphasizes constructivist and cognitivist perspectives. The volume seeks to draw connections between different disciplines’ traditionally disparate studies of knowledge communication, defined here as the communication of domain knowledge between experts of the same discipline, experts of different disciplines, or non-experts with an interest in developing expert knowledge. Featuring work from scholars across linguistics, corporate communication, and sociology on diverse professional environments, chapters focus on one of three central aspects in the communication of expert knowledge: the textual carrier of the interaction, the roles and relationships between parties in these interactions, and the contexts in which the texts and communication occur. Taken together, the collection elucidates the value of an approach that supposes that expertise is co-created in interaction under the conditions of human cognitive systems and that knowledge asymmetries can offer both challenges and opportunities to better understand and generate new forms of communication and specialized knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in language and communication, professional communication, organizational communication, and sociology of knowledge.

Expert-lay communication in the medical field requires the utmost attention to readers’ or listeners’ needs and competences. If these are neglected, laypeople’s comprehension of the message is likely to be negatively affected. Text types like package leaflets and informed consents have been the object of countless studies. In this volume, Giulia Pedrini examines a new document type: the layperson summary of clinical trials. She conducts her analysis from a contrastive and translational perspective in three languages (English, German, and Italian). All texts are instances of interlingual translations of simplified documents written in Plain Language; a still widely unexplored niche within the field of translation studies.

This volume offers insights into the ways in which plain language has influenced the language of the law in the United Kingdom, critically reflecting on its historical development and future directions. The book opens with an overview of the theoretical frameworks underpinning plain language and a brief history of plain language initiatives as a foundation from which to outline ongoing debates on the opportunities and challenges of using plain language in the legal domain. The volume details strands where plain language has had considerable impact thus far on legal English in the UK, notably in legislative drafting, but it also explores areas in which plain language has made fewer inroads, such as the language of court judgments and that of online terms and conditions. The book looks ahead to unpack highly topical areas within the plain language debate, including the question of design and visualisation and the ramifications of digitalisation, contributing to ongoing conversations on the importance of plain language both in the UK and beyond. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of language and the law as well as related disciplinary areas such as applied linguistics and English for Specific Purposes.