Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication

Abstract

In the digital age, the transformation process of information into ‘knowledge’ is characterized by hyper-connected communities, where a potentially infinite amount of information is ubiquitously accessible to individuals or community users and is instrumental in the creation of shared knowledge, but also in building consensus across community participants, societal membership and grouping, through the argumentative ideological representation of assumptions, values and practices. This Special Issue of “Lingue e Linguaggi” on the theme Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication explores the interface between these three dimensions and combines an array of perspectives into a distinctly unified volume, offering synchronic, diachronic, comparative, interlinguistic and intercultural approaches over a range of specialized knowledge domains. The volume integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches, making use of Corpus Linguistics, alongside other methods incorporated in theoretical approaches such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Theory and Argumentation Theory, focusing on the pragma-linguistic features of different texts and genres, together with their ideological purposes for different audiences in various contexts of use. The collection of essays investigates argumentative styles and patterning along with the discursive socio-construction of ideology in the dynamics of recontextualization, rescripting and remediation which affect the multi-faceted nature of contemporary communication.