e-ISSN: 2239-0359 ISSN: 2239-0367 Lingue e Linguaggi is a peer-reviewed international journal which focuses on the description of natural languages and forms of communication. The journal is concerned with a range of languages, including English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Albanian, and their varieties, from the linguistic, literary, and cultural perspectives, in their synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The journal publishes original articles and book reviews. Lingue e Linguaggi is published twice a year. Besides ordinary issues, special issues devoted to a special topic may be published. All articles go through double-blind review processes. Journal indexing: MLA; EBSCO; DOAJ; ROAD; Google Scholars
Authors who publish with this publication accept all the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license at the link below. Gli autori che pubblicano in questa rivista accettano i termini e le condizioni specificate nella licenza Creative Commons di cui al link sottostante. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/it/legalcode
Lucie Albertini-Guillevic, Madelaine Verbard, Carnac – Guillevic. Un poète, un territoire
Francesco Serdonati, Paolo Rondinelli (a cura di), Proverbi italiani
Salvatore Bancheri, Simone Casini, Italiese as a bridge. Rethinking Italian L2 in a global world
A corpus-based comparison of interactional patterns in EFL student and LLM-generated essays
The emergence of ChatGPT has attracted increasing scholarly attention to the affordances and challenges of integrating large language models (LLMs) in EFL learners’ writing skills development. Although some studies have investigated AI-generated text detection and characteristics, research on LLMs in EFL education remains limited. This paper seeks to address this gap and advance learners’ critical understanding of AI applications. It reports on a small-scale study comparing genuine EFL undergraduate student essays, suspected LLM-generated essays, and essays generated using ChatGPT 4.0 and DeepSeek-V3. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005a, 2005b) framework of interactional metadiscourse, the study examined patterns of stance and engagement in the texts. Combining quantitative analysis with qualitative interpretation, the study identified consistent use of engagement as the defining characteristic of genuine student writing, whereas LLMs showed limited capacity to engage readers. Furthermore, although LLMs approximated human stance-taking, they nevertheless favored a detached style, contrasting with the more personal tone of student writing. We believe that these findings can inform both EFL instructors and students by offering insights that may contribute to a deeper understanding of the rhetorical limitations of LLMs in academic writing contexts.
Abstract – The study analyses a corpus of multimedia journalistic discourses featuring people living with HIV in Spain, with the aim of exploring patterns in the use of deictic forms as markers of identity, agency and enunciative distance. The analysis is based on the theoretical frameworks of stigma (Goffman 1963; Link & Phelan 2001) and discursive positioning (Davies, Harré 1990) and pays special attention to gender and age variables. The results reveal significant differences in the use of deictic forms according to the group: older women tend to narrate their experience from a biographical ‘I’ and to use the identity-marking ‘you’ as a form of empathic generalisation with the normative role of woman and mother, as well as to achieve deictic distancing; older men articulate a ‘I’ that oscillates between the emotional and the testimonial, incorporating stigmatising social voices; young men, on the other hand, resort to ‘I’ as a form of critical self-affirmation and ‘we’ as a strategy of narrative politicisation. The analysis of the use of the third person shows how stigma is externalised through the evocation of medical, social or family voices, which function as agents of judgement or discrimination. These external voices, integrated into dynamics of discursive polyphony, allow us to observe how speakers negotiate, internalise or resist dominant representations of HIV status. Finally, the absence of testimonies from young women with HIV raises questions about the mechanisms of invisibility and self-exclusion in the public sphere. Resumen – El estudio analiza un corpus de discursos periodísticos multimedia protagonizados por personas que viven con VIH en España, con el objetivo de explorar los patrones en el empleo de las formas deícticas como marcadores de identidad, agencia y distancia enunciativa. El análisis se apoya en los marcos teóricos del estigma (Goffman 1963; Link & Phelan 2001) y del posicionamiento discursivo (Davies, Harré 1990), y presta especial atención a las variables de género y edad. Los resultados revelan diferencias significativas en el uso de las formas deícticas según el grupo: las mujeres mayores tienden a narrar su experiencia desde un “yo” biográfico y a emplear el “tú” identitario como forma de generalización empática con el papel normativo de mujer y de madre, así como para llevar a cabo un distanciamiento deíctico; los hombres mayores articulan un “yo” que oscila entre lo emocional y lo testimonial, incorporando voces sociales estigmatizantes; los hombres jóvenes, en cambio, recurren al “yo” como forma de autoafirmación crítica y al “nosotros” como estrategia de politización narrativa. El análisis del uso de la tercera persona muestra cómo el estigma es externalizado mediante la evocación de voces médicas, sociales o familiares, que funcionan como agentes de juicio o discriminación. Estas voces ajenas, integradas en dinámicas de polifonía discursiva, permiten observar cómo los hablantes negocian, interiorizan o resisten las representaciones dominantes sobre la seropositividad. La ausencia de testimonios de mujeres jóvenes con VIH plantea, finalmente, interrogantes sobre los mecanismos de invisibilización y autoexclusión en el espacio público.
Este artículo pretende estudiar cómo la espada con la que Simón Bolívar liberó a las colonias americanas del yugo español contribuyó a crear una narrativa alrededor suyo que, en fases alternadas, ha “tramado” en todos sus significados la democracia en Colombia. Con base en la obra entre historia y novela de Patricia Lara Salive, La espada de Bolívar (2023), se taxonomizarán de forma especial estas diferentes fases, averiguando en qué porcentaje (valor cuantitativo) y con cuáles gestas (valor cualitativo) esta espada ha colaborado a la construcción de la democracia y, de alguna manera, de la libertad durante aquellas que se consideran ser las etapas de la historia del país caribeño después de la colonia: independencia, consolidación republicana, siglo XX y adelantos del siglo XXI. Después de haber sido empuñada por el Libertador, robada en 1974 por el M-19, menospreciada por el rey español Felipe VI y reclamada por el actual presidente colombiano Gustavo Petro, este símbolo imperecedero recuerda la historia de Colombia de los últimos dos siglos, en la espera constante de una libertad total.
Dalla morfologia di Goethe alle ontologie multispecies di Haraway
The paper brings into dialogue Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s vegetal morphology, as articulated in Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790), with several key concepts in Donna Haraway’s thought, including contact zone, sympoiesis, and becoming-with. Through a transhistorical and theoretical comparison, the study explores the possibility of reading Goethe’s work as a proto-ecological epistemological laboratory, capable of anticipating – albeit in germinal form – many of the concerns that characterize contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist thought. In particular, the paper highlights how Goethe’s conception of metamorphosis as a dynamic and relational principle of life resonates with Haraway’s sympoietic ontology, in which knowledge emerges as a situated, material, and interspecific practice. For Goethe, the plant becomes a figure of interdependence and living memory – a space of co-production between forms and environmental that, in light of Haraway’s thought, can be interpreted as a ‘contact zone’. The aim is twofold: on the one hand, to contribute to an ecocritical (re)reading of the classical-Romantic naturalistic tradition by proposing a relational genealogy of knowledge; on the other, to foreground Goethe’s morphological legacy as a theoretical resource for contemporary ecocritical reflection.
Dilemmi coloniali in un testo dimenticato
The article examines Henry Rider Haggard’s Black Heart and White Heart (1896), claiming that this understudied novella needs to be rediscovered and studied today. By analysing the novella’s spatiality and characterisation, the article highlights its innovative aspects in comparison to Haggard’s best-known romances of the 1880s, suggesting that these novelties bear evidence of important changes in the author’s ideological stance. A first object of scrutiny is the representation of Zulu space. The use of Zulu toponyms and the attention for both spatial and historical details make the novella’s setting more realistic than the imaginary, gothicised settings of Kings Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), proving Haggard’s increased respect for indigenous culture. A similar attitude can be traced in the unwonted characterisation of Black Heart and White Heart. The novella challenges colonial propaganda by opposing a British villain to a Zulu hero and by encouraging the reader to empathise with the latter. Dominant prejudices of white virtue and black corruption are significantly reversed in the text which, by problematising the age’s conceptualisation of skin-colour and morality, also casts a shadow on the legitimacy of colonial domination. Finally, the chapter focuses on the thought-provoking portrayals of two Zulu women who, unlike other indigenous women featured in the more famous romances, challenge established views of gender and ethnicity.
This article analyzes the narrative genealogy connecting Second Class Citizen (1974) by Buchi Emecheta and Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. At the core of this study is the concept of ‘narrative sisterhood’ as a form of literary continuity through which Black women writers create symbolic spaces of resistance, recognition, and collective memory across generations and diasporic experiences. Adichie’s novel does not merely parallel Emecheta’s work, but rather reworks and transforms themes already present in nuce in Emecheta’s narrative universe. Through the figures of Adah and Ifemelu, the essay explores how diasporic Black female subjectivities are shaped, on the one hand, by migration, racialization, and gender oppression, and, on the other hand, by the search for belonging and affirmation. Particular attention is devoted to writing as a transformative and political act: Adah’s manuscript and Ifemelu’s blog become narrative spaces in which silence is transformed into speech and marginality into self-definition. The article further examines how bodily violence, reproductive control, racism, and linguistic displacement affect the protagonists’ processes of subjectivation. Drawing on the theories of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said, this study emphasizes that writing is a practice of reconstruction and resistance.
Miscommunication and accommodation issues in ELF-mediated intercultural migration contexts
This paper focuses on interactions between West-African immigrants and Italian intercultural mediators in authority in centres for legal advice and medical assistance. In such contexts, it was observed that misunderstanding is often triggered by distinct ELF variations in contact. These variations are often, in Kachru’s (1986) terms, from the outer circle (endonormative variations spoken by immigrants from former British colonies) and the expanding circle (exonormative variations making reference to native inner-circle norms spoken by non-native experts, who regard migrants’ variations as ‘defective variants’ of the native-speaker language). Central in this enquiry is the notion of transfer of non-native speakers’ respective L1 semantic, syntactic and pragmatic structures into ELF, caused by different cognitive-experiential backgrounds – or schemata (Carrell 1983) – underlying their native typologically different languages (Guido 2008, 2012, 2019) and their cultures (Jenkins 2007). Being aware of such L1-transfer processes underlying ELF uses is crucial for experts responsible for successful communication. Yet, as case studies will show, this is not evident in migration contexts where experts impose upon immigrants their own ELF-mediated specialized uses which may be cognitively inaccessible and conceptually unavailable (Widdowson 1991) to immigrants, thus representing the very cause of intercultural miscommunication in need of accommodation.
This paper examines the dramatic oeuvre of Kateřina Rudčenková (b. 1976), a prominent author on the Czech literary scene of the twenty-first century. By contextualizing her plays against the backdrop of recent Czech history and the reception of Western feminism in Czechia during the post-1989 transition, we show how the playwright—drawing on a distinctly Central European cultural milieu as well as on autobiographical elements—illuminates the condition of contemporary Czech women. Her protagonists frequently function as alter egos who, on the one hand, find themselves entangled in dysfunctional relationships with men who are either possessive or emotionally absent, and, on the other, despite enjoying certain freedoms, struggle to emancipate themselves fully from the conventions of a middle class that retains a markedly conservative outlook. These theater heroines demonstrate that many women of Rudčenková’s generation remain in a state of suspension, unable to keep pace with the latest global feminist developments.
This paper examines the modern Chinese academic debate on the etymology of hútong 胡同, a term closely associated with Beijing’s historical urban fabric. Since the late twentieth century, scholarly discussion has been shaped by competing explanatory frameworks that differ not only in their conclusions, but also in their underlying methodological assumptions. Early externalist accounts, most notably those developed by Zhāng Qingchang and later refined by Junast, interpret hútong as a loanword acquired through contact with Mongolian during the Yuan dynasty, often grounding the explanation in a semantic chain centered on the notion of a ‘well.’ More recent scholarship has challenged this view by reassessing phonological correspondence, textual attestations, and historical urban evidence. Internalist reconstructions, exemplified by the work of Wáng Yuè, argue that hútong can be explained through internal Chinese developments, tracing its evolution through pre-Yuan lexical forms, vernacular orthography, and documented sound change. From this perspective, a borrowing-based explanation is not linguistically necessary. Between these positions stands an intermediate proposal advanced by Lín Yì, which rejects the well-based semantic chain while maintaining an externalist orientation. Drawing on Altaic comparative linguistics, Lín situates hútong within a broader areal semantic field denoting narrow, hollow passages and proposes Mongolian γudum as a more plausible etymon. Rather than advocating a single definitive solution, this paper situates these competing accounts within a shared analytical framework and evaluates them in terms of evidentiary standards, explanatory sufficiency, and methodological orientation. It argues that the hútong debate exemplifies a broader tension in Chinese historical linguistics between contact-based plausibility and internal philological continuity, and that its persistence reflects not only empirical uncertainty but also differing conceptions of how linguistic history should be reconstructed.
Narrative resources in destination storytelling on Instagram
Storytelling has become an increasingly influential concept in tourism marketing, where destinations are frequently promoted through narratives designed to facilitate emotional engagement, identification, and narrative transportation. From a narratological perspective, however, storytelling traditionally implies the representation and communication of a story involving events, actors, and temporal development. This distinction is particularly relevant in social media communication, where promotional texts are often brief, fragmented, and lacking fully developed plots. Drawing on Abbott’s (2008) notion of minimal narrative and on broader narratological approaches to narrativity, this study investigates the narrative resources through which destinations acquire narrativity in Instagram tourism discourse. The analysis is based on a specialised corpus of 74,319 words comprising 1,021 English-language Instagram posts published by nine Italian regional tourism boards between August 2025 and February 2026. Adopting a corpus-assisted discourse analytic approach, the study combines quantitative corpus-linguistic techniques with qualitative concordance analysis to examine three interconnected narrative dimensions: characterisation through personification and anthropomorphisation, experiential immersion, and temporality. The findings reveal that destinations are systematically represented as humanised entities endowed with agency, communicative abilities, personality traits, and symbolic identities. Experiential immersion is realised through the interaction of projected participation, sensory immersion, and affective framing, which encourage readers to imaginatively participate in projected destination experiences. Temporality is constructed through recurring patterns of temporal idealisation, temporal suspension, mythical temporality, and future orientation, frequently combined within the same promotional texts. The study further shows that these dimensions rarely operate independently but interact to create destination representations characterised by agency, experiential immersion, and temporal depth. The paper argues that Instagram tourism discourse often relies not on fully developed stories but on recurring narrative resources and minimal narratives that contribute to the construction of narrativity. By integrating narratological theory with tourism discourse analysis, the study provides new insights into the linguistic mechanisms through which destinations are represented, experienced, and imagined in contemporary social media communication.
Processi di designazione del maschile in app di incontro per uomini
Abstract – This contribution investigates the processes of masculine designation in short profile texts from male dating apps, with particular attention to the Italian terms maschio and maschile and to their distribution as auto-designations and hetero-designations. On the basis of a primary corpus of 39 Grindr profile texts, supplemented by comparative materials collected between 2021 and 2022 from Romeo, Scruff, Wapo and related platforms, as well as by subsequent qualitative checks carried out up to 2026, the paper analyses profiles as brief, pragmatically dense texts in which self-presentation and partner selection converge in a device of identity regulation. The study argues that maschio and maschile do not function as merely referential descriptors, but as normative operators: they establish thresholds of access to interaction, distinguish desirable from undesirable partners, and construct a selective solidarity among subjects who recognize themselves in a model of discreet, reserved, embodied and anti-effeminate virility. The analysis shows the prevalence of hetero-designations, the centrality of sexual positioning as an implicit classificatory criterion, and the recurrence of negative designations that feminize, ridicule or exclude men perceived as effeminate or passive. Keywords: masculine designation; maschio; maschile; auto-designation; hetero-designation; sexual positioning. Recapito autore: albertomanco@unior.it
Equivalencia y funcionalidad en la traducción literaria de expresiones idiomáticas
This study examines the Spanish translation of a representative set of phraseological units found in the novel Sabbia nera by Cristina Cassar Scalia and in its Spanish version, Arena negra. The main objective is to analyze the translation strategies employed in rendering idiomatic expressions from Italian into Spanish and to determine to what extent the solutions adopted succeed in reproducing for the target reader a communicative, pragmatic, and stylistic effect equivalent to that generated in the reader of the source text. The corpus consists of fourteen phraseological units selected for their narrative relevance, metaphorical density, and characterizing function within the literary discourse. The study follows a qualitative and descriptive approach, grounded in contributions from phraseology and translation studies, particularly gradual models of equivalence and the functional-communicative perspective oriented toward the recipient. The analysis considers not only lexical correspondence but also the preservation of the conceptual image, expressive intensity, register, and textual function of each unit within its discursive context. The results reveal a clear tendency toward substitution with established idiomatic equivalents in the target language, with a predominance of full or total phraseological equivalence (57.1% of the cases). Instances of partial functional equivalence are also identified, characterized by attenuation or reformulation of the metaphorical component, as well as a single case of insufficient equivalence resulting from a non-lexicalized calque. The study highlights the typological and cultural proximity between Italian and Spanish, which facilitates stable metaphorical correspondences, and underscores the importance of pragmatic and discursive adequacy as a key criterion for assessing the quality of phraseological translation in literary texts.
This article aims to study the collective imaginary of the concept of democracy in Venezuela through the relationship between language and literature in the novel Patria o muerte (2015) by Venezuelan author Alberto Barrera Tyszka. The narrative is set in a country absorbed by the final days of leader Hugo Chávez, marked by a sharp internal dichotomy: dictatorship vs democracy. Furthermore, the novel’s title itself is significant: it refers to a political slogan of the Chavista leader who, in 2011, chose to replace the traditional word “death” —linked to “homeland”— with “life”, further intensifying the country’s ideological conflict.The specificity of this novel lies in its selection of characters and their political ideologies: on one hand, it portrays an anti-Chavista extremist perspective; on the other, it depicts a strong radicalism and support for Hugo Chávez as a political figure. Accordingly, the study proposes to analyze the lexicon (nouns and adjectives) associated with each character in sentences that mention Chávez directly or indirectly. This project relies on the Diccionario ideológico de la lengua española by Julio Casares (2013 [1942]), with the aim of investigating how the language of literature can help to “weave democracy” in Venezuela and to uncover which “face of the coin” emerges from the novel’s linguistic and literary nuances.
Although Charles Dickens is renowned for detailed narration, his fiction also relies on strategically significant omissions. The article examines these absences through Lamarque’s concept of “narrative opacity” (2014), according to which textual meaning stems from the relationship between narrative content and its mode of presentation. Also drawing on Gerld Prince’s notions of “unnarration” (i.e. events that cannot be narrated) and “disnarration” (i.e. events that only occur hypothetically or negatively), the essay analyses Dickens’ short story “The Italian Prisoner” (1860) and explores the author’s uneasiness in representing Italian criminality. Through close textual analysis, the paper argues that the story’s tripartite structure foregrounds opacity surrounding time, space, and criminal agency. The protagonist, Giovanni Carlavero, is imprisoned and released without clear explanation, and narrator and reader alike are excluded from complete knowledge of events. These omissions generate narrative tension, while simultaneously inviting the reader to actively reconstruct meaning. The only plausible interpretation, however, casts the Italian legal system in a negative light, depicting it as opaque and corrupt. Through these strategies, Dickens articulates a broader critique of continental justice and aligns with nineteenth-century representations of Southern Europe as a morally and institutionally deficient Other. “The Italian Prisoner” thus reflects Victorian anxieties about foreign criminality and resonates with Dickens’ portrayal of foreign offenders in Little Dorrit (1857) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Sebbene le ricche e dettagliate narrazioni di Charles Dickens siano rinomate, l’autore ricorre a volte a omissioni narrative strategicamente rilevanti. L’articolo esamina tali assenze alla luce del concetto di “opacità narrativa” elaborato da Lamarque (2014), secondo cui il significato testuale deriva dalla relazione tra il contenuto narrativo e le sue modalità di presentazione. Avvalendosi delle nozioni di “unnarration” (eventi che non possono essere narrati) e “disnarration” (eventi che accadono ipoteticamente o negativamente) formulate da Gerald Prince, l’articolo analizza il racconto “The Italian Prisoner” (1860) ed esplora il disagio dell’autore nel rappresentare la criminalità italiana. L’articolo suggerisce che la struttura tripartita del racconto evidenzia un’opacità legata a tempo, spazio e responsabilità criminale. Il protagonista, Giovanni Carlavero, viene inesplicabilmente imprigionato e rilasciato, escludendo tanto il narratore che il lettore da una completa conoscenza degli eventi. Queste omissioni generano una tensione anrrativa e invitano il lettore a ricosrtruire attivamente il significato. La sola ricostruzione plausibile, tuttavia, mette in cattiva luce il sistema giudiziario italiano, raffigurandolo come opaco e corrotto. Attrabverso queste strategie, Dickens articola una più ampia critica della giustizia continentale, allineandosi alle rappresentazioni ottocentesche dell’Europa meridionale quale Altro moralmente e istituzionalmente inferiore. “The Italian Prisoner” riflette le ansie Vittoriane nei confronti della criminalità straniera e rispecchia la rappresentazione dei criminali stranieri in “Little Dorrit” (1857) e “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859).
Mensch und "Umwelt" in der Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit
This article explores the possibilities of an ecocritical approach to early modern literature. To this end, it first discusses some fundamental contextual factors at the intersection of cultural history, intellectual history and environmental history, which define the pre-modern concept of nature and the relationship between early modern people and nature. In a second step, an ecocritical reading of early modern literature is then put forward for discussion on the basis of two specific textual examples from around 1500. One of these is Hans Sachs’s poetic Nuremberg City Praise (1530), the other is De iudicium Jovis, a Neo-Latin prose dialogue by Paul Niavis (Schneevogel), first published in 1495. Beyond the specific stylistic and aesthetic conventions employed by both texts—which stem from their affiliation with distinct poetic and discursive traditions rooted in the vernacular Middle Ages and humanism respectively—it is above all their respective perspectives on the relationship between humanity and nature that prove to be profoundly different. Thus, the narrative discourse of Sachs’s proverbial poem consistently focuses on the city as an anthropogenic habitat founded on the use of natural resources, to which the allegorical natural setting of the forest, sketched out at the beginning, relates exclusively in a symbolic frame of reference. With regard to mining, however, Niavis’s dialogue offers a more nuanced, essentially pessimistic and critical reflection on humanity’s exploitation of nature, which also gives nature – in the form of ‘Mother Earth’ – a voice of its own, thereby countering, even if unwittingly, the rigorously anthropocentric understanding of nature prevalent at the time.
This article examines the phenomenon of trash from a linguistic perspective, approaching it not as an intrinsic quality of a specific content, but as an evaluative category grounded in the gap between expectation and realization. After outlining the theoretical framework that defines the mechanisms through which trash is constructed, the study addresses the question of whether a distinct “language of trash” can be said to exist, focusing on three main generative devices: deviation from an expected register, overt or covert vulgarity, and the violation of communicative expectations. The analysis is based on a corpus of digital materials (memes, GIFs, reels, and video excerpts) drawn from social media pages and profiles dedicated to trash culture. The data show how these devices operate concretely in the production and media circulation of trash-related content. The findings suggest that it is not possible to speak of an autonomous linguistic variety associated with trash. Rather, so-called “trash language” emerges from the interaction between linguistic usage, social evaluation, and media amplification. Through processes of recontextualization and circulation, linguistic deviation, vulgarity, and pragmatic incongruity are transformed into objects of shared ironic consumption. In this sense, trash provides a privileged vantage point from which to observe how language is continuously evaluated, exposed, and renegotiated within contemporary mediatized public space.
Ambientalismo e sperimentazione formale nella letteratura austriaca contemporanea
In Austrian literature, nature has traditionally been present as a landscape considered an integral part of national identity. The myth of an uncontaminated scenic beauty and bearer of healthy values ​​was already questioned in the second half of the 20th century. In recent years, the new sense of responsibility towards nature goes hand in hand with the denunciation of global violence against the environment. The landscape disappears and conventional and anthropocentric narrative and theatrical forms are called in question. Contemporary texts, like Kathrin Röggla's Das Wasser(2022) and Thomas Köck's paradies fluten(2014), show a mix of formal experimentalism, environmentalist appeal, and catastrophism, in an attempt to shake the audience out of a passivity regarding climate change.
Les jeux de mots dans les enseignes commerciales en Belgique francophone
Whether they be a genuine marketing operation, a poetic or even an impressionist pictorial act, plays on words in commercial onomastic have become commonplace in the urban landscape​. On the basis of a survey carried out in Belgium (in Wallonia and in Brussels) ​- which identified over 200 of them on the signs​ of restaurants, shops and other types of institutions​ - our own contribution is an attempt to draw up a taxonomy of the rhetorical figures most often used by shopkeepers, and to measure their recurrence and function. The article also looks at the possible link between​ a certain kind of institution and its propensity to create or not a pun to draw attention.
The essay undertakes an ecocritical comparison between Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868), a nineteenth‑century Central European writer, and Amitav Ghosh (1956), a contemporary author of Indian origin. Through an analysis of the Vorrede to Bunte Steine (1852) and of the essay The Great Derangement (2016), it places in dialogue two contrasting yet complementary visions of the relationship between humanity and nature. Stifter celebrates the continuity and harmony of the natural world, assigning moral significance to the ordinary dimension of experience and to the “gentle law” that governs silent and enduring phenomena. Ghosh, by contrast, exposes the modern realist novel’s inability to represent extreme climatic events and advocates for new narrative forms capable of giving voice to the nonhuman and confronting the global ecological crisis. Particular attention is devoted to the circumstance that, despite their separation by historical period and cultural context, both writers share the conviction that literature performs an ethical and transformative function: for Stifter, to teach an attentive perception of the strength inherent in quiet and continuous things; for Ghosh, to restore the complexity and urgency of contemporary environmental collapse.
This study examines how restaurants in three English-speaking countries—the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia—deploy transparency to rebuild trust when responding publicly to 1-star Google Reviews. Guided by Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Hall’s context-communication framework, the Global Restaurant Response Corpus (GRRC) was assembled: 1,500 manager replies (500 per country; 657,750 tokens) posted in 2024–2025 by venues rated 4 stars or higher. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis, lexical and discourse patterns that signal transparency (e.g., “explain”, “because”, “reason”) and trust (e.g., “honest”, “ensure”, “acknowledge”) were analysed and compared. Quantitative keyword and collocation tests revealed a shared four-move response template—apology, acknowledgment, justification, remediation—yet uncovered culturally inflected preferences: U.S. replies favored explicit justifications and empathic tone; U.K. replies foregrounded restrained professionalism; Australian replies blended directness with conversational warmth. These findings suggest that while a global norm of “visible accountability” is emerging in digital complaint management, its rhetorical realization remains tuned to local communication styles. The study advances understanding of transparency as a culturally mediated trust-building strategy and offers practical guidance for hospitality professionals crafting responses in an increasingly transparent marketplace.