Research Aims

The interests of the Puglia research group embrace various dimensions of language variation including political discourse, tourism discourse, winespeak, multimedia products, and literary products. Research carried out within this unit combines the methods of corpus linguistics, both qualitative and quantitative, with theoretical reference frameworks such as systemic functional grammar, visual grammar and discourse analysis to investigate linguistic issues related to genre analysis, discourse construction and textuality, rewriting for a different audience or medium, translation, pragmatics, semantics, phraseology, and figurative language. Approaches also include contrastive studies and cross-cultural analysis.

The Puglia research group has recently held conferences and published edited volumes on the representation and redefinition of specialised knowledge and specialized discourse and multimedia.

Recent studies have focused on persuasion in promotional communication across cultures, tourism promotion on social media, science popularization for children, adapting classical theatre pieces for very young audiences. Further studies have focused on the spread of populism in Europe and in the USA, with a special emphasis on the language of British and American leaders, and the figures of speeches employed by such leaders to persuade their audience.

Members