The lecture offered an introduction to specialized linguistics. The lecture was divided into three parts. The first part was dedicated to linguistic landscape (LL), which she introduced as the ‘visibility and salience of languages in public and commercial signs in a given territory or region’ (Landry and Bourhis 1997). This field stands at the junction of sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, geography, and media studies. Professor Morbiducci then shifted her focus on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), introducing a number of key concepts such as Braj Kachru’s circles of English diagrams, the communicative and pragmatic focus upheld by Widdowson – among others –, and language ownership. Kurt Kohn’s concept of ‘My English’ was also introduced, highlighting a psycholinguistic perspective on the acquisition of ELF linguistic skills. The third and last part of the lecture offered a brief overview on Corpus Linguistics (CL). After describing how CL has gained more and more stature over the last decades, its major areas of application were described, giving examples of major corpora available online. Morbiducci concluded her lecture by explaining the difference between types of corpora, as well as by naming a number of corpus analysis tools such as Sketch Engine.
16 gennaio 2023