The seminar introduced doctoral students to basic theoretical and practical knowledge on the subject of specialized discourse, with particular emphasis on the role played by multi-lexical bundles within it. Professor Mocini began his lecture by familiarizing his audience with definitions of such key terms in the field as discourse, discourse community, or text, understood here as a social exchange of meaning in context (Halliday and Hasan, 1990). Then, he discussed three variables of context (field, tenor, and mode) that influence the way in which meanings are realized and expressed in the text, defining its specific register. The seminar drew attention to the fact that some multi-lexical patterns tend to frequently reoccur in particular contexts (i.e. within certain discourse communities), and should therefore be perceived as an important element of the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teaching. Professor Mocini presented basic structural and functional taxonomy of those lexical bundles, supplementing it with examples from the field of medical sciences. The seminar ended with a practical exercise in which doctoral students had the opportunity to extract register-specific collocations from a medical paper’s abstract and assign them to three functional categories (ideational, interpersonal, or textual lexical phrases).
26 gennaio 2023