Introduction to Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication

This Special Issue of Lingue e Linguaggi is the product of a Colloquium held from the 13th to the 14th of June 2019, at the Faculty of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome. The theme for the event was “Exploring the Discursive Creation of Argumentation and Ideology in Evolving Specialized Knowledge Domains”. It was hosted by the Rome Sapienza Unit (Coordinator Rita Salvi) of a National Research Project (PRIN) entitled “Knowledge dissemination across media in English: continuity and change in discourse strategies, ideologies and epistemologies” (2015TJ8ZAS, 2015-2017), financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research: the other Research Units belonging to the project included Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione, Milano (Iulm), Università degli Studi di Milano, Università degli Studi di Pisa. Directory Board Members of the research group CLAVIER, Corpus and Language Variation in Language Research, also extended their invitation to scholars to participate in the event. The Keynote Speakers for the occasion were Susan Hunston, University of Birmingham, UK, and Srikant Sarangi, University of Aalborg, Denmark. The interface between argumentation, ideology and discourse proved to be a fruitful ground for discussion throughout the two days of presentation and debate. The Rome 2019 Colloquium gathered research experiences and findings on these topics over a range of specialized knowledge domains, as this collection of papers demonstrates. The research reported in this volume includes synchronic, diachronic, comparative, multimodal, interlinguistic and intercultural perspectives. Similarly, a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and tools were called into play in exploring these themes, highlighting both connections and contrasts in conceptual and explanatory frameworks. Some of these will be commented on briefly here.