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A broad strand of applied linguistic research has focused on the language of science and scholarship, stressing its role in the construction and negotiation of knowledge claims. Central to the success of such texts is the use of evaluative expressions encoding what is considered to be desirable or undesirable in a given domain. While the speech acts relevant to evaluation have been extensively researched, little is known of the underlying values they encode. This volume seeks to fill the gap by exploring the main facets of academic value in a corpus of research articles from leading journals in anthropology, biology, computer science, economics, engineering, history, mathematics, medicine, physics and sociology. The collocations and qualified entities associated with such variables in the corpus provide insights into how scholars draw on a repertoire of conventional, largely unqualified, axiological meanings instrumental to the production of new knowledge in their field.

This volume reflects the latest work of scholars specialising in the linguistic and legal aspects of normative texts across languages (English, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish) and law systems. Like other domains of specialised language use, legal discourse is subject to the converging pressures of internationalisation and of emerging practices that destabilise well-established norms and routines. In an integrated, interdependent context, supranational laws, rules and procedures are gradually developed and harmonised to regulate issues that can no longer be dealt with by national laws alone, as in the case of the European Union. The contributors discuss the impact of such developments on the construction, evolution and hybridisation of legal texts, analysed both linguistically and from the practitioner’s standpoint.

This volume brings together a selection of contributions presented at the 15 th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes, held at the University of Bergamo (Italy) from 29 August to 2 September 2005. The conference title, «New Trends in Specialized Discourse», reflects the emphasis given to recent orientations in research, coming from established as well as new authors in the field.
As suggested by the title of this volume, the analysis of specialized discourse calls for a specialized discourse analysis. When applied linguists deal with vocational discourses, they are faced with a double challenge: on the one hand, an understanding of textualisations often alien to the general language; on the other hand, the use of analytical tools designed specifically for their investigation. The studies presented in this volume position themselves somewhere along this continuum, focusing alternatively on converging/diverging features of texts and discourses.