marianna lya zummo | Università degli Studi di Palermo (original) (raw)

Papers by marianna lya zummo

Journal of Language and Discrimination

Social media interactions represent an accessible way for young people to get health information ... more Social media interactions represent an accessible way for young people to get health information and provide a form of public discourse about health. It is against this backdrop that experts and other health professionals have turned to digital platforms (e.g., TikTok) to share educational content about timely or touchy topics, and to spread awareness, specifically among younger users. This paper aims to explore these digital platforms where professionals provide health information that is specifically tailored for a young audience and attempts to explore the discursive negotiation of healthcare and health accessibility in digital social settings. In light of a social media critical discourse perspective, this study explores the creative shifts in the process of accommodating a product to a target audience and questions what meanings, in terms of accessibility and/or discrimination, these products carry for their audience.

$Research paper thumbnail of \u201cDear Young People, don\u2019t vote\u201d. Seniors in political advertisements: irony and/or legitimation$

The widespread representation of older people in popular culture as passive and inert has been ch... more The widespread representation of older people in popular culture as passive and inert has been challenged in a range of recent studies and publications (Nussbaum / Coupland 2004, Caprara et al. 2013). In view of the increasing number of older adults in today\u2019s society, the notion of aging has received significant attention in the public sphere where common assumptions and stereotypes are challenged and potential scenarios are presented. As it has been discussed from different academic perspectives over the past twenty years, older people\u2019s collective condition is undergoing important sociological and cultural changes, making the elderly - among other things - an enticing political reservoir of votes and a pivotal segment of the active electorate. Guided by this evidence, many political actors have devoted specific communication strategies to such age- groups, providing both ad hoc political messages and policy activities. This study builds on previous research (Schneider /...

Blogs are extensively used for personal accounts and news reports. In particular, health blogs ca... more Blogs are extensively used for personal accounts and news reports. In particular, health blogs can be considered as both information sources and communication channels be- tween Science and Society, since they face the growing need for information among non-insiders. This study is concerned with the dimension of reality portrayed in blog comment en- tries; focusing particularly on participants'' representation of facts and their commit- ment to the truth of the proposition. The framework for this study has been shaped by the typologies in Chafe (1986), Willett (1988), Van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), Plungian (2001), Mar\uecn (2002, 2004). Data are taken from three health and science we- blogs dealing with health issues. Following literature, markers of evidentiality and epis- temic modality were selected in order to assess the writer''s attitude towards the stance (epistemic modality); its reliability and the qualification of source-of-information (evidence of pe...

Computer Mediated Medical Communicatio

Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with... more Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure timestamping service. Although Bitcoin participants which create new blocks cannot modify their order, they can manipulate timestamps almost undetected. This undermines the Bitcoin protocol as a reliable timestamping service. In particular, a newcomer that synchronizes the entire blockchain has a little guarantee about timestamps of all blocks. In this paper, we present a simple yet powerful mechanism that increases the reliability of Bitcoin timestamps. Our protocol can provide evidence that a block was created within a certain time range. The protocol is efficient, backward compatible, and surprisingly, currently deployed SSL/TLS servers can act as reference time sources. The protocol has many applications and can be used for detecting various attacks against the Bitcoin protocol.

Emerging countries are recently experiencing a growing trend for business sustainability and tran... more Emerging countries are recently experiencing a growing trend for business sustainability and transparency. In India, where the virtues of charity and philanthropy are deeply rooted in the cultural, religious and historical traditions, big firms have been particularly active in providing basic services for the local communities. In the last decade, a small but growing number of companies have also started to disclose on their social and environmental issues. More aware of the impact of their operations on the surrounding population and species, energy companies have felt a stronger urge to account for the sustainability of their activities. The present study, part of a larger research project, is conducted on a corpus of CSR reports in English issued between 2008 and 2011 by oil and electric companies operating in developing and industrial countries. Standardising projects such as GRI and UNGC influence the type and amount of information provided in CSR reports but not the discoursal organisation and the priority given to the different social responsibility areas and themes. Anglocentric textual models have been exported to India and combined with local regulative requirements and culture-specific features, resulting in a union of global and local elements. Moreover, CSR reports constitute a mixed genre, combining both informative and promotional features, which could result in an unbalanced picture, highlighting triumphs and avoiding key challenges. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the Indian CSR reports can help to reveal how the emergent genre is taking shape in the country and to identify any peculiar structural, lexical and rhetorical features linked to the national values and socio-historical situation.

Paolo Loffredo Editore, 2020

ФГУ «ФНЦ трансплантологии и искусственных органов имени академика В.И. Шумакова» Минздравсоцразви... more ФГУ «ФНЦ трансплантологии и искусственных органов имени академика В.И. Шумакова» Минздравсоцразвития РФ, г. Москва Оксидативный стресс возникает при нарушении баланса между активными формами кислорода (супероксид анион, перекись водорода, гидроксильные радикалы азота и др.) и антиоксидантной способностью. Целью работы явилось изучение параметров оксидативного статуса и антиоксидантной защиты при подключении осевого насоса у экспериментальных животных. Исследование проведено на 7 телятах в возрасте от 110 до 130 дней и массой тела от 95 до 105 кг. Прямую оценку оксидативного стресса (FORT) и антиоксидантной защиты (FORD) проводили на анализаторе «FORM Plus CR3000» («Callegary», Италия). У здоровых животных показатели оксидативного равновесия отличаются от таковых у человека. FORT у телят ниже (0,42 ± 0,11 против 1,74 ± 0,32 ммоль/л H 2 O 2 , соответственно, p < 0,05), а показатель FORD/FORT выше (3,92 ± 1,30 и 1,33 ± 0,27, соответственно, p < 0,05), что необходимо учитывать при интерпретации результатов экспериментальных и клинических исследований. У трех телят в условиях эксперимента при подключении осевого насоса максимальные значения параметров оксидативного стресса наблюдались на 1-3-и сутки с последующей их нормализацией. Прямая оценка параметров оксидативного стресса может быть использована для контроля адекватности вспомогательного кровообращения в эксперименте.

Liguori, 2012

in Regenerating Community, Territry, Voices, Di Michele L. Ed, Liguori, Italy, pp. 249-253

Scripta Manent, 2018

Considering that learners engage in the creation of new educational scenarios, often using digita... more Considering that learners engage in the creation of new educational scenarios, often using digital media, travelogues have been analysed because they represent the digital development of a well-established genre within tourism discourse. This study focuses on the discursive construction of expats as 1) integrated tourist and 2) travelogue writers. I consider the occurrence of an Us as opposed/assimilated with a Them in the expression of values, behaviors and spaces by analyzing a corpus made up of articles taken from the most accessed travel webzines for expats at the time of the research. Then I analyse the thematic structures and techniques of this textual typology. The paper may help to address pedagogical issues such as critical genre awareness and identity construction.

Set in the tradition of studies that look at digital interactions, this paper aims to explore the... more Set in the tradition of studies that look at digital interactions, this paper aims to explore the dimension of illness as referred to by informal caregivers in online exchanges. The research attempts to a) describe posts as mediated illness stories by comparing them to the storytelling in interaction model (Mishler), and b) explore what is revealed about the writer. A data set of 7371 posts (including sub-replies) has been studied as personal narratives in non-clinical therapeutic exchanges by means of Digital Conversation Analysis (Giles et al.), and investigated as written emotional disclosure (Pennebaker). Posts are found to convey explicit and implicit messages to be understood and incorporated into health promotion efforts, beliefs and issues. The paper makes a contribution to the field of medical humanities by proposing online posts as third-person accounts of illness experiences, and as the linguistic manifestation of caregivers' (CGs) state of mind. Although digital sett...

Nel 2009 i media riportano di un caso sportivo che suscita scalpore a livello internazionale: Cas... more Nel 2009 i media riportano di un caso sportivo che suscita scalpore a livello internazionale: Caster Mokgadi Semenya, atleta sudafricana, dopo aver vinto la medaglia d\u2019oro negli 800 metri femminili ai Mondiali di atletica leggera di Berlino, viene accusata di essere un uomo. A partire da quell\u2019anno, numerosi commenti, articoli e interviste si sono succeduti toccando una questione discussa nella letteratura sulle differenze di genere

Translation or Transcreation? Discourses, Texts and Visuals presents us with an apparent dilemma:... more Translation or Transcreation? Discourses, Texts and Visuals presents us with an apparent dilemma: is translation primarily a form of transfer or a form of creation? This dilemma harks back to a series of questions about the nature of creativity which are at the heart of Western philosophy and aesthetics: what distinguishes an original from a reproduction? What is original in every “translation” and what has already been translated in every “original”? While these questions have been theoretically debated in the past fifty years mainly in the contexts of French and American deconstruction, contemporary communication practices bring them back on the table with renewed urgency. The global flows of information and culture, the digitalisation of reading and writing, and the increasingly multimodal character of new media are radically transforming the very notion of “text” – let alone that of an “original text”. Against this background, the dilemma between translation as transfer and tran...

Translation and transcreation can both be considered as practices carried out by professionals tr... more Translation and transcreation can both be considered as practices carried out by professionals trained in the communication of languages, cultures and situational settings. However, a growing number of internet users resort to the Internet to equip themselves with language knowledge, exploiting the collaborative setting the Internet provides. Online collaboration is based on the new culture of openness and engagement, which is negotiated via interaction with the final aim of providing a possible good, and \u201cprofessional-like\u201d, translation. As stated by Guyon (2010, 33), coordination and discussion between participants are part and parcel of the translation process. Although fora have thoroughly been discussed as a locus of empowerment (Zummo 2015, Alfer 2017), this collaborative setting has received little attention in language contexts from scholars. After a brief literature review, I introduce the corpus and methods, and then present my findings. My discussion focuses on the interactions among website users dealing with some generic and specialist words to be translated in the English/Italian cultural, social or professional contexts. Data for analysis were gathered from Wordreference, a popular website dealing with languages, with the aim of studying community practices involved with the mediation and collaboration processes, when negotiating meanings of culturally ambiguous words. Findings show that the collaborative nature of fora contributes to finding the best translation output as a result of the negotiation of meanings between different speakers belonging to different cultures and different professional backgrounds

This study looks at the communication between users concerning health risks, with the aim of expl... more This study looks at the communication between users concerning health risks, with the aim of exploring their use of fora and assessing whether participants establish a niche with like-minded users during these exchanges. By integrating a corpus linguistic approach with content analysis and multiple studies on computer mediated health discourse, this study analyses the intense attention paid to the correlation between the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, as an example of elaboration of the message and risk of emotive amplification, with fora working as echo chambers. Results include: a) a qualitative analysis of the content of posts and their qualification, b) a focus on the type of concerns questioners raise, and c) a comparison of the qualifier proportions between the posts and the responses they get. The comparison between posts/responses investigates whether the forum works as an amplification station of emotions, or as a locus to establish a belief niche.

Today "sports" means both a physical activity and a social pastime. Sociologists and linguists pu... more Today "sports" means both a physical activity and a social pastime. Sociologists and linguists put their attention on language, which offers a large amount of peculiar expressions. Supporters' fervour and the big fanzines distribution widen up the vocabulary which is build up from borrowing, neologism and semantic stratifications. The result is not a global language but a glocalized product. On the other hand, rhetoric tends to be the same in any articles no matter its origin. The text becomes a fusion between facts (sport reporting) and story (which is told as a romance) with different narrative techniques melted together to form a new specialized genre. Looking first to the semantic aspects in football articles, we tried to find out what textual tools are used to describe the sports event focusing on textual emphasis.

This article investigates the way politicians use social networking sites as effective communicat... more This article investigates the way politicians use social networking sites as effective communication platforms to discursively enhance authenticity, sincerity and (self --)connection to what can be defined as the “People” (followers/lurkers/net users). Within the framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, and using tools c oming from Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the paper analyses the multi semiotic elements used by different political leaders (i.e. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Matteo Salvini), to connect with the “People,” and discusses the politainment product as a perso nalised way to skip the institutional mediation channels of politics.

Altre Modernità, 2018

This paper analyses the dialogic structure occurring in an asynchronous discussion forum taken as... more This paper analyses the dialogic structure occurring in an asynchronous discussion forum taken as a talk-in-interaction venue, and a confirmation niche.I employ a conversation-analysis based approach adapted to online written texts (Antaki et al. 2005; Herring, 2013; Giles et al. 2015) and studied in the context of forum participative writings (Stommel and Lamerichs, 2014) as an interactional event (Herring 2007), and confirmation site (Quattrociocchi and Vicini, 2016).Results show that the exchange is construed by adapting conversation-like concepts within an asynchronous and written mode of communication, and that the participatory framework is the ground where opposing groups interact and build a personal confirmation niche, which represents a relevant barrier to a critical discourse attitude.-