We present here the first translation into a modern language of the anonymous commentary on the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is an evidence of the style of exegetical work that was being done in the Peripatetic schools during the 2nd–3rd century AD, and a testimony to a particular version of 2nd century Aristotelianism. Even if the comment is not continuous, one gets the impression of listening to a good lecturer illustrating Aristotle’s text. He paraphrases it at times, (...) makes comparisons with other passages of the corpus, illustrates the structure and the logic of the discourse, and shows the difference between Aristotle’s positions and those of other schools. In the most theoretically interesting parts of the commentary the anonymous discusses aporiai, and opposes Aristotle’s ethical theories to other schools, especially to the Stoics. (shrink)

L’article présente une brève histoire de l’interprétation évolutionniste des traités d’Aristote à partir de la tendance évolutionniste de Jaeger. Il se concentre surtout, en premier lieu, sur la naissance et le développement des interprétations dialectiques des traités aristotéliciens à partir des années soixante du XX e siècle et, en second lieu, sur les critiques adressées à cette tendance par les interprètes contemporains du début du XXI e siècle. La section finale propose une approche alternative : selon cette interprétation, Aristote ne (...) renonce pas, y compris dans ses Éthiques, à la recherche de la définition. Dans l’ Éthique à Nicomaque, il parvient à définir les principaux concepts et phénomènes moraux en suivant la méthode permettant de fonder les définitions qui est décrite dans les Seconds Analytiques, livre II. Cela n’exclut pas que la méthode « dialectique » ou « endoxale » ait un certain rôle dans l’ Éthique à Nicomaque. (shrink)

In the paper I discuss three theses defended by A. Kenny: in antiquity up to Aspasius or to Alexander of Aphrodisias the EE was considered the most important version of Aristotle’s ethical discourse; the idea that the common books belonged to the one or to the other treatise; the opposition between the theory of happiness of EN I and X and that of EE II and VIII.

This article investigates some main characteristics of TED talks, a new popularizing genre. In particular, it examines the process that recontextualizes scientific speeches into TED talks presented by their own authors, using several discursive conventions to negotiate their role as experts and to establish a closer relationship with their audience. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 2012 TED talks, the article will draw upon Hyland’s concept of ‘proximity’, and the five elements that he takes into account when illustrating (...) proximity in popularizing texts: organization, argument structure, credibility, stance and reader engagement. It will be observed that the linguistic techniques used to enhance comprehensibility, the use of evaluative and emotive adjectives, and the direct involvement of the audience through the use of inclusive pronouns help the speaker breach the expert/audience barrier, establishing an ‘alignment’. Rather than focusing on proximity of membership, these talks emphasize proximity of commitment, by concentrating not on the speakers’ identity and reputation, but rather on how they are personally involved in the topic of the speech. These techniques reveal TED’s idea that science should be ideas to be discussed rather than information to be passively received. (shrink)

The present article is part of a preliminary study concerning the discursive manifestations of US President Trump’s sexist beliefs. While many studies have focused on Trump’s usage of hostile sexism, this work examines the linguistic strategies utilised by Trump to convey benevolent sexism, a form of discrimination based on the idea that women are weak and need to be protected, that they should respect traditional male-centric gender roles, and that they should be idolised by men. Drawing upon Fiske and Glick’s (...) Ambivalent Sexism Theory, the study will analyse a corpus of all the positive tweets addressing women tweeted by Trump since the beginning of his 2016 campaign. The study sheds a light on how President Trump’s usage of hostile and benevolent sexism are actually two sides of the same coin: they both confirm the idea of women as an inferior sex. (shrink)

This paper will discuss the role of modality in UN Security Council resolutions. As a work in progress on whether the use of strategic vagueness in UN resolutions has contributed to the outbreak of the second Gulf war, this work proposes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the role of vagueness of the central modal verbs shall, should, and may in the institutional language of the UN, drawing upon Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach and Jenkins, Gotti, and Trosborg's theories on modality. Observing (...) the semantic and linguistic values of these modals, the analysis investigates their double-faced strength: though they can be used to guarantee a wide degree of applicability of the resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, supporting a legislative intent of using vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

This work attempts to understand whether it is possible to talk about the emergence of specific recurring linguistic patterns in UN resolutions, used as a political strategy. The paper presents a comparative analysis between a corpus of resolutions related to the Second Gulf War and to the 2011 North Korean nuclear crisis, focussing on ethic adjectives and preambulatory and operative phrases used in these resolutions. It is attempted to show how vague and weak expressions can be used either to lead (...) to intentionally biased interpretations of the law as was supposed in the Iraqi case, or to mitigate international tensions, though maintaining a firm position against international threats, as supposed for North Korea. (shrink)

The present work discusses the complex nature of the term ‘gender’ in legal discourse, in the wake of the recent pushbacks that the 2011 Istanbul Convention has received from anti-feminist movements and nations that have not signed/ratified the document or have withdrawn from it. Though its original aim was to protect women’s rights, the debate has eventually surfaced deeply-rooted problems linked to gender-related vocabulary. For this reason, the study will analyse the use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ in the (...) 1995 UN Beijing Declaration, the 1998 Rome Statute, and the 2011 Istanbul Convention, from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. It aims to provide a critical comparison of the definitions, translations, and interpretations of the term ‘gender’, in an attempt to overcome some of the issues involved in the harmonisation of EU documentation, which could certainly help guarantee fundamental rights and convince more states to sign/ratify the Convention, or at least, not allow them to use issues not related to women’s rights to not accept the document. The interpretation of gender-related violence is still ‘in progress’, and the lack of harmonisation could eventually hinder fundamental human rights instead of helping the Istanbul Convention save lives. (shrink)

This paper will develop a new reading of the institutional pattern. According to this interpretation, legal norms exist only inside of legal institutions - on the assumption that law consists of legal institutions and that legal norms should have meaning and normative force only inside of them. At this basic idea the thesis, which this paper proposes, tries to connect Robert Alexy’s concept of normative optimization of principles to the institutional theory: legal norms as optimization of principles, which shape a (...) legal institution. (shrink)

This article proposes a novel interpretation of Montaigne’s and Bayle’s comments on Tacitus. My contention is that their Tacitism is a Foucauldian discourse on toleration. Toleration is an example of governmentality, a strategy to govern a population, not a genuine call for religious diversity. This novel reading applies to Michel de Montaigne’s Essays and Pierre Bayle’s Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet and his Historical and Critical Dictionary. Montaigne’s essay On the Useful and the Honourable, he shows that (...) there is a difference between his public and private persona. The author discusses ideas of toleration in a Tacitist style. This happens in his essay Something Lacking in Our Civil Administrations, where the author laments the death of Sebastian Castalio and, indirectly, he supports his commitment to religious pluralism. As I will show, Montaigne embraces a Gallican belief system, which is more conciliatory Bayle a century later, discusses the same issues. In his Various Thoughts, he makes a case for toleration as a tool to manage a population. Ultimately, it will be clear how this plea for toleration is not a product of the Enlightenment, but it is rather a discourse to achieve societal compliance. (shrink)

This study aims at investigating vagueness in Security Council Resolutions by focussing on a selection of nouns and phrases used as the main casus belli for the Second Gulf War. Analysing a corpus of Security Council Resolutions relating to the conflict, the study leads a qualitative and quantitative analysis drawing upon Mellinkoff’s theories on “weasel words”, which are “words and expressions with a very flexible meaning, strictly dependent on context and interpretation”. Special attention is devoted to the historical/political consequences of (...) such vague and indeterminate expressions. The findings indicate that excessive vagueness might have led to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of the Resolutions, triggering the Iraqi conflict instead of a diplomatic solution. The analysis of the “weasel words” used in the Resolutions suggests the double-faced strength of such expressions: though they can guaranteed a wide degree of applicability of the Resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

Cet article comporte, outre l'élaboration d'un système de notation des gestes, un inventaire descriptif des gestes et des mimiques utilisés par les artistes lyriques, une définition des différents paramètres gestuels ainsi qu'une étude des rapports geste/parole et geste/mimique. Les gestes et les mimiques sont classés selon leurs fonctions. On distingue deux catégories de gestes : les gestes à valeur de signal, autrement dit les gestes faits avec intention de communiquer et qui ne sont pas spécifiques aux chanteurs d'opéra puisqu'on les (...) retrouve dans le théâtre parlé, et les gestes à valeur d'indice, c.à.d. des gestes faits sans intention de communiquer : ce sont les gestes idiolectaux, (c.à.d. des gestes spécifiques au chanteur et qui sont conditionnés par de multiples facteurs : origine sociale ou géographique, sexe, morphologie, psychologie, etc...), les gestes esthétiques qui sont des accompagnements purement plastiques du texte chanté, les gestes imposés par les contraintes théâtrales (costumes, accessoires) et les gestes inhérents à la technique vocale. En ce qui concerne les mimiques, on peut les classer également en deux catégories : les mimiques à valeur expressive, qui ne présentent pas d'intérêt particulier et les mimiques sans valeur expressive regroupant les mimiques d'accompagnement (crispations musculaires, grimaces ou rides qui correspondent à un effort vocal et n'ont aucune raison d'être particulière) et les mimiques fonctionnelles, c.à.d. les mimiques liées à la technique vocale. L'application des méthodes linguistiques et notamment de la commutation, permet de dégager des traits pertinents aussi bien au niveau des gestes qu'à celui des mimiques. (shrink)

Over the last few years the diplomatic language of UN resolutions has repeatedly been questioned for the excessive presence of vagueness. The use of vague terms could be connected to the genre of diplomatic texts, as resolutions should be applicable to every international contingency and used to mitigate tensions between different legal cultures. However, excessive vagueness could also lead to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of resolutions, undermining their legal impact and triggering conflicts instead of diplomatic solutions. This study aims (...) at investigating intentional vagueness in Security Council resolutions, by focussing on the analysis of the resolutions relating to the second Gulf war. Using the qualitative Discourse-Historical approach (Wodak in Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Taylor & Francis Ltd., London [2000]) and quantitative analysis tools (Antconc and Sketch Engine), special attention is given to the historical/political consequences of the vagueness and indeterminacy used in that framework and to the study of vague ‘weasel words’ (Mellinkoff in The language of the law, Little, Brown & Company, Boston [1963]), modals, and adjectives contained in the corpus. The hypothesis of intentional vagueness is further reinforced through an analysis of the US legislation related to the outbreak of the war, to reveal how the US has legally interpreted UN legislation and to understand the purposes and consequences of vague language contained in it. The findings indicate that vagueness in resolutions has triggered the Iraqi conflict instead of diplomatic solutions with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

This paper is based on a doctoral thesis which aimed at investigating on whether the use of strategic vagueness in Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq has contributed to the breakout of the 2002–2003s Gulf war instead of a diplomatic solution of the controversies. This work contains a linguistic and legal comparative analysis between UN and U.S. documents and their drafts in order to demonstrate how vagueness was deliberately added to the final versions of the documents before being passed, and (...) thus strategically used vagueness has played a crucial role in UN resolutions related to the outbreak of war in Iraq, and in relevant legislation produced by the United States for its Congressional authorisation for war. The comparative analysis between S/RES/1441(2002) and US legislation has evidenced that that there would have been diplomatic solutions to the Iraq crises which were not synonymous of light-handed intervention against Iraq, but deliberately vague UN wording allowed the US to build its own legislation with a personal interpretation implying that the UN did not impede military action. (shrink)

Next SectionThis paper proposes an extension of Dependency Tree Semantics (DTS), an underspecified formalism originally proposed in Robaldo (2007). The crucial advantage of DTS as compared to other contemporary proposals is its ability to represent Independent Set (IS) readings (a.k.a. scopeless readings), e.g. cumulative and collective readings. DTS achieves the expressivity needed to represent IS readings because it underspecifies Skolem-like functional dependencies. This paper extends DTS by introducing additional meta-constraints in First-Order Logic dedicated to disambiguating underspecified structures. However, it is (...) worth noting that the meta-constraints are independent from DTS, and could be easily re-implemented in any underspecified theory. The meta-constraints achieve flexible disambiguation, in the sense that they allow ambiguous structures to be specified independently of the linguistic (rather than logical) knowledge used. Secondly, DTS, equipped with the meta-constraints, becomes an expressively complete formalism in the sense of Ebert (2005). Expressive completeness is a desirable property for an underspecified formalism, because it allows a representation for each possible subset of available readings. (shrink)