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In the last years there has been a considerable amount of research into visual rhetoric in advertising, with a special focus on visual metaphor. Taxonomies of visual rhetoric (e.g. Phillips & McQuarrie, 2004) deal with the structural, the conceptual and the pragmatic aspects of visual rhetoric. The majority rely on structural and conceptual categories in deciding on the rhetorical nature of ads. However, visual rhetoric also operates at the level of perception (Maes & Shilperoord, 2008). The aim of this paper is to show that the rhetorical nature of visuals in advertising is based on a combination of formal and conceptual or perceptual features.

The aim of this paper is to analyse metonymies from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Metonymy has been considered as an association process between contiguous items within the same cognitive domain or as involving a meaning transfer between properties. These approaches, however, prove inadequate in offering a complete account. I will argue that metonymies are used as reference tools to refer to individuals or objects lying outside their linguistically-specified denotation. I will outline how the intended referent might be identified by the property the speaker singles out for the hearer to focus on. Finally, different metonymic uses in communication will be analysed.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of ongoing research on the integration of groups at risk of exclusion, in order to facilitate decision-making processes that allow their consideration by social protection mechanisms. The main objectives of the research were to 000construct tools to explore and assess entry to the workforce based on skills training and risk factors. Study participants comprised groups using services in the area provided by Social Action, which included women at risk, people with disabilities, immigrants, ethnic minorities, present and former drug addicts, and other groups such as homeless people. The methodology is qualitative, through ethnographic fieldwork. We conclude that, unlike poverty and marginalisation, which manifest as an economic deficit and thus may be tackled by economic measures, social exclusion corresponds to a social deficit. Exclusion produces deficits in terms of social cohesion, in which factors related to training and the skills acquired play an essential role.

This essay sets out to compare discourse features and communicative practices in the use of textese in Whatsapp across two different generations. Textese, and other ways of online writing, has been associated with plenty of voices expressing a concern for the way young people adopted this practice ( Humphrys, 2007 , Sutherland, 2002 ). This prompted a “moral panics”, stating that textese triggers a failure in young people's ability to communicate using the standard variety of a language. Contrary to these voices, this paper defends the idea that online writing should not always be linked to the failure mentioned above. Results from this article prove that using textese and failing to communicate using the standard variety of a language cannot be systematically associated with teenagers’ literacy/communicative practices. They also provide evidence to support those voices arguing that the use of textese is intentionally adopted according to the circumstances surrounding a particular communicative situation.

Physician-patient communication, essential to achieving good health outcomes, can become complicated when a native language is not shared, as is the case for many Latino patients in the United States. This communication is then enriched, but also hindered, by the diverse Latino dialects that arise in the discourse. Thus, it is imperative that providers have access to resources that promote effective communication. Until recently most medical Spanish resources have focused mainly on standard language, ignoring the use of dialect and lexical variants. This paper will briefly discuss lexical variants in the medical setting along with the challenges introduced when including them in reference materials. Then, some of the medical professionals’ needs regarding reference resources will be presented, followed by a few weaknesses inherent in those currently in use. Finally, a proposal will be offered for a system that takes these needs into consideration and seeks to facilitate the medical discourse.

This paper focuses on the construction of ontologies for terminological purposes, and more precisely, on the design criteria and methodologies that can be adopted to this end. Therefore, we will outline some important design criteria and compare some relevant methodologies, with respect to five factors; on the basis of that study, we will propose our own methodology, designed to build ontology-based multilingual terminology resources.