{"title":"Politicizing COVID-19 Vaccines in the Press: A Critical Discourse Analysis.","authors":"Ali Haif Abbas","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09857-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09857-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Undoubtedly and unfortunately, COVID-19 pandemic has been politicized in media see Abbas (Int J Semiot Law, 2020), Rui Zhang (Media Asia 48:89-107, 2021). Although vaccines play a crucial role in eliminating the pandemic, they have been politicized by media. This article aims to show how COVID-19 vaccines are politicized in the press. The article collects some selected reports on vaccines taken from American and Chinese media. The reports are analyzed according to an analytical framework suggested by the researcher. The framework and data collection and description are clearly presented in the method section. Based on data analysis, the article shows that COVID-19 vaccines have been politicized. The study recommends that diseases and vaccines should not be politicized. In other words, we should respect and trust science and our scientists for no other purpose than to reach herd immunity and overcome a dangerous pandemic that has taken and is still taking thousands of innocent lives.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":"35 3","pages":"1167-1185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s11196-021-09857-3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39195417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tatiana Grieshofer Née Tkacukova, Matt Gee, Ralph Morton
{"title":"The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice.","authors":"Tatiana Grieshofer Née Tkacukova, Matt Gee, Ralph Morton","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09870-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09870-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview and a qualitative analysis of such syntactic characteristics as length and structure of sentences and noun phrases. The analysis is viewed in the broader context of genre characteristics of court forms, their role within legal proceedings, and their function for eliciting narratives from court users. The findings show that while the elicitation strategies are not always coherently aligned with the guidance sections, the guidance itself condenses legal and procedural information into overly complex and verbose syntactic constructions. Comprehensibility barriers are thus created through breaks in information flow, ambiguous syntactic constructions, missing information and misalignment between questions and guidance. Such comprehension challenges have a negative impact on the potential of court users to effectively engage with legal proceedings.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":"35 5","pages":"1733-1759"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8592072/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39643369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To be Mother or not? Cultural Models of Motherhood and Their Meaning Effects on Gendered Representations.","authors":"Federica Turco","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09831-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09831-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this paper I will focus on the concept of the person in its philosophical, representative and bodily facets, in a gender perspective. Starting from the interesting figure of Gianna Beretta Molla, known for having been beatified for having sacrificed her own life to save that of the child she was carrying, I'll try to reason about some key concepts concerning women representation in modernity, such as motherhood, iconic figures and cultural models from which the meaning of feminine subjects itself depends.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":"35 4","pages":"1393-1406"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s11196-021-09831-z","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25398324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Juridical Relevance of the Phenomenological Notion of Person in Max Scheler and Edith Stein.","authors":"Francesco Galofaro","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09823-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09823-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The paper presents a semiotic interpretation of the phenomenological debate on the notion of person, focusing in particular on Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein. The semiotic interpretation lets us identify the categories that orient the debate: collective/individual and subject/object. As we will see, the phenomenological analysis of the relation between person and social units such as the community, the association, and the mass shows similarities to contemporary socio-semiotic models. The difference between community, association, and mass provides an explanation for the establishment of legal systems. The notion of person we inherit from phenomenology can also be useful in facing juridical problems raised by the use of non-human decision-makers such as machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence applications.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":" ","pages":"1317-1331"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s11196-021-09823-z","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40670343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"COVID-19 Pandemic-Related Arguments in Polish Civil Litigation.","authors":"Anna Piszcz","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09875-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09875-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The aim of this paper is to analyse the legal record on civil litigation from mid-March 2020 to mid-July 2021 and examine COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments in a sample of litigated cases heard in Polish courts, more precisely 41 cases. In an attempt to establish the number and types of court cases in which such arguments have been raised, the population of individual case records was accessed electronically from the Ordinary Courts Judgments Portal (Pol. <i>Portal Orzeczeń Sądów Powszechnych</i>). The analysed research material consists of texts of written justifications published along with rulings of courts of the first instance in the Portal, except for texts regarding criminal cases and widely understood labour cases. This paper refers to certain theoretical aspects of argument and argumentation. Then, it sheds light on the use of COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments by the parties involved in litigation-as reported by the courts in written justifications-considering, amongst others, whether those arguments were found convincing by the courts. Based on a survey of relevant cases, an attempt was made to identify categories of COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments of the parties involved in litigation, raised in their legal submissions. Also a look into the tendencies in this regard was taken to see whether any patterns emerge and it is possible (or not) to discern different trends in the analysed phenomena. The point of the analysis in this article is both descriptive and normative.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":"35 3","pages":"1215-1232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8728475/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39799554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Global Regulation of \"Fake News\" in the Time of Oxymora: Facts and Fictions about the Covid-19 Pandemic as Coincidences or Predictive Programming?","authors":"Rostam J Neuwirth","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09840-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09840-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The beginning of the twenty-first century saw an apparent change in language in public discourses characterised by the rise of so-called \"essentially oxymoronic concepts\", i.e., mainly oxymora and paradoxes. In earlier times, these rhetorical figures of speech were largely reserved for the domain of literature, the arts or mysticism. Today, however, many new technologies and other innovations are contributing to their rise also in the domains of science and of law. Particularly in law, their inherent contradictory quality of combining apparently antagonistic suppositions challenges the traditional dualistic mode of reasoning and binary logic. As reflected in terms like fake news, alternative facts or conspiracy theories, these concepts are seen as a threat to the rule of law and legal certainty and have been described as harbingers of an age of disinformation or post-truth. The challenge posed by these apparently contradictory concepts requires a closer look at the premises that guide our legal thinking and a more integrated theory of the senses and their role in law, as captured by the terms \"legal synaesthesia\" and \"legal semiotics\". It also calls for an inquiry into the mind's functioning generally and how it processes information in the creative process of decision making, linking thoughts and actions as well as facts and fictions. Based on the qualification of \"fake news\" as an oxymoron, this article critically examines the deficiencies in a dichotomous distinction between fact and fiction exemplified by information about the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) in an attempt to clarify the principal issues for a global regulatory debate regarding \"fake news\".</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":"35 3","pages":"831-857"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s11196-021-09840-y","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38889995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interpreting Intercepted Communication: A <i>Sui Generis</i> Translational Activity.","authors":"Nadja Capus, Ivana Havelka","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09876-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09876-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity <i>sui generis</i> and<i>-</i>since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises-advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":" ","pages":"1817-1836"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9374636/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40702583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Penetration of COVID-19 Related Terminology into Legal, Medical, and Journalistic Discourses.","authors":"Paula Trzaskawka, Joanna Kic-Drgas","doi":"10.1007/s11196-021-09881-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09881-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>March 2020 has become a moment of change in communication mode and quality. Previously, the media paid attention to the current affairs, however, never earlier the journalistic discourse has been so influentially affected by the ongoing phenomenon as in the case of COVID-19. Almost overnight the new terminological phenomena with specific legal or medical reference were introduced into everyday language mainly via mass media and become an important part of a pandemic related narration. The strong influence on the shape of the mentioned linguistic changes has mainly the adoption of new legal regulations due to the unexpected outbreak of the pandemic. The aim of the following paper is to investigate how COVID-19 pandemic affected the specialisation of the journalistic discourse and how different domains (law, medicine) are being influenced by new terminology and in other way round, how for example law and medicine influence new \"COVID language\". In order to take the interdisciplinary nature of the issue into account, the degree of hybridity of the selected texts will be examined by means of selected material analysis. The methodology applied in the paper uses an empirical approach and comparative analysis. The material used for the analysis comes from the selected Polish quality and boulevard press. The paper concerns the linguistic influence of the \"invisible enemy\" on the language presented in press. The main findings reveal the intense use of neologisms, borrowings, and it shows that the discourse was changed linguistically thanks to Student's t-test.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":"35 3","pages":"937-960"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8752036/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39824543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rise of Conspiracy Theories in the Pandemic Times.","authors":"Elżbieta Kużelewska, Mariusz Tomaszuk","doi":"10.1007/s11196-022-09910-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-022-09910-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>COVID-19 pandemic occurred as an unexpected experience affecting all countries around the globe. In addition to the obvious health, economic and political effects, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered immense changes in the social spheres. People and institutions were forced to adjust to the new circumstances, change habits and move most or all of their activity online. In the completely virtual world, pandemic became a fertile ground for the bloom of the conspiracy theories already existing, but struggling for the global attention. The aim of the paper is to present three main conspiracy theories rapidly gaining popularity during the pandemic (the QAnon, anti-vaccination movements and anti-5G movements) and to analyse how they developed since the pandemic had been announced. In particular, the rising activity of the representatives of the movements will be analysed, as well as its acceleration in connection with pandemic and the resulting influence on social and political life. Finally, the paper will try examine whether the rapid development of conspiracy theories within societies has had any relations to the level of trust towards government-made decisions. The thesis being verified hereto is that pandemic accelerated the development of conspiracy theories due to the diminishing level of trust towards governments operating in the most difficult period in recent history. There are variety of reasons for the belief in conspiracy theories and they depend on the specificity of the theory and specificity of group of people it originates from. In general, it can be noted that all kind of conspiracies are developed by either (1) people who actually believe in them and are sharing them with good intentions (to warn other about the dangers hidden behind certain actions or institutions) or (2) malignant individuals whose aim is to discord or discredit an opponent or critic or, alternatively, distract attention from misconduct or lack of competence.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":" ","pages":"2373-2389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9325658/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40589845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"European Human Rights Dimension of the Online Access to Cultural Heritage in Times of the COVID-19 Outbreak.","authors":"Elżbieta Kużelewska, Mariusz Tomaszuk","doi":"10.1007/s11196-020-09712-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09712-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized that \"everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits\". As a result, cultural rights have been understood as inseparable from human rights and require protection mechanisms within particular international (including regional) legal systems. The European continent is proud to have developed one of the most effective mechanisms of the human rights protection by establishing the Council of Europe and adopting the European Court of Human Rights. The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 reformulated many concepts of access to human rights and possibilities to enjoy freedoms. Even if access to culture (access to cultural heritage) has been available online for many years, it is the time of globally occurring lockdowns that forced people to stay home and found themselves in a situation when all of a sudden online access to culture became the only way of access to culture. The article aims to analyze the current situation in Europe by asking questions if and how online access to culture is recognized and protected under the Council of Europe's mechanisms with special emphasis on the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights in this field.</p>","PeriodicalId":44376,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW-REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SEMIOTIQUE JURIDIQUE","volume":"35 3","pages":"1067-1079"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s11196-020-09712-x","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38622188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}