44th Groupe d’Etude et de Recherche en Anglais de Spécialité (GERAS) Conference: Cultures, memories and legacies in specialized English

The 44th international GERAS colloquium, organized at ENS Paris-Saclay on March 23, 24 and 25, 2023, will focus on cultures, memories, and legacies in specialized English.

The specialization of the English language can be thought of as a phenomenon that is at once cultural, memorial and heritage: using specialized varieties of English is in fact showing one’s adherence to certain specific cultural patterns, it is displaying one’s belonging to professional or disciplinary discursive communities whose traditions oblige you, it is to reproduce in the language the legacies that frame and guide our choices. Gradually mastering the codes and conventions of these specialized varieties of English, through formal or informal learning, means entering a culture specific to specialized communities , embracing a memory, extending and bringing to life linguistic and behavioral legacies. By the notion of habitus, Pierre Bourdieu (1980: 91) has in fact taught us that we are constantly subject to the influence of a “collective memory reproducing in the successors the achievements of the predecessors”. Thus, the observable traces of cultures, memories and heritages in the English language reflect the fact that specialization is above all a community and collective phenomenon , which brings together certain human communities, formed around particular social functions, around convergent language choices.