Local/Global Identities and the Journal Editorial Genre

The data presented here covers three distinct types of medical publication: Anglo-American journals, English-medium Italian journals and standard Italian journals. Their differences/similarities should shed light on aspects of textual variation (within the same genre and discipline) that reflect the writers’ cultural/linguistic background. The results suggest that Italian editorialists seldom write MEDs targeting non-medical issues (i.e. comment editorials) and steer clear of the intensely polemical tone adopted by some Anglo-American journals. Their behaviour may be linked to what Hall and Hall (1990) describe as a ‘high context’ culture, i.e. one where interactants retain most of the information rather than making it explicit. Such apparent reticence may conflict, admittedly, with the ‘low context’ communicative style of Anglo-American editorialists. Editorialists are faced with the challenge of reconciling two ‘small cultures’ (their local academic community and local lingua-cultural affiliation) with a ‘large culture’ (the discipline as a global, translinguistic community). The easy option is to concentrate on the latter, forgetting that it can only emerge as the result of a negotial process involving the former. Fortunately, Italian editorialists appear to be doing just that when they draft English MEDs that do not merely incorporate elements of the NEng/NIt repertoire but do so in innovative and at times creative ways. Both in academic English and in everyday life, the expression of identity can be as much about what makes people similar as it is about what makes them unique.