Cornelia Ilie, Professor
Örebro University, Sweden
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Cornelia Ilie is Professor of English Linguistics at Örebro University, Sweden. Her main research interests include the discursive practices of institutional dialogue (particularly political discourse and parliamentary debates), argumentation analysis and cross-cultural rhetoric. Apart from the rhetorical study of question-response patterns, her recent research has focused on pragma-rhetorical strategies in political and media discourse, academic discourse and cross-cultural communication. Her publications on parliamentary discourse and practices explore the participants’ rhetorical appeals, metadiscursive argumentation (through parentheticals and persuasive definitions), as well as unparliamentary language and behaviour, including institutional insults as cognitive forms of verbal confrontation. She is currently coordinating a cross-cultural project on the typology of rhetorical and argumentative strategies used in parliamentary debates.
Between 1998-2001 Professor Ilie coordinated the project entitled ‘The rhetoric of Polish and Swedish political debates’ funded by Östersjöstiftelsen (The Baltic Sea Foundation). She is the initiator of EPARNET (European Parliamentary Network), an international research network for the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of parliamentary practices. The EPARNET participants are involved in developing interdisciplinary and cross-cultural corpus-based approaches to the study of parliamentary discourse with respect to culture-specific rhetorical traditions, debating styles, argumentation practices, politeness rules, gender relations, stereotyping devices. The aim is to explore deliberation strategies and argumentation patterns with regard to citizenship issues in national parliaments in 17 European countries by focusing on the roles of national and European citizenship, as well as on the citizens’ involvement in and scrutiny of parliamentary practices in terms of democratic principles. As EPARDIS coordinator she organised several seminars and workshops at Södertörn University College, in Napoli and in Brussels (2006-2007).
She is also a board member of IADA (International Association for Dialogue Analysis) and the coordinator of DialogForum, an inter-university interdisciplinary network initially funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, with participants from Södertörn University College, Stockholm University, Chalmers University and Uppsala University.
One of Prof. Ilie’s current projects proposes an interdisciplinary approach to parliamentary discursive practices (particularly the British, Swedish and Romanian Parliaments) from a gender perspective. By taking full account of the specific historical conditions and socio-cultural traditions of each of the parliaments under scrutiny, the investigation focuses on the ways in which ideological beliefs, age, party affiliation, institutional status and political agendas are interrelated with gender-specific roles, attitudes and interaction strategies, and how they are conveyed linguistically and rhetorically: by means of specific discourse markers, (im)politeness formulas, and rhetorical turns.
Professor Ilie is on the editorial board of Journal of Language and Politics and Controversia: An International Journal of Debate and Democratic Renewal. Some of her recent publications are the following: ‘Parliamentary discourses’, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2006; ‘Classical Rhetoric’, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2006; ‘Rhetoric and Language’, in The International Encyclopedia of Communication, 2007; ‘British ‘consensus’ versus Swedish ‘samförstånd’ in parliamentary debates’, 2007. She is in the process of editing a book, European Parliaments under Scrutiny: Argumentative strategies and rhetorical styles (John Benjamins), and a special issue of Journal of Pragmatics entitled ‘Parliamentary Pragmatics’. Her active interest in the interface between rhetoric and the linguistics of communication has materialised in the ASLA Conference on language, culture and rhetoric that she organised at Örebro University in 2003, and whose proceedings she edited in the volume Language, culture, rhetoric: Cultural and rhetorical perspectives on communication (2004).