*** LAURENT GAUTIER, EVA LAVRIC (Eds.): Unité et diversité dans le discours sur le vin en Europe. Actes du colloque d'Innsbruck, 15-16 octobre 2012. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, P. O. Box 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email: - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "InnTrans - Innsbrucker Beiträge zu Sprache, Kultur und Translation” series, No. 8. 2015, 210 pp. ISBN 978-3-631-64306-8.
This book publishes the proceedings of two study days held alongside the European project VinoLingua, which ran from January 2010 to March 2013 in the Lifelong Learning / Leonardo da Vinci programme, aiming to create teaching material for teaching languages to winemakers. It involved a consortium of private and public partners in Austria, Spain, France and Italy; the book is also open to the Polish language, however, and is the fruit of decidedly multidiscliplainary work involving linguists, educationalists and chemists specialising in sensory analysis around the issue of unity and diversity in discourse about wine in different languages and cultures. As Laurent Gautier (professor of German and applied linguistics at Bourgogne University in Dijon) and Eva Lavric (Romance linguistics at Innsbruck University) explain at the start of the introduction, 'all of winemaking (… ) is arranged around words and discourse: regulatory documents defining specifications for particular appellations, comments on product tastings by professional winetasters for the purposes of awarding a prize or a medal in a competition, blogs by wine buffs (…) wanting to share their latest fine wine discovery, bottle labels and counter-labels and so on.' It is precisely this discursive dimension of the construction of an object which is 'both eminently natural and also profoundly anchored in culture' which is examined in this book at European level - along with a trip to Mexico.
At first, two contributions start by considering the oral discourse of wine-tasting by professionals in the industry, be they winemakers, wine experts or sommeliers. Eva-Maria Rupprechter thus looks in an extension to her Master's thesis at the lexical and discursive strategies of French-speaking and German-speaking winemakers, who have to constantly take a position when describing their wines between the extremes of the jargon of the specialist, vouching for their expertise, and the common language, vouching for being well understood by the man in the street. Prof. Robert Vion compares and contrasts the discourse of winetasting in competitions with a comparable discourse in training and initiation, with the aim of discerning the cognitive and linguistic strategies that allow the two locutors to verbalise and communicate their specialist knowledge. These first two contributions already demonstrate the highly scientific nature of the authors' approach, which the contributions in the second part of the book confirm at all levels because they discuss a number of subjects that were at the heart of the VinoLingua project. There is, for example, a look at the way the theme of wine has irrigated - and continues to irrigate - Hispanic production, whether it be in literature or in other arts, Maria Prieto Grande being led to confirm the universality of the theme and the modalities of how it is developed outside the specialised or professional spheres.
The third part of the book is devoted to lexical and therefore inevitably conceptual questions about wine, the position of the Italian language compared with the French language being studied in particular in two chapters. The other two consider the conceptual field of muscat from a comparative French and Polish perspective on the one hand, and the use of mineral/minerality terms in semi-professional winemaking in France on the other. The fourth and last part of the book takes as its theme in three contributions an often overlooked dimension without which, however, discourse about wine could not exist, namely the cultural dimension. Pierre Bouvier
*** CAOIMHÍN MACMAOLÁIN: Food Law. European, Domestic and International Frameworks. Hart publishing (16C Worcester Place, OX1 2JW, UK. Tel: (44-1865) 517530 - Fax: 510710 - Email: mail@hartpub.co.uk - Internet: http://www.hartpub.co.uk ). 2015, 312 pp, £35.99. ISBN 978-1-84946-670-7.
Teacher of law at Trinity College in Dublin, Caoimhín MacMaoláin provides an overview in this book of the impact of European and international food law on English law. After briefly describing the conceptual framework for the study of food law and explaining how English law stood in this domain, he explains in detail the process by which European and international influences, along with national law, have impacted on most aspects of production, sales and consumption of food products. He then assesses the way the government, the Food Standards Agency and the relevant local authorities have intervened in the sector. Through his work, the author looks at questions such as food labelling, publicity, quality and ingredient requirements, appellations d'origine contrôlée, genetic modification, organic farming, anima welfare and the role of law in tackling bad health, obesity and food-related illnesses. He also looks at the big crises that have hit the food domain, be it bovine spongiform encepalitis or the scandal of horsemeat discovered in beef products. Finally, he assesses how English law has been influenced by the rules in force on the biological and chemical safety of food before concluding by considering the influence of environmental concerns. (PBo)
*** CAROLINE U. AMANN: The EU Education Policy in the Post-Lisbon Era. A Comprehensive Approach. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). 'Völkerrecht, Europarecht und internationales Wirtschaftsrecht' series, No. 21. 2015, 287 pp. ISBN 978-3-631-66615-9.
Following on from a doctoral thesis in law at Innsbruck University, this book gives an overview of the current state of European law on education and education policies, along with possible developments in the domain. It covers the innovations introduced by the Lisbon Treaty and the Lisbon/EU 2020 Strategy and its implications for education and training. The author also analyses the Erasmus+ programme. In addition, Caroline Amann examines in detail education law as mentioned in the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights and the main trends in Court of Justice case law in this field. Finally, she focuses on various measures relating to Cohesion Policy and evaluates educational initiatives put into action in the framework of macroregioanl strategies, particularly by the Territorial Cooperation Grouping that covers the region of Tyrol, South Tyrol and Trentino-Upper Adige. (PLa)
*** MARIE J. BOUCHARD, DAMIEN ROUSSELIERE (Eds.): The Weight of the Social Economy. An International Perspective. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes / Peter Lang (1 rue Maurice, B-1050 Brussels. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). 'Social Economy & Public Economy' series, No. 6. 2015, 333 pp ISBN 978-2-87574-287-2.
What is the weight of the social economy? How should we measure it? Across the world these days, cooperatives, non-profit organisations, foundations and other social enterprises play an increasingly important role when it comes to job creation and social cohesion, social innovation, regional development and protection of the environment. Commentators agree that the social economy has the capacity to balance economies, mostly by acting as an anti-cyclical force in the face of social crises. It happens, however, that many countries and regions lack figures on the weight, size and sco9pe of players in the social economy in their territory. This book emerging from work carried out by researchers at the International Centre of Research and Information on the Public, Social and Cooperative Economy (Ciriec) could be useful to them, particularly because it fills a gap in the scientific literature. The authors brought together in these pages explain why it is important to have statistics for this sector, and also to understand how they are produced and to discern how the social economy could be better understood in the future. In the first part of the book, the authors decipher indicators, criteria for describing bodies, the classification of international normalisation systems and methodologies. The second part looks at the lessons to be learned from the various studies carried out in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. (PLa)