The lines of research pursued in GEDIT are the following:

1. Oral genre analysis

The knowledge of oral discourse, which is crucial for realizing speakers’ competences in different contexts, is based on the contributions of conversational analysis and of ethnography of communication, and is carried out in other significant fields which have developed after it. In order to analyze (oral and written) discourse, both monological and dialogical, theoretical perspectives are used, which are  applied to the study of different types of interactions (epistolary, administrative, political, journalistic, etc.) as well as specific features of verbal communication within different social contexts. Methods and tools for analyzing oral discourse which are applicable in the study of daily interaction (ordinary conversation, exchanges of services, etc.) and institutional and media interaction, among others, are explored.

2. Political discourse

Politics is one of the areas on which our study group has focused within the framework of the semiodiscursive and enunciative approach. From this perspective, the discourse of any field (social, cultural and literary, public and private) is rooted in a communicative situation defined by certain precise parameters. In this framework, the situational dimension of the discourse is explored with a descriptive and interpretative purpose. The different genres of political discourse are important when creating social meaning. The specific constraints to which they are subjected and the masking strategies normally used by politicians pose a challenge for the analyst.

3. Scientific discourse and dissemination

Dissemination is a discursive practice arising from the relation between the scientific community and society which generally takes place through the different media. The use of language in oral or written contexts is the object of our study. The recontextualization which is necessary to transform scientific language into common language is explored, as well as the specificity of explanatory discourse and its procedures, expressive resources that both scientists and mediators use to draw attention in order to clarify and to account for concepts and objects that can be difficult to understand. The participants in the field of science, their representation in cultural life and the position they have in the informative act are also taken into consideration.

4. Discourse and knowledge

This line of research addresses knowledge on the basis of beliefs agreed by the epistemic communities and the attribution of knowledge in discursive contexts. This study is based on a cognitive theory centered on the typology of knowledge and the ways of managing it in textual construction. Structures and strategies are researched at all text and speech levels, especially those global and local meanings that make it possible: reference, known-new relationships and topic-comments, assumptions, implications, evidentiality, etc. Social and cultural dimensions of knowledge management are also examined.

5. Discourse and gender

The discursive construction of genre is the main aim of this study. It is based on key theoretical concepts such as "performativity" (Butler, 1991); "symbolic violence" (Bourdieu, 1975); and "assujettissement" (Foucault, 1977), which enable to limit the perspective of the object of analysis and, then, develop multimodal analytical protocols tailored to discourse analysis. Real video-recorded interactions, focus groups, interviews, advertisements, films, written and oral documents, among others comprise the analytical resource. One of the most common analytical activities is to observe "regulations" imposed by dominant discourses on bodies and interactions with the purpose of identifying discursive processes of social transformation.

6. Discourse and social transformation. Critical discourse analysis

In this line of research, we observe and analyze how social transformation is constructed in terms of discourse. At times of crisis like these, when citizens from all over the world are organized against economic systems (market dictatorships) and political systems that no longer represent them, new discourses emerge with a meaning related to outrage and proposals for action (the occupancy of public places and spaces in different countries). The purpose of this research is to find out how these new discourses are built and which sociocognitive transformations entail.

7. Multilingualism and diversity. Sociolinguistic studies

From the management of cultural and linguistic diversity emerges a fundamental issue in a more-than-ever heterogeneous and ever-changing society: multilingualism and diversity. The theoretical concept of "multiculturalism" has been changed to "interculturality" and "transculturality", where diversity is seen as a new basis for development, creativity, innovation, social cohesion, equity and coexistence. This line of research emphasizes political discourses regarding urban environments as a unit of analysis, since they represent the main areas of concentration of population diversity, derived from migration. The final objective is to analyze, if beyond the discursive rhetoric of diversity as a positive value, a concrete and effective management of urban environments is being carried out.

8. Discourse pragmatics. Contrastive, corpus and enunciative linguistics

The objective of this line of research is to analyze and describe the pragmatic, semantic and grammatical features of lexical markers and idiomatic,phraseological units, specifically those having an epistemic value (related to the degree of certainty or probability) and /or marked value (related to the source of knowledge) in various discursive genres. The approach is primarily contrastive (Catalan, Spanish, French, English and German). The purpose of the research is to observe the processes of grammaticalization, behavior and the differences or formal and functional similarities of linguistic units explored in the process of drawing up and interpreting a discourse in a specific textual genre.

9. Translation of feigned orality

Feigned orality is the fiction or illusion of orality that a written text seeks to evoke through specific resources, that is, resources that are typically considered "oral". In this line of research, linguistic facts characterizing feigned orality in two languages ​​are described and compared. In addition, translations including excerpts of feigned orality are examined.

10. Translation studies applied to multimodal genres (audiovisual translation)

The objective of this line of research is to analyze the treatment of various culture-related phenomena in different types of audiovisual translation, mainly dubbing and subtitling. These phenomena encompass: translation of humor, multilingualism treatment, and especially, L3 translation (a language present in the text being neither the source language nor the target language), the translation of altered language (for instance, that one occurring under the influence of drugs or alcohol), as well as the translation of feigned orality.

11. Translation and discursive approaches to legal and economic translation

In this line, we set out to conduct a research in the field of legal translation based on methodological resources of contrastive textual analysis and comparative law. Linguistic, cultural and textual elements presented by these types of texts can be analyzed to determine translation problems and propose appropriate solutions. In case of having published translations of this type of texts, linguistic resources used in those translations are observed and assessed regarding resources used in source texts. In this sense, it can be viewed the creation of a representative text corpus of different legal genres in several languages ​​(source texts and translations).

12. Assessment and translation

In the framework of functional-systemic linguistics, assessment is a resource for communicating interpersonal meanings revealing the willingness of the sender to set a dialogue with the receiver, conditioned by power relations and solidarity among participants. This is a type of meaning characteristic of literary texts, but it does not leave out legal or economic texts. In this line, assessment and its treatment in two different fields is examined, specifically in legal, economic and literary translation, as well as the translating strategies applied in each field and the typology of phenomena in different languages ​​and text genres, in terms of assessment.

13. Stylistics applied to literary translation

In this line of research, we study linguistics translation, discursive and narrative resources contributing to create the style of writers and used to achieve certain effects on the text. The aim of research is to explore stylistic resources used in translations in comparison with the texts from which they come, as well as the context in which the translation is inserted. In this sense, we can describe which language model can be suitable for translator’s training.