A central actor in Renaissance Italy, the secretary alternately took on the functions of scribe, counsellor, and emissary. This collection of essays brings new light on the various facets of this character. The secretary responded to crucial needs in the Italian peninsula, which at the time was grappling with growing instability.

Public discourse is rife with lay and expert talk on the economic crisis. A variety of narratives by politicians, journalists and citizens got woven into representations of "the economic crisis". This issue of Mots focuses on some of those narratives with the combined insights of linguistics, political science and sociology.

This issue deals with the connections between linguistic variation in political and media discourses and the judgement this variation from the standard french may imply.

This Special issue of our journal will be entirely devoted to presidential speeches and presidential electoral campaigns.

This dossier aims to study a recent phenomenon that is usually called "soundbites". In the wake of pioneer work on that multifaceted subject, we have opted for a transdisciplinary approach that includes the sciences of language and communication as well as social sciences.

The terror attacks of 2015-2016 in France occasioned a lot of commentary. This dossier aims to analyse the unfolding of post-terror attack discourse with perspective. Articles discuss the place given to emotions, the framing modalities of terrorist events and the degree of consensus expressed in post-terror attack discourse