The aim of this paper is to explain the use of insults from a relevance-theoretic perspective. To that end, our analysis takes into consideration four variables that, we believe, play a major role in how insults are produced an interpreted: (a) the conventional or innovative nature of the insult; (b) the underlying intentionality (to offend, to praise or to establish/maintain social bonding; (c) the in/correct interpretation of the insult, and (d) the addressee's reaction or lack thereof. The combination of these variables generates a twenty four case taxonomy that can account for and describe the use of insults in any given (cross)-cultural context. The proposed taxonomy will be here described and exemplified.

This paper focusses on relevance, translation and cross culture, that is, on tlie way addressees from different languages and cultures perceive the same messages and how these respond to the varied expectations communicators have and which have been nurtured from a wide cultural experience. Relevance theory offers the right tools to understand the way people from different cultural backgrounds react to the same pieces of information and the effects they cause on them. Using Gutt's application to translation of Sperber and Wilson's "descriptive and interpretive use of language", 1 highlight the importance of descriptive (covert) translation, not only in examples where the addressee's assumptions must be fulfilled even at the expense of the communicative intentions manifested in the original language but also in other instances where interpretive translation would have been traditionally preferred. Relevance theory, translation and cultureH.P. Grice (1975) instructed speakers to be relevant in their speech that is to offer the information they consider more important or relevant for their hearers. This, evidently, logical and harmless statement was the starting point of Sperber and Wilson's (S&W, henceforth) Relevance Theory, one of the most innovative proposals for the understanding of language and the cognitive and linguistic procedures that organize communicative

Interdisciplinary studies within linguistics are "the sign of the times". Nowadays, linguistics is applied to domains of knowledge which before did not seem to have any relationship with the study of languages. For instance, linguistics now analyses such diverse áreas as computer science, medicine, psychology, sociology, etc. Within this scenario, this special volume of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (RAEI) exhibits a panorama of different linguistic approaches to a wide range of media discourses. Media is an essential feature of today's globalized world, a networked world in which ubiquitous media such as televisión, the Internet and mobile technologies share their space with more traditional means of communication such as the printed newspapers or the radio. Media, forus, is a broadterm which encompasses many forms of communication. Indeed, media is not only the typical uni-directional one-to-many form of communication, but also any way in which people can connect to other people in this interconnected world we live in, including one-to-one communication (mobile phones, e-mail, chat rooms) and the current interest in producing many-to-many user-generated discourses, produced by a collectivity in order to be shared by the collectivity (for instance weblogs, virtual social spaces such as MySpace, YouTube,Wikipedia, etc.). This broad idea of media can be traced in the different articles that are included in this special issue of RAEI. From the contents of this volume, we can conclude that newspapers are still one the main interests in linguistic research on the media. This interest is reflected upon the eight articles that are devoted to this médium. Some of them deal with political discourse and analyse the: way politicians and newspapers use language to achieve their goals. In this guise, we can mention the contributions by Pilar Alonso (on comment articles in the press), Una Dirks (bn the Iraq conflict discourse in the British and Germán quality press), Juana Marín Arrese and Begoña Núñez Perucha (on evaluating journalistic

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AHSTRACTThe synesthesia is perhapsone of the most significantstylistic recourses used by I). II. Lawrenee when he undertakes the task of resolving in a lilerary fashion one of his f'avourile topics: the physical and spiritual comtnunion between his characlers and Nature. With its use, Lawrenee manages, by mixing and confusíng the different sensorial perceptions, to enhance the discursive level and the dramatic tensión, adding new deep and symbolic tonalitiesto the narrative momentum.In this paper, we study through selected passages from Sons and Lovers the nature of Lawrence's synesthesias, seen from a linguistic and literary perspective. We also observe up to what point he remains faithful to a "normative" tradition or lets his creativity maniíest freely when building them. INTRODUCCIÓNEl adjetivo sinestésico constituyeren nuestra opinión, uno de los recursos estilísticos favoritos y más interesantes de esa calidad impresionista, casi física y palpable, que posee el estilo de D. II. Lawrenee en sus descripciones de la naturaleza. Lawrenee materializa o resuelve mediante el empleo de la sinestesia los momentos culminantes de la comunión ñsico-espiritual de sus héroes con dicho medio. En ellos, como destacamos en los textos que hemos seleccionado, los sentidos, que perciben de una forma individual y especializada, van perdiendo, poco a poco, su función primaria, produciéndose cruces e interferencias sensoriales que elevan el tono discursivo y la tensión narrativa al penetrar en ámbitos connotativos y simbólicos nuevos.En el estudio que presentamos, hemos seleccionado dos pasajes de Sons and Lovers en los que el contacto de un personaje y su identificación con la naturaleza se realiza sinestésicamente. Ambos textos presentan, empero, diferencias notables a la hora de elegir y seleccionar aquellas sensaciones sensoriales que han de sufrir transformaciones sinestésicas tal y como yeremos. 139