Gerlinde Mautner

Time to get wired: Using web-based corpora in critical discourse analysis

Although the world wide web has become a popular object of and tool for different kinds of semiotic and linguistic investigation, critical discourse analysis (CDA) does not seem to share this enthusiasm in equal measure. The contemporary relevance of the web as a key site for the articulation of social issues should make it a prime target for critical discourse analysts with a political and emancipatory brief. Nonetheless, CDA publications are still predominantly based on conventional, non-electronic sources of data. This article discusses the analytic potential that web-based data opens up and also identifies the specific challenges that arise as a result. These are linked to the size of the web, its diversity, ephemeral quality, interactivity, and multimodality. Indicating directions in which future research might proceed, the article makes a plea for more critical discourse analysts to work with web-based corpora.

The Entrepreneurial University: A discursive profile of a higher education buzzword

The growing orientation of public universities towards the corporate sector has had a sign ficant impact on higher education governance, management, and discourse. The rhetoric of the free market, man fested most tangibly in business-related lexis, is now firmly established in the discursive repertoire employed by academic leaders, politicians, and the media, as well as parts of higher education research. Within this rhetoric, enterprise and enterprising, as well as entrepreneur and entrepreneurial, stand out as keywords carrying sign ficant ideological loads that reflect the colonisation of academia by the market. The organisational and policy-making implications of academic enterprise have received considerable attention from higher education researchers, while discourse analysts have identified general discursive features of the ‘marketised’ higher education landscape. What the present paper adds to the existing debate is an in-depth study of a set of keywords in which processes of adaptation and appropriation crystallise, thus showing how macro-level social phenomena are mirrored, on the micro-level of linguistic detail, in the collocational behaviour of individual lexical items. The textual data that this paper is based on, gleaned mostly from the Internet, show that entrepreneur, entrepreneurial, enterprise, and enterprising are ambiguous in denotation and rich in connotation, making them susceptible to processes of semantic appropriation to suit particular agendas. Prevailing motfs and representations are ident fled through a combination of the computer-supported survey of Web-based material and the qualitative analysis of sample texts.

Mining large corpora for social information: The case of elderly

Using a large, computerized corpus, this study aims to provide lexicogrammatical evidence of stereotypical constructions of age and aging. It focuses on elderly, a word that is pivotal to the domain in question and whose associative meaning is contested. The collocational profile drawn up on the basis of corpus evidence shows that elderly is primarily associated with discourses of care, disability, and vulnerability, emerging less as a marker of chronological age than of perceived social consequences. In addition to making a contribution to discourse-oriented aging research, the article also demonstrates the use of corpus linguistic methods within a sociolinguistic framework. (Ageism, ageist language, corpus linguistics.)*

Language and the Market

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: H.Kelly-Holmes & G.Mautner PART I: THEORISING LANGUAGE AND THE MARKET Language(s) and the Market: Theoretical and Empirical Work from a Management Perspective G.Jack Markets and Language(s): The Sociolinguistic Perspective H.Kelly-Holmes PART II: LANGUAGE, THE MARKET AND EMPLOYMENT Anyone doing something phonetic can attract business these days The Demand and Supply of Accents in the Indian Call Centre Industry C.Cowie Packaging English-speaking Products: Maid Agencies in Singapore B.P.Lorente Recruiting the Best: English, Job Adverts and the Private Job Market in Sri Lanka M.Herat & L.McLoughlin English and the Global Market: The Impact in the German Business Domain S.K.Hilgendorf PART III: COMMERCIAL MULTILINGUALISM Language Policy and Multilingual Advertising in France: E.Martin Linguistic Landscapes and the Market L.Edelman & D.Gorter Commodified English in East Asian Internet Advertising J.S.Lee PART IV: REVITALISATION AND THE MARKET From Industrial Development to Language Planning: The Evolution of Udaras na Gaeltachta J.Walsh E-Commerce and Minority Languages: A Welsh Perspective D.Cunliffe, N.Pearson & S.Richards Urban Rap goes to Artic Lapland: Breaking Through and Saving the Endangered Inari Sami Language S.Leppanen & S.Pietikainen PART V: IDEOLOGIES, MARKETS AND LANGUAGES English as Official State Language in Ohio: Economy Trumps Ideology B.E.Evans Multilingualism within Transnational Companies: An Analysis of Company Policy and Practice in a Diversity Perspective B.L.Gunnarsson Raising Language Awareness or Reinforming Monolingual Norms? A Study of International Marketing Textbooks H.Kelly-Holmes Speaking Commercial Femininities and Masculinities: Advertising Language in Cosmopolitan and Mens Health Magazine H.Motschenbacher PART VI: CORPORATE DISCOURSES The Spread of Corporate Discourse to Other Social Domains G.Mautner The Rhetoric of Corporate Mission Statements: Virtues and Emotions for the Market M.Isaksson & P.E.F.Jorgensen The Integration of Other Social Domains into Corporate Discourse: The Case of Political Metaphors V.Koller PART VII: CONCLUSION Language and the Market: Approaches, Actors and Agendas G.Mautner References Index

‘Adam Smith for Diocesan Missioner’: Legitimation in Religious Discourse

The quotation in the title is the tongue-in-cheek conclusion reached by the Anglican team rector of the parish church in Putney, London, in an article in the Church Times (Fraser, 2007). The church cafe in his parish, he argues, is as successful as it is – in both social and commercial terms – precisely because it is ‘an unashamedly commercial enterprise’. As such, it apparently proves Adam Smith’s ideas about the beneficial effects of self-interest.

Sprache, Handel, Sprachhandeln: Zur Bedeutung von Sprache im Management

Manager und Managerinnen verbringen den Grosteil ihres Arbeitstages mit Kommunikation. Die Schatzungen in Prozentzahlen schwanken; in der Literatur sind Werte um die 80 % gangig (Whetten und Cameron 1991, 230), im personlichen Gesprach gehen Praktiker/innen mitunter auf bis zu 100 %. In der Tat ist die Mehrzahl der routinemasigen Planungs-, Steuerungs- und Fuhrungsaufgaben untrennbar mit Sprechen, Zuhoren, Lesen und Schreiben verbunden. Aus linguistischer Perspektive lesen sich die Eintrage im Terminkalender und auf der To-Do-Liste einer Fuhrungskraft wie ein Inventar von Textsorten bzw. Interaktionstypen: Face-to-face und medial wird in Meetings, Interviews, Pressekonferenzen, Verhandlungen und Berichten ein engmaschiges Kontaktnetz mit den Stakeholdern innerhalb und auserhalb der Organisation geknupft.