Gerlinde Mautner - Böcker

Market forces are widely acknowledged to be at the heart of globalizing forces, and any consideration of how globalization affects language and vice versa requires an in-depth examination of the relationship between languages and markets.

Language plays a central role in creating and sustaining the market society—a society, that is, in which market exchange is no longer simply a process, but an all-encompassing social principle. The social domains affected include education, politics and religion. Around the world, government departments have re-defined themselves as service providers; universities produce graduates; job seekers are asked to package themselves more effectively, and there are consultants specializing in church marketing. And as individuals, too, we are supposed to brand ourselves, sell ourselves and strategically manage our personal relationships. Through an intricate dialectic, such patterns of linguistic choices reinforce the social structures that shape them, further consolidating the marketization process. Marketization thus emerges as a globally unfolding process in which language holds a key position as both cause and effect, and as both subject and object. The book examines these phenomena from a linguistic and critical perspective, drawing on critical discourse analysis, sociological treatises of market society, and critical management studies.

Language plays a central role in creating and sustaining the market society—a society, that is, in which market exchange is no longer simply a process, but an all-encompassing social principle. The social domains affected include education, politics and religion. Around the world, government departments have re-defined themselves as service providers; universities produce graduates; job seekers are asked to package themselves more effectively, and there are consultants specializing in church marketing. And as individuals, too, we are supposed to brand ourselves, sell ourselves and strategically manage our personal relationships. Through an intricate dialectic, such patterns of linguistic choices reinforce the social structures that shape them, further consolidating the marketization process. Marketization thus emerges as a globally unfolding process in which language holds a key position as both cause and effect, and as both subject and object. The book examines these phenomena from a linguistic and critical perspective, drawing on critical discourse analysis, sociological treatises of market society, and critical management studies.

The breadth and spread of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) indicate its usefulness for exploring language use within a social context. However, its theoretical foundations, limitations, and epistemological implications must be considered so that we can adjust our research designs accordingly. This Element offers a compact guide to which corpus linguistic tools are available and how they can contribute to finding out more about discourse. It will appeal to researchers both new and experienced, within the CADS community and beyond.

The book takes a specifically linguistic approach to business communication, drawing together perspectives from various research traditions. These include genre analysis, LSP research, and language teaching. There are 30 chapters organized into five parts: (1) Introduction; (2) genres and media (e.g., presentations, negotiations, meetings, sales talk, e-mail, websites, advertising, annual reports; (3) Foreign languages and culture (e.g., intercultural business communication, language needs and policies, multilingualism and English as a lingua franca in international business contexts, teaching and learning foreign business languages), (4) Lexical phenomena (e.g., structure and semantics of business terms, metaphor, metonymy and euphemism, language planning, the language of marketing and accounting, proper names in business, lexicography, corpora and corpus linguistics), (5) Building bridges across disciplines (e.g., organizational discourse, corporate language and design, standardized text modules).

In spite of the day-to-day relevance of business communication, it remains underrepresented in standard handbooks and textbooks on applied linguistics. The present volume introduces readers to a wide variety of linguistic studies of business communication, ranging from traditional LSP approaches to contemporary discourse-based work, and from the micro-level of lexical choice to macro-level questions of language policy and culture.