Volume 10, Issue 2

The present study investigates linguistic choices and strategy selection of American speakers of English, Russian native speakers, and American L2 learners of Russian in their complaints by exploring the interaction of social factors and gender. The data was elicited through an open-ended discourse completion questionnaire and an assessment questionnaire. The qualitative analysis shows significant differences between genders in the group of Russian speakers. The major finding was that Russian males were more judgmental and direct in their complaints, but they were also more humorous and ironic than Russian females. Fewer differences were observed in the group of American speakers and American L2 learners of Russian. The findings indicate similar gender differences within each group and across groups in terms of strategy selection and the number of words. Some of the differences were statistically significant.The findings of the interlanguage analysis open areas for pedagogical intervention so that L2 learners better understand how to address males and females, as well as which linguistic strategies to use to minimize offense while negotiating a problem in Russian culture.

This paper is meant to discuss two diverse but mutually entailed goals, underpinning the analysis of media business discourse. On the one hand, it promotes a critical understanding of how gender marks discourse and encodes power in business discursive communities, thus playing a key role in “shaping the expectations about people’s behaviours” (Koller 2004: 178). On the other, it promotes an interdisciplinary approach so as to disambiguate the discursive and argumentative strategies in the construction of media content by focusing on the symbolic organization and interaction between citizens and the discursive communities, in terms of male/female representations, given the way they throw global challenges and/or replicate stereotypes and particular ways of perceiving (Carter 1994: 5) the business discourse in terms of enunciation. The contrastive analysis of a corpus of magazine texts, covering news in April and May 2011, with a large readership in the global scenario, in Portuguese and in English (Sábado, Visão, Time and Newsweek), uncovers the power imbalance created when media texts pass on stereotypical patterns of behaviour in business and everyday discursive communities.

Assuming that “YouTube provides a deindividuated interactional context where social identity, including ethnic identity, is salient” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich et al. 2013, our emphasis), we focus our analysis on the online discussants’ identity narratives (i.e. avatars, pseudonyms and comments) in order to investigate what makes each identity narrative into a cohesive specific ethos and how this ethos is coherent with the positioning of the party and their leaders. Our methodology includes qualitative analysis (avatars and pseudonyms) as well as a quantitative approach (comments vs leadership speeches). Our findings confirm that the emotions and ideologies salient in the leadership speeches and keywords are perpetuated, reinvented and re-enacted in avatars, pseudonyms and comments, constructing therefore a coherent virtual community. We also conclude that the ethos of this virtual community was built on the concept of resisting the loss of sovereignty (among other things to resist), symbolically co-constructed with myths, memories and a glorious past, instilling pride and unity, while cultivating anger, resentment and contempt against the “enemy”.

This paper aims to analyze the deictic representations of person in the British and American media discourse, mostly focusing on such genres and subgenres as newspaper articles, interviews, letters to editors, opinions, headlines and advertisements. For this purpose, we wish to introduce a theoretical framework for the study and then we hope to present certain ways in which deictic expressions (personal, possessive and reflexive pronouns) represent person. Theoretical framework for our study is based upon the socio-cognitive approach, which gives priority to individual practices and subjectivity over social practices in discourse as well as the definition of discourse based on knowledge. The reason why we focus on the media discourse is obvious. The high degree of personalized conceptualization and contextualization dominated by a large number of subjective factors prevail in the above-mentioned genres and subgenres of media discourse. The deictic representations of person play the key role in this process.

The purpose of this case study is to investigate the identity linguistically and cognitively presented by official Target Corporation’s discourse and to unveil any structures or elements that are prominent enough to be included in the employees’ discourse production. The assumption is that the particular language we speak and the structures we choose in various contexts predispose us to think and act in certain ways. As for the approach utilized in this research, it is rather data-driven than data-based. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak and Meyer 2001) are employed and they are supplemented by Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2005). The sampling of the customers was opportunistic. The identity in and around organization can be effectively investigated through linguistic methods. The study has shown that the vision of the company’s identity is more integrated by the executives and team leaders than grassroots employees. The paper draws attention to the very basic level of communication and its potential of imposing certain conceptualizations – the actual building blocks of any narrative. Moreover, the methodology employed goes beyond mere content analysis and applies rigorous linguistic analysis of company discourse.