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Détail de la contribution

Auteur: Yulia DANYUSHINA

Titre:
Business and Governance Linguistics: an Interdisciplinary Approach


Abstract/Résumé: The paper suggests establishing a separate sub-discipline on the crossroads of Applied Linguistics and Communication studies (regarding the communicating power and influence in business, management, administration and governance) – Business and Governance Linguistics – a complex, interdisciplinary field for researching the use of language in business / governance and verbal specifics of institutional communication. The author initiates the exploration of this new linguistic sub-discipline, defining its key areas and practical purposes. The discursive approach is adopted to provide the basis for investigating this promising sphere, and the multi-level critical discourse analysis (based on the integrating the concepts by van Dijk 2007, Fairclough 1993, 2001, Wodak & Chilton 2005 and others) is used as its key research method, therefore a complex definition of business and governance discourse is proposed. The spectrum of research questions Business and Governance Linguistics encompasses the following wider spheres: - what are the ways of improving communication in/for governance; - how to facilitate - by communicative means - closer links between the elite (the government and big business) and civil society, - what is the role and the opportunities given by better communication for further developing participatory democracy, citizenry, and social sustainability; - how efficient communication can lessen social tense (of all kinds – between social strata, ethnic, national and racial groups, religions, professional classes etc) and foster national development; - what are the peculiarities of the leadership discourse; - how business can express its corporate social responsibility; - what are the new opportunities given for improving communication efficiency by modern IT, the Internet, new, telecommunications, social networks, multimedia. The author starts exploring the field by investigating the corporate websites and blogs of leading US companies – the paper explores the language (the linguistics and extra-linguistics) of the corporate governance, leadership, internal and external specifics of the corporate communication. The report argues that all the companies represent the four discursive types identified by the author on the basis of the four types of social implications in their discursive rhetoric: (a) directly related to the development of information and communication technologies, e.g. Google, (b) manufacturers of mass market consumer goods, e.g. Coca-Cola, (c) financial sector companies, e.g. Bank of America, and (d) big oil corporations, e.g. Exxon Mobil.