A Corpus-based Study of the Discursive Construction of Corporate Identities by Chinese and American Banks

By taking the perspective of Social Constructivism and the Discourse-Historical Approach, and using the corpus linguistic tool Wmatrix, this study compares the discursive strategies adopted by Chinese and American banks in their construction of corporate identities. The research underlines the shared and unique features presented in prominent themes, communication strategies and lexical patterns. It is found that Chinese banks prefer to emphasise their historical development, industrial ranking and organisational structure to positively construct their identity as industry leaders, adopting a corporate ability strategy through the frequent usage of numbers and superlative adjectives. However, American banks tend to stress care for their employees, communities and environment. They prefer to use a corporate responsibility strategy to build their identity as social contributors through the frequent usage of performative verbs to exhibit specific corporate activities. This study may have practical implications for Chinese companies wishing to improve their international communication capability and may offer educational implications for Business English teaching.

Contrast, Contact, Convergence? Afrikaans and English Modal Auxiliaries in South African Parliamentary Discourse (1925–1985)

This article investigates modal auxiliaries in original and translated Afrikaans and South African English parliamentary discourse in the period 1925–1985. Against the background of the sociolinguistic history of language contact in the bilingual South African parliament (1910–1994), it analyses (a) the contrastive differences in the use of modal auxiliaries in South African English and Afrikaans, (b) potential cross-linguistic influence in the use of modals between the two languages, and (c) the way in which contrastive differences and cross-linguistic influence are reflected in translations. In both languages, modal auxiliaries are more common in parliamentary discourse than in general usage. There is little evidence of overall convergence; there are, however, cross-linguistic similarities in specific pragmatic uses of modals in parliament. Translations show a large degree of shining-through from the source text, alongside adjustment to target norms; the tension between these two forces is variable, and influenced by social factors.

Native-like Performance of Pragmatic Features: Speech Acts in Spanish

This study had as its goal to investigate how nonnative speakers (NNSs) of Spanish were able to perform pragmatics which in various ways resembled that of native speakers (NSs). The study focused on three advanced NNSs of Spanish who had contributed data six years earlier to a corpus of NS and NNS speech acts of complimenting, apologizing and refusing. The purpose was to do a contrastive analysis comparing the pragmatic performance of NNSs and NSs in order to capture both similarities and areas where highly competent NNSs displayed knowledge gaps, however subtle. The subjects responded to a language background questionnaire regarding their learning of Spanish and also completed a learning style preference survey. They were then asked to revisit their earlier performance in pragmatics from the corpus data and to describe the strategies that they used to produce their highly-rated performance in Spanish pragmatics at that time. The findings revealed ways in which the three subjects differentially imitated NS behavior, and provided insights as to how they arrived at native-like behavior in their facial expressions, use of clicks, physical contact practices, colloquial language, and cursing. The subjects’ reported learning style preferences appeared to be generally consistent with the strategies that they reported using for dealing with the pragmatic features of interest, such as the way that they dealt with cursing.

How Do Female and Male Characters Speak in the Japanese Translation of English Crime Novels?

The repertoire of linguistic expressions that index sociopragmatic meanings differs considerably from language to language. This difference becomes particularly noticeable when one language is translated into another. As an example, this study examines dialogs in the Japanese translations of two English crime novels to see how the translator deals with normatively gendered morphological forms in Japanese for which no corresponding forms exist in English. The analysis shows that although the same imperative, declarative, and interrogative forms are used for female and male characters in the English originals, in the translations, gendered forms are used not simply based on the gender of the characters but on the interaction of gender with other social variables, in particular class and age. The results and their theoretical implications are discussed, employing the notions of indirect indexing, double-voiced discourse, and cultural filter.

Love as a Term of Address in British English: Micro-diachronic Variation

This paper explores the pragmatic scope of the endearment ‘love’ in contemporary spoken British English. It will be suggested that the function of ‘love’ in interaction can be understood as a ritual framing expression that enables speakers to index certain interpersonal constellations and action contexts in which speakers claim rights and social authority by couching them in affective stance displays. The study is based on the 1994 and 2014 versions of the British National Corpus. The findings show that over the course of twenty years, the use of ‘love’ has become significantly less frequent and has undergone a functional profile shift to index, more centrally than before, other-deprecating evaluation, enacted through joking and performative use in storytelling. Those functions appear to feed off the core semantics and interpersonal constellations of ‘love’ as well as associations with social and linguistic stereotypes.

Terms of Address: A Contrastive Investigation of Ongoing Changes in British, American and Indian English and in German

Address terms are closely related to the conceptualisation of hierarchical relations in a speech community, so, since – at least in Western societies – tendencies towards a flattening of hierarchies have been noted (cf. Mair, 2006), we expect changes in this domain. Some evidence has been produced for German, American and British English, but empirical insights on address choice in Indian English are lacking to date. As it tends to be a conservative variety (cf. e.g. Collins, 2012), we might expect resistance to change. The study makes a novel use of discourse completion tasks to investigate ongoing change using an ‘apparent-time’ approach. Our findings support the view of Indian English as conservative and of American English as changing most clearly towards informalisation, visible in the increasing use of informal attention getters (hey!). However, evidence of recent change is otherwise not as pronounced as expected and actually absent regarding pronoun choice in German.