Gerlinde Mautner

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.

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.

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. Despite this, the disciplines of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have an uneasy relationship with markets. The hegemony of market processes and their negative outcomes has, it could be argued, become a commonsense assumption in the academic treatment of the subject. The aim of the current volume is to challenge this assumption. The book takes the market as its common starting point, and examines, in a large number of individual contributions, the sociolinguistic inputs and fall-out from market processes, using a variety of different methodological approaches and various contexts and case studies. These cases range from a call centre in India to an industrial development agency in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht, with genres ranging from Sámi rap music to corporate mission statements. The book is intentionally interdisciplinary, including perspectives from management and economics, media and communications studies, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and cultural 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.