DICOEN 2003 - Abstracts

Second International Conference on Discourse, Communication and Enterprise (DICOEN2003)

Abstract
Against a backdrop of ongoing heterogeneous discourse about the Bangsa Malaysia (Lit. 'Malaysian Nation') leitmotif, the state strives to forge a strategic sense of nationhood via political dictates and related discursive practices that promote in the main a common language, education system, culture, and ideology. Given the dominant role of the mass media, the discursive construction of these national ideals in the Malaysian multicultural contexts are traditionally manifest in the mainstream media that also serve as the contested site of composite identity construction, particularly the print media and the Internet, which may be ideologically framed as an assimilation/integration dialectic (Abdullah 2003). As might be expected in similar socio-political scenarios, this discursive practice becomes more pronounced to coincide with major commemorative events such as the National Day.
Further, in the face of what is currently perceived as the twin spectres of 'globalisation' and 'a borderless world', particularly by nascent nation-states, both the state's political dictates and its people's perceptive states would appear to be under scrutiny. Castells (1997) tenders the view that the dawn of the global network society, powered by the information technology revolution, witnesses "powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalization and cosmopolitanism on behalf of cultural singularity and people's control over their lives and environment" spawning, as it were, "a whole array of reactive movements that build trenches of resistance on behalf of God, nation, ethnicity, family, [and] locality" (p. 2). A major contributing factor is that, with the projected demise of statism, the nation-state is being called into question with profound implications for (re)constructions of 'nationhood' and 'sovereignty'. Hence, any national 'Discourse' (after Gee 1997) of geopolitical identity needs to be seen as the contested site of ideological representations and relations of power inasmuch as the construction of international and/or sub-national identities are concerned within the ambit of a globalisation/localisation dialectic (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999). In the main, mediated and mediatised efforts that clearly seek to access, colonise and appropriate this site by their pervasively discursive nature deserve special attention vis-à-vis the powerful role of the mass media as the harbingers of social change (Fairclough 1995a).
Malaysia celebrates its National Day on August 31 every year, a date which coincides with the day in 1957 when the nation officially obtained its Merdeka (Lit.'Independence') from Britain. To commemorate the occasion, leading national newspapers publish a series of articles on nationhood besides organising online polls and contests that address in the main the national identity problematic: 'What does it mean to be Malaysian?' or 'Why am I proud to be Malaysian?' This paper reports on a study of 30 mainly corporate body advertisements that appeared in The Star newspaper circa the Malaysian National Day celebrations in August 2002. Using a critical discourse analysis approach (Fairclough 1995b, 2001), the investigation sought an world/national in media events, identities that are constructed for citizens directly or indirectly addressed, and the relationships that are set up between the participants of the events. The results indicate that 'legitimate language' is used together with intertextual/interdiscursive elements to produce hybridised genres that not only seek to promote national solidarity and a common rhetorical vision within the discursive space of a composite national identity, but also to communicate relationships of economic uniqueness and resilience on the part of the advertisers/sponsors as well as readers/citizens as co-participants in the discourse.

References
Abdullah, F. S. (2003). Prolegomena to a discursive model of Malaysian national identity. In Young, L. and Harrison, C. (Eds.) Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical .Discourse Analysis: Studies in Social Change. Ottawa: Continuum Press (In press).
Castells, M. (1997). The Power of Identity. Cornwall: Blackwell.
Chouliaraki, L. & Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in Late Modernity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Fairclough, N. (1995a). Media Discourse. London: Arnold.
Fairclough, N. (1995b). Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power. 2nd ed.London: Longman.
Gee, J. P. (1999). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge.

The influence of English as a Global Language over the Vocabulary of Business Communication in Italian

Abstract
Globalisation is a term that provokes strong reactions, positive or negative. Globalisation is praised for the new opportunities it brings, such as access to markets and the transfer of technology - opportunities that hold out the promise of increased productivity and higher living standards. But globalisation is also feared and often condemned because it sometimes brings unwelcome change. Globalisation is not simply a phenomenon in economy but it is a process that depends on a constellation of factors, and on shifts in their configuration that take place over time.
Unification tendencies in Europe have conceded with globalisation tendencies, concerning communication, scientific research and languages. Languages have to compete for a market, and analysing the current language situation in the European Union, there is no doubt the most extensively cultivated language in Europe is English enjoying international recognition and strong economic status. Research into language contact is becoming an even-more important branch of sociolinguistics in an increasingly internationalised economy.
In order to communicate in a foreign language, to obtain knowledge of practice of the strategies, it is not enough to learn the words and the grammar; it also involves being able to handle the language as the vehicle or the medium of a culture.
This presentation -which is a part of an on-going research - examines the role of English in Italian for economics highlighting how English can have a real influence over the vocabulary of business communication in Italian.

This presentation gives an overview of the latest changes that have occurred in Italian for economics. Some decades ago Italian companies traditionally operated on a national basis, in recent years internationalisation has affected company operation. It is well-known that loanwords are subject to many prejudices and misconceptions but natural languages have a continuous need for lexical innovation caused by changing communication needs resulting from the discovery, invention, and adoption of new things and ideas which must be labelled. In the case of Italian language for special purposes, loanwords can not be considered as a negative phenomenon.

In order to better understand the role of borrowing in the interaction of the external and internal economy of language, it must suffice in the present context to establish its main determinants. To this end, the following compact question may serve as a useful guideline: Who borrows what, why, how, from whom, and under what circumstances?
The presentation focuses on foreign terms in the business language and illustrates the 'new'vocabulary with some examples taken from a daily paper of economics (Il Sole 24 Ore) and a weekly magazine (Il Panorama). Further, it presents what language is used in business situations and stresses the characteristics in vocabulary, although the language of economics has its characteristics in grammar, syntax and style as well.

Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul - FAMECOS/PUCRS - Brazil
scrofer@pucrs.br

Abstract
De una manera general las organizaciones han desenvolvido su acciones comunicacionales utilizándose del modelo tradicional de características informacionales, de traslado de información. Esa opción de una cierta manera evidencia el desconocimiento del poder de la comunicación como la herramienta estratégica.
El presente trabajo objetiva ampliar las discusiones en el tema, contribuyendo para (re)pensar la comunicación organizacional en el espacio de las organizaciones.
La discusión propuesta es basada en autores que se acercan la comunicación organizacional sob diferentes perspectivas, tal como Daniels, Spiker y Papa (1997), Goodhall y Eisenberg (1997), Lite (1995), dentre otros. Daniels, Spiker y Papa (1997) afirman que la comunicación organizacional dice respecto a los procesos de comunicación que caracterizan las organizaciones humanas, identificándola a partir de tres modelos o perspectivas de comunicación organizacional: tradicional, interpretativo y crítico. Goodhall Jr y Eisnberg (1997), a su vez, presentan cuatro teorías de comunicación organizacional: a) la comunicación organizacional como el traslado de información, b) como el proceso transacional, c) como la estrategia del control, y como el equilibrio entre la creatividad y el constreñimiento/coerción/sometimiento (constraint). Lite (1997) realiza una breve revisión de la evolución conceptual de la comunicación organizacional, su origen, dificultades y limitaciones para su implantación en una organización, destacando algunas teorías que hán marcando los estudios de la comunicación organizacional.
Entre los autores brasileños que son una referencia en los estudios de esa área, la comunicación organizacional "configura las diferentes modalidades comunicacionales que envolven su actividad,.... comprendendo la comunicación institucional, la comunicación mercadológica, la comunicación administrativa y la comunicación interna." (KUNSCH, 2003). Torquato (2202, p.35), a su vez, afirma que la comunicación organizacional "es la posibilidad sistémica que, integrada, recoge las modalidades de comunicación cultural, comunicación administrativa, comunicación social y sistemas de información". Ambos autores dan énfasis a la necesidad de la comunicación ser pensada de una manera integrada y como una herramienta estratégica para las organizaciones.
¿Estarán las organizaciones preparadas y aptas para trabajar la comunicación bajo ese acercamiento? El presente texto busca, por lo tanto, los subsidios para contestar esa questión.

Abstract
The present paper reports some preliminary results of an on-going investigation which focuses the cognition process by which academic tests organize, relate and understand professional experience, specially, those who are focused on quality of communication as part of the field of quality management.
From a practical point of view, the analyses may provide insights where quality of communication and quality management principles cross. The data consists of authentic business texts of internal and external correspondence collect at four different types of Portuguese enterprises.

Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil
leilabarbara@ig.com.br
tony4@uol.com.br

Abstract
In this presentation, we will report on an investigation which looked at the presence and use of 'chunks' in business meetings held in Portuguese, whose participants were Brazilian and Portuguese speakers. We use the term 'chunk' to refer to collocations (Sinclair, 1991), lexical bundles (Biber et al, 1999), and other forms of recurrent formulaic language (Wray, 2000). The focus of the analysis is on the frequency and meaning of chunks as they were used both by individual speakers and across different speakers. Chunks are used for a range of different purposes, including topic initiation and maintenance, turn and floor negotiation, but their analysis also permits insights into the power relations established within the meetings as the interaction evolves.

Toward Dialectic Discourse in Advertising:
McDonalds, Adbusters and the Subvertising of Corporate American Culture

Abstract
While much has been written on the relationship between advertising and its targets, our role as consumers is often seen as one of passive, yet essential, acquiescence to the discursive will of advertisers. My intent here, is to explore the ways alternative media, specifically Adbusters magazine, use the language, images, and techniques of advertising to challenge consumers to question the corporate identities they have helped to construct, in particular, that of the McDonalds Corporation.
Corporate identity and its underlying ideologies are constructed, shaped and maintained through various forms of mediated discourse. Advertisers go to great lengths to craft for themselves often complex and uniformly positive public identities. However, all discourse is potentially dialectic in that all participants contribute to its meaning, relevance, and truth value in both in its production and its consumption. Our tendency, as lifetime consumers of advertising, is to follow carefully laid cues through often complex multimodal and intertextual layers to arrive at expected and predetermined connotational conclusions. Advertisers produce a riddle and our job is to call upon our vast experience and competence to solve it in the "correct" manner. The result is yet another successful exchange in the ongoing co-construction of inextricably linked corporate and consumer identities. Adbusters attempts to disrupt this habitual discursive compliance within the same promotional frames used by McDonalds and other corporate advertisers, by producing graphics, narrative text, mock ads, and "promotional" calls to action designed to foreground some of the less attractive aspects of corporate identity.
If advertising can be understood as an entirely public form of social co-practice, based on our competence in producing and decoding scripts (Pateman 1990), how might these scripts and their components be used by Adbusters to publicly "dis-advertise" products and deconstruct the "community of ideology" (Fowler 1985) which unites McDonalds and its customers, while "subvertising" its corporate identity? What role does the consumer play in this process and how do potentially shifting identities alter the traditional landscape of advertising?

With an eye toward the role of ideology in the re-formation of consumer identity, I employ theories of critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk 1991, Dellinger 1995), intertextual analysis within CDA (Fairclough 1999), visual semiotic analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, Barthes 1997), and semantic script theory (Raskin and Attardo 1991) in the hope of clarifying the processes of resistance and paradigm shift in alternative media, while casting new light on the consumer/ producer dialectic in advertising discourse.

Communicative Purposes, Discourse Communities and Genres of Discourse at a Workplace: reporting the adventures and misadventures of a discourse researcher in a Brazilian Company

Abstract
The present communication reports the results of a doctorate research on Discourse Analysis at Workplaces (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2001; Bargiela-Chiappini & Nickerson, 1999 & 2002; Barbara, Celani, collins & Scott, 1994 & 1996) Rogers, 2001) developed within the theoretical frameworks of Genre Analysis (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993; Eggins & Martin, 1997), Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1985/1994; Eggins, 1994; Thompson, 1996) and Corpus Linguistics (Ajmer & Altenberg, 1991; Berber-Sardinha, 1999, 2000 & 2002; Scott, 1999; Sinclair, 1994 and Stubbs, 1996), and discusses the drawbacks faced during the processes of classification and analysis of the data.
An Animal Health Brazilian Company was surveyed to what concerns its cultural and situational contexts, and its textual productions in Portuguese by means of qualitative and quantitative analyses. The combination of these two methods allowed us to generate data from different sources, and observe the internal discourse of this company from the points of view of a) its organization and managing, b) its professional community, c) its internal written production and d) its lexico-grammatical features. As a consequence, our results range from the most conventional choices to the most peculiar possibilities, revealing the dynamism and complexity of the organizational context.
However, as our analysis shows, gathering data from different sources, broaden up the context of observation and collecting texts named as internal written communications and sent by mail, mailshot, fax and e-mail within different departments made it difficult to classify both the professionals under investigation as a Discourse Community and the corpus as a Genre of Discourse. In our presentation, we will bring about the problems faced and present our solutions.

Technological objects through discourse: a case study from the field of telemedicine

Abstract
In recent years, many authors in the sociology of organization have emphasized the importance of a symmetrical understanding of the different elements that contribute to organizational practices and activities (Callon and Law, 1989; Law, 1994). From this point of view, human and non-human actors are mutually linked in a network of relations and practices, with the result that what is 'natural' and what is 'artificial' is often the result of organizational processes and not an a priori.
This is particularly evident in contexts of technological and organizational innovation, where scientific and applied research influence each other, and where different technologies and knowledges are called into action. In this sense, the field of medicine seems particularly interesting, in that it brings together people, technologies, professional knowledges, organizational practices and requires the standardization of processes and results (Berg, 1997; Elston, 1997).
In our paper we will present a case study from the field of telemedicine, a setting where subjects located in different places discuss virtually by mean of different technologies producing the encounter of a plurality of organizational, professional and occupational appurtenances. In particular, the study will focus on a telecardiology centre, born in 1999, which constitutes to date the biggest telecardiology call-centre in Italy. In this centre, 60 cardiologists alternatively report the electrocardiograms that are transmitted telephonically by general practitioners from different regions. Tracks are read on PCs monitor, they are interpreted and reported by cardiologists, discussed with doctors, and then sent back by fax to them.
Our analysis will focus on how general practitioners and cardiologists negotiate the relevance of the different elements they deal with (ECG track, patient, previous exams and so on). Based on the recordings of one month of telephone conversations, we will consider how a technological object (the telematic ECG) is constructed and acts through discursive practices and distant interaction. We will consider in particular the reciprocal construction of technological objects and subjects through the alignment of the different elements of the network, showing how human and non-human actors influence each other, 'speak' for each other and link their meanings and actions to each other's definition. The analysis will show how the interaction between cardiologist and general practitioner is oriented to frame a coherent scenario that makes the connections between the different elements accountable.

References
Berg, M. (1997), Rationalizing Medical Work. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Callon, M. e Law, J. (1989), On the Construction of Socio-technical Networks: Content and Context Revisited. Knowledge and Society 9: 57-83.
Elston, M.A. (1997), The Sociology of Medical Science and Technology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Law, J. (1994), Organizing Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell.

Abstract
Within the framework of social discourse analysis, I will discuss the function of the discourse of the host of a Tv talk-show in the media practice of debates. More precisely, I will highlight different types of strategies used to create a high polemic relationship between the debaters, as well as between the audience and the debaters. The data is taken from a recent French broadcast: "C'est mon choix", directed by the popular host Evelyne Thomas (FR3 channel, november 2001).
The media, especially the broadcast, report a great deal of debates. A debate can be described as a communicative event aimed at the confronting of opinions. In this, the media assume a civic function: they report to citizen a relevant ongoing of the public space. But the polemical value of a debate also makes it become an entertaining talk show. Thus, the media can focus on their economical goal: they sell a show to customers. In any case, a media debate constitutes a particular professional practice anchored in the public space that constraints the organization of the discourse as well as the identities of the participants.
As a matter of fact, the media actually develop an extreme type of debates essentially directed to a female audience, hosted by a woman, and aimed only at showing the performing of the participants, including the audience in the studio. The program under analysis belongs to this new entertaining category, considering the following markers:
o the subject: women who cannot restrain from touching other people, which reveals a cultural and social gap, and implies a strong opposition between male/female attitudes;
o the physical setting: not only the debaters but also the audience are ratified and differentiated participants (pros vs cons) ;
o the debaters (and the audience) exhibit "extreme" signs of social membership;
o the host acts systematically in order to provoke a direct confrontation.
The analysis focuses on this later dimension. For example, I will consider the manner the hostess strategically interrupts the debaters; how the hostess ratifies a sentence of a debater to unbalance the interaction; how she encourages communicative quarrels; or how she comes down on one side and then on the other with the aim of emphasing the entertainment dimension of the show at the expense of the expression of opinions. This reveals a radical change in the role of the media in reporting social issues.

References
BELL A. & P. GARRETT (eds) (1998), Approaches to Media Discourse, Oxford, Blackwell.
BURGER M. & L. FILLIETTAZ. (2002), "Media Interviews: an Intersection of Multiple Social Practices", in CANDLIN Ch. (ed.): Research and Practice in Professional Discourse, Honkong, Hongkong University Press, 567-589.
DIJK VAN T.A. (1997) (ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction, London, Sage.
FAIRCLOUGH N. (1995), Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge, Polity Press.
LIVINGSTONE S. & P. LUNT (1994), Talk on Television, London, Routledge.
ROULET E., L. FILLIETTAZ & A. GROBET avec M. BURGER (2001), Un modèle et un instrument d'analyse de l'organisation du discours, Berne, Lang.
SHATTUC J. (1997), The Talking Cure, London, Routledge.

Deductive and Inductive Determinism of Discourse Analysis: A Pragmatic-Cognitive Approach

Abstract
The present paper bridges considerations characteristic of the domains of linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as cognitive linguistics and social psychology. At the root of the argument is the hypothesis that a given discourse type is as such an analytic determinant, i.e. that it dictates methods of investigation into it. These methods necessarily manifest a "bottom-up" or "top-down" orientation (cf. Beaugrande 1997), which is different in intensity or dominance relative to what kind of discourse is investigated.

It is argued that certain discourse types which "include" an analyst (that is, where an analyst is part of depicted events or part of discourse audience) or are more "familiar" to him/her generate observations on their function and structure at a relatively early stage of their componential analysis, or even before it takes place. Once the global function of the text has been presupposed, the analysis proceeds "top-down", i.e. toward all micro-data chunks supportive of the initial hypothesis. This happens, for instance, in the case of the discourse of advertising. Analysts of the discourse of advertising (cf. Myers 1994; Goddard 1998, and others)

On the other hand, discourse analyses pursued in a "bottom-up" manner seem to result from an analyst having insufficient extralinguistic knowledge to postulate a priori claims about the text and its function. This constraint concerns analysts not being part of the reality investigated and, more often than not, undertaking a diachronic study or a study of highly-metaphoric discourse.

The primary objective of the paper is to postulate, on the basis of investigation into a couple of different discourse types (language of politics and the media, advertising, law, and scientific argument), about the degree of analytic determinism pertaining to a given kind of text. In other words, it is to indicate which discourse types invite which of the analytic approaches (i.e. "top-down" and "bottom-up") in a more explicit manner.

The secondary goal is to suggest that the analysis of discourse determination can further benefit from the application of concepts which are normally part of Cognitive Grammar (CG) apparatus. It will be shown that CG can substantially contribute toward specification of the distance that holds between the analyst and the investigated discourse. Addressed here will be Langacker's concept of subjectification (cf. Langacker 1990b) and its relevance to considerations of the analyst's status in discourse.

References
Beaugrande, R. de (1997). New Foundations for Science of Text and Discourse. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Langacker, R.W. (1990b). "Subjectification". In Cognitive Linguistics 1: 5-38.

Abstract
The educational system in Romania has entered a process of steady reform, in an attempt to adjust it to Western norms. One of the most visible effects of such an attempt is the introduction of a new type of discourse in University presentation and advertising materials. Whether they are printed or put on the internet, such texts are definitely the outcome of the tendency to introduce the principles of enterprise management in the management of educational institutions.
The ultimate end is to align the standard of Romanian Universities to the one in the EU, where Romania hopes to integrate. This has led to a "westernisation" of University discourse. A close analysis of University prospectuses or a survey of University websites reveals how much these texts have borrowed from the jargon of EU documents. Words such as "competente", "oportunitati", "grant" have been borrowed with very slight, if any, phonetic and spelling modifications.
The message is clear: we can offer high quality education, we are as proficient as any university abroad, we also offer equal opportunities. Yet since the main target audience is prospective Romanian students, depending on the particular social and demographic circumstances where universities are located, the messages take on various political connotations. In Moldavia, for instance, which is known as the poorest region in the country, the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration aims to attract students by promising them quick integration in the work force. Universities in Transylvania, on the other hand, which is known as a region of a mixed ethnic background and of ethnic conflict, sell the promise of interethnic peacefulness and collaboration. In other words, they promote themselves as fostering politically correct practices and discourses.
The "Westernising" of the University discourse, however, is not complete. At points, one can encounter chunks of text that remind one of old Communist speeches. On the other hand, there are attempts to forbid by law the introduction of loans from English into Romanian. Whether the university discourse will re-engineer itself and dig into the resources of local, genuine vocabulary is uncertain at the moment. What is definitely clear is that University management communicates with society in the same manner as enterprise management, and that it endeavours to project an image of professionalism.

Abstract
My intention in the present paper is to comment on the experience of devising, piloting and revising some listening comprehension activities for a manual I am working on : Business English Guide, addressed to students and professionals in Economy and Business Administration.
It is true that developing listening comprehension activities is neither a new nor a spectacular subject in general; what I find challenging in this context is the fact that such activities have been more or less avoided so far, at least by Romanian manual writers. Reading is usually preferred, although, in a natural way, we begin the learning of a language with listening. We must admit that a taped text could be a source of technical troubles for the user, but it is still worth playing it, exploiting it. That is why I will make my statements starting from the idea that listening comprehension is not important only in its own right, but it also plays an essential part in the process of language learning.
Therefore, in the first part of the study we attempt to cover a number of theoretical issues, among which: the sub-skills of listening, the factors implied in listening comprehension, the desirable characteristics of tasks and the teacher's approach to listening comprehension activities. The second section is dedicated to the practical part-namely the discussion on the designed activities and the students and teachers' feedback after piloting them, starting (hopefully !) from a well-chosen text in terms of its motivational, methodological and linguistic conceptual characteristics.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that I still have work to do for the manual, consequently, sharing this experience with you may help me identify and work on the weak points of the whole writing project.

Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil
pcgago@uol.com.br
soniabit@terra.com.br

The co-construction of the transition relevance place in a Brazilian Consumer's Product Safety Comission Meeting: some structural properties of institutional interaction in conflict situation

Abstract
Talk in interaction is the home environment both for language use and the workings of institutions in society. Most of the social work, as it is understood in Sociology, is done throgh direct face to face or mediated talk in interaction. Conversation is considered the locus of sociability and a crucial aspect of participation in social life is the distribution of oportunities to talk with others.
The turn taking system described for ordinary conversation by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) says that overwhelmingly one party talks at a time, more than one speaker at a time are common but brief, transition from one speaker to another is done mostly with no gap and no overlapp, among other features.
Considering that conversation is the "matrix genre" of language use and that the various sorts of institutional talk (medical, in service encounters, in court meetings, etc.) are specializations derived from conversation but different from it, in this presentation we will examine some structural properties of institutional interaction in conflict situation. We will show how participants from a Brazilian's Consumer Product Safety Comission Meeting organize the transition space and their opportunities to talk oriented to their specific goals of the meeting. Early placement of overlapping talk is commom and deeply associated with the conflict participants have to solve.

AMID Policy and Practice: Strategizing language and Discourse in the Changing Work Place

Abstract
Situated in the capital, Pharma Globe Ontario (PGO is a pseudonym) is an international Canadian pharmaceutical company that excels in, among other commodities, the development of nuclear medicine and the production of radioactive substances sold the world over. Privatized in 1991, PGO was formerly a public company under federal jurisdiction founded in the 1960's. The effects of the company's long history of transformations ensuing from privatization, international mergers and acquisitions are observable at all levels of its work life.

Though other spheres were impacted by these changes, this paper proposes to trace the dynamics of language management as it materialized in the past 25 years at PGO. Based on an ethnographic methodology, interviews and observations were directed between July 2002 and March 2003 within the framework of a socio-linguistic study lead by Normand Labrie and Monica Heller ("Speaking Out: Canadian "Francophonie" and the Globalized New Economy"). This research project aims at understanding how different phenomena partake in the commodification of language, particularly French, in Canada's new economy. To better understand the role occupied by language in the process of producing services at PGO, we will focus on two different levels of communication. The first addresses the dynamics of internal communication and the latter explores questions related to external interactions, namely between international sales people and their clients.

From a historical viewpoint, the gathered data highlights important schisms between language policy and practice in regards to internal communication. During the mid 1970's, the former public company adopted a bilingual policy assuring French and English translations of internal documents. 1985 marked the beginning of a lengthy shift as the crown corporation was placed on the bidding market, culminating in the company's privatization in 1991. Subsequently, by the late 1980's the department of translation disintegrated. The use of French, however has taken on a new role since the acquisition of a Belgian company now part of PGO. The relationship between the Ottawa and Belgium offices testifies to the complexities that may arise in the process of establishing a synergy within a culturally and linguistically heterogeneous work force contributing towards the development of a single corporation.

Today PGO deals with clients across the world and has subsidiary companies set up in North America, Europe, Latin-America and Asia. Yet, no official language policy regarding external or internal communications has been formulated. For the time being, linguistic resources managed ad hoc command significant business interactions. PGO's international sales people, however, recognize the value of providing services, as much as possible, in the client's own language. The company must cope with increasing pressures of identifying new markets and creating an attractive international image owing to a diverse clientele. In the process of establishing quality rapports with international clients, PGO's improvised style of language management may not provide the most efficient long-term scheme for employing their linguistic resources.

Exploring the past and present of PGO's history from the viewpoint of language management as it transpired in policy and practice will shed light on important processes linked to the commodification of language. Today's globalized economy demands an increasing linguistic flexibility on behalf of international corporations. PGO provides one such example

New economy, communication and corpus-based research: A multi-disciplinary approach to digital economic text

Abstract
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Information and Communication Technologies have established themselves as the means of an irreversible social and economic change. They have caused the codification of a new technological paradigm, characterized by a deep fracture with the past and by the modification of some core concepts and behaviours. This new technological paradigm has in fact determined a dramatic transformation in the way we consider time and space, but also in the way we perform our basic activities such as buying, selling, working, communicating, writing and studying.
The purpose of the present paper, which is the ongoing effort of a group of scholars from the Faculty of Economics, University of Cagliari, comprising both linguists and economists, is to study some aspects of the recent phenomenon known as "digital revolution" from a multi-disciplinary point of view. We will show how two different academic subjects, such as Economics and Linguistics, can generate a peculiar yet scientifically sound performance, while enjoying the beneficial effects that a multi-disciplinary approach normally involves.
Thanks to digital information, both economics and discourse have experienced a gradual and incremental "virtualization" process. This process has caused, on the one hand, the rise of the new economic paradigm commonly and differently known as Internet economy, web economy, digital economy, informational economy, knowledge economy, but, more successfully, as "new economy". On the other hand, the process of virtualization of texts and information has generated what we now call hypertexts and the consequent academic interest in this new type of discourse.
Thus, the present paper will try to show how the changes experienced by the two realms, linguistics and economics, following the digital revolution, can give scholars an extra key advantage to analyse complex issues and relate with them.
To do so, we will present a corpus of articles taken from The Economist during the period January 1995 - the beginning of the digital revolution - April 2000 - the Nasdaq crash. The year span was decided because this period represents the so-called "first life of the new economy", until its failure in April 2000.
The articles will be collected from two different sources. The 1995-1998 articles from "The Economist "CD-Rom Collection. The 1999-2000 articles will be instead downloaded directly from the magazine's Internet site, http://www.economist.com.
The corpus was determined by choosing a list of seven key words: cyber; e-commerce, e-trade, home banking, Internet banking, new economy, old economy. Consequently, we will present a corpus-based research aiming at the study of those lexical and morphological peculiarities of the English language which clearly state and symbolize the passage from old economy to new economy.
Our pragmatic aim will be to devote special attention to such linguistic phenomena as lexical evolutionism and morphological dynamism, which highly emphasize the flexibility and looseness of the English language, its capacity to define new situations and new concepts through neologisms and through the creative combination of existing lexical items. As many scholars have repeatedly affirmed, this capacity is hardly found in any other language.

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the discourse of eleven pictures of the On-line Campaign of Spain called "Spain Marks, Spain's New Image in the World" carried out by the Institute of Tourism of Spain - Turespaña - (Instituto de Turismo de España), and which can be seen at <http://www.spain.info/Portal/EN/Services/campaigns/Default.htm> where there are eighteen striking photographs that are accompanied by a short text that emphasises different features of the Spanish culture.
It can be stated that advertisements' main aim is to persuade people to buy a product, yet they also aim at entertaining, informing, warning, deceiving and changing people's attitudes or behaviour. In order to do so, they use persuasive strategies such as creating the need for the product, at the same time attaching to it and associating it with certain values such as youth, beauty, money, modernity, eroticism and so on. As a result advertisements provide a pattern of behaviour, a life style and they pledge the supply of pleasure.
What is quite surprising about this tourism campaign, is that in order to promote tourism in Spain, there are not big pictures of landscapes, monuments or picturesque places, instead extremely striking pictures are portrayed. These pictures are accompanied by a short clarifying text, yet both the pictures and the texts are teeming with cultural elements. The manner in which those cultural elements (events, food, concepts) are expressed will be commented on in this paper.

Power, control and the globalisation of consumer-oriented practices and attitudes in the internet

Abstract
It is an assumed fact that computer-mediated communication (CMC) in general, and the Internet in particular, has the capacity to change the way individuals interact with each other, while at the same time increases access to information in ways never seen before. On the other hand, "The rapid commercialization of cyberspace and increasing control of Internet infrastructure and content by major corporate players (…) is leading towards a consumer-oriented cyberspace that promises to either marginalize online public discourse or incorporate it within privatized and individualized forms of interaction: online commerce, entertainment, and business communication. It is becoming more and more difficult for non-commercial sites to compete for the attention of online participants" (Dahlberg 2001).
Setting out to examine how CMC technologies have taken up and motivated some of the transformations towards the new capitalism referred to by Fairclough (2003) as the "restructuring of relations between the economic, political and social domains", this paper will deal with aspects related to the hybridisation of discourses, genres and styles encouraged by a consumer-oriented internet that makes it possible for advertising practices and 'discourses' to colonise CMC at different levels.
The frameworks for the study are Fairclough's theory and method of Critical Discourse Analysis and Halliday's theory of grammatical description, Systemic Functional Grammar.

References
Dahlberg, Lincoln (2001): "Computer-Mediated Communication and The Public Sphere: A Critical Analysis". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 7 (1).
Fairclough, Norman (2003): "Critical Discourse Analysis in Researching Language in the New Capitalism: Overdetermination, Transdisciplinarity and Textual Analysis". In L. Young (ed). Systemic Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum (forthcoming). Available for downloading at http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/download.htm.

The Online Communication Model of UK Biotech Firms: Matching Communication Functions with Target Audiences' Needs

Abstract
The Internet is rapidly changing the infrastructure of information - creating a turbulent and sometimes confusing communication environment. The concept of the 'general public' does not seem to exist anymore. Studies of trends show that an increasing number of people obtain information from sources which are different from the traditional media outlets. Reputation, awareness, and perception are more and more difficult to create as audiences become more fragmented in the way they access and use information.

On the other hand, Internet technology is the most efficient medium for companies to provide newly fragmented audiences with the data they desire. All of these audience groups value a personalised relationship, eschewing standardised messages. Smart companies are beginning to use technology to communicate individually with these key audiences, rather than through the standardised systems of the past.

The Internet can be used in three major ways by communication professionals:
1. To post news and press releases on sites which publish on-line news (indirect, one-way, general).
2. To use the organisational web-site as an information resource for consumers and stakeholders (direct; one-way, two-way or interactive; general or customised).
3. To create and develop digital communities centred around their specialisation (direct; one-way, two-way or interactive; general or customised).

A research project (web site observation survey) conducted by Ranchhod, Gurau and Lace (2002) investigated the main information categories used on the web sites of biotech companies, as well as the main target audiences for these categories of messages. The main conclusions of that project were that in the digital environment it is more difficult to separate the PR and the marketing messages, since they use the same media channel (the organisational web site) and have to be adapted to the Internet standard content format. On the other hand, it is more difficult to make a clear-cut separation of the targeted audiences, since any person with an Internet connection can access the web site of the organisation and read the whole content.

The present research project builds on the conclusions of the previous study, investigating the communication function of various categories of online texts and its relationship with the needs of various target audiences.

The online messages raise a challenge since on the same web site there coexist messages for different audiences. With some exceptions (e.g. Information for Investors) the standard text categories are not strictly audience-oriented. The online messages are accessed by various audiences, each with its own information needs; therefore, the communication manager will have to combine into the standard text categories information with multiple meanings and values for various audiences, making sure that the overall online communication answers the needs of these audiences. This perspective is also determined by the specific profile of the Internet channels from which users 'pull' information depending on their specific needs and objectives.

The conclusions of this study show that the communication managers of UK biotech companies use a double grid for designing and implementing the corporate texts on the company's web site: on one hand they consider the main information categories that need to be covered in order to give a complete, accurate and positive image of the firm; and on the other hand, they attempt to match these messages with the needs and perspectives of different audiences, which are often overlapping or even conflicting. The tension between these two choices forces the communication managers to choose between two main web structures: company- or audience-oriented, although sometimes there are successful examples of a mixed approach.

Social Transformations of Identity: A Critical Discourse Analysis
of Baltic Tourism Websites in the Post-Soviet Context

Abstract
Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the three Baltic States have been striving to promote their independent national identities. In the context of critical discourse analysis, this promotion of identity constitutes a social action as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia redefine themselves for their citizens and the world beyond their borders. One way in which this social action is manifested is through state-created and supported World Wide Web sites that promote tourism. As the sites encourage visits by domestic and international travelers alike, they also construct and promote the independent national identities these countries have sought to advance since the end of Soviet rule. Through the use of the Web to market their independence, the Baltic States have adopted a policy of globalization that unites social action and discourse in a way that is, as Hardy (2003) describes, co-constitutive.

Identity construction most typically revolves around a nation or an individual characterizing a self by associating certain features with that self and by disassociating that self from the others from whom it wants to be viewed as distinct. (Cf. Mead 1934, Morley and Robins 1995), Harre and van Langehove 1999.) Baltic tourism websites offer many examples of these characterizations and disassociations:
(1) 'Lithuanians are predominantly Roman Catholic as opposed to their Russian Orthodox neighbors.'
(2) [The Latvian region of] 'Latgale's close historic, economic and cultural links with
Eastern Slavs have been the impetus for a different development pattern for the
region, which has adopted various Slavic cultural elements.'
(3) 'Having cast off communist rule more than ten years ago, Estonia has thrown her doors back open to the world and invited visitors to come sample her charms.'

Because of the role of language and, by extension, other semiotic modes in constructing and displaying a self, an analysis of national identity construction must focus multimodally on how national identity is mediated (Scollon 2001) through text - both linguistic and visual. This paper heeds Kachru's (1989) call for a paradigm shift in researching and understanding the sociolinguistic reality of English in identity formation. A multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001) incorporating a number of theoretical perspectives including social constructionism (Carbaugh 1996), critical discourse analysis (Wodak, deCillia, Reisigl, and Leibhart 1999), mediated discourse analysis (Scollon 2001), and visual semiotic analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001) of texts and image found in websites promoting Baltic tourism provides the theoretical and methodological bases of this research. This analysis reveals how changes in business and communication cultures - i.e. the introduction and incorporation of the World Wide Web- has played a seminal role in the social transformation of the Baltic states in providing both a locale and a means for their restructuring, reconstruction, and promotion of their independent identities.

Abstract
Globalisation has brought about the growing trend to communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds. This is already an urgent need in the business world, where multicultural encounters have become a common practice. People participating in meetings and negotiations, the most crucial steps in international operations, are compelled to overcome not only the problems derived from cultural differences but also the misunderstandings resulting from not using their mother tongue.

More than 50 percent of human communication is carried out through non-verbal and vocal channels. Body language is a universal tool used by human beings of all cultures and it provides the interlocutors with not only data but also, and what is more important, with essential information about personal attitudes and feelings.

The proposed paper analyses the benefits of having a command of Non-Verbal language to put business messages across in intercultural contexts. It focuses on the study of body language interpretation and concentrates on some specific palm and hand-to-face gestures. An example of palm movement covered in this paper is the handshaking greeting, which transfers a great amount of personal information and helps to build an enduring first impression of the initiator or receiver.

The theoretical content will be complemented with a practical exercise carried out in teams that will consist in the interpretation of body language of some famous Portuguese and Spanish politicians and business people through the study of current press news.

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to reveal the persuasive and directive language used by network companies - also called multilevel companies. These companies keep up intense activity in marketing to attract new distributors and to motivate the exiting ones. So that, they have an structure centred around multiple and complex social networks constituted by each one of the individuals that approve to take part in the business as costumer - distributor.
This paper focus on the critical analysis of discourse of texts from the official web site which the company of nutrition, Herbalife, has. Herbalife is one of the network companies that occupies the first places in world-wide sales within this kind of business.
Recently, advertisements in the new mass media, as Internet, Satellite tv, are arosen. In the case of Herbalife advertisements play a relevant role, so that, they use them with the purpose of promoting a perfect and positive image of a powerful organisation and persuading readers to take some action. Having in mind the identity crisis of modern people, they offer, apart of a good and competitive product, an identity within a community, providing them with values and lifestyle.

Abstract
One of society's most pervasive forms of discourse is the language that is used in advertisements. A lot of research has been done in the fields of marketing, media studies and linguistics on how the complex strands of the advertising message are integrated. This study will present an ongoing research on the advertising discourse of some selected banking and financial institutions in Malaysia. This research intends to explore the patterns of the advertising discourse of these organizations in which cultural features are incorporated in the advertising message not only to enable advertising to function as persuasive discourse but also to root the organization within the vectors of the community. In other words, these organizations are capitalizing on these advertisements in order to place themselves significantly not only within the financial circle but within the community as well, so as to redefine the organisations' identity within the community.

Abstract
Conflict-avoiding has been characterised as a preferred means of communication for Japanese as well as Thais. In business interaction, pressure arising from the job causes potential conflict between co-workers. Both Thais and Japanese potentially adopt the strategy of conflict-softening as a means of dealing with conflict in intercultural business communication.

The presentation explores:
" how Thais and Japanese deal with the conflicts in inter-cultural business meetings
" what conflict-softening strategies are used by Thais and Japanese in inter-cultural business meetings
" what significant cultural values underly the use of these conflict-softening strategies

The data obtained were 7.43 hours of tape-recorded meetings between Thai and Japanese business persons working in two large Japanese companies in Thailand. The meetings were conducted in English. The SPEAKING framework (Hymes 1976) was used to organize the analysis of the relevant social and cultural background of the participants in the meetings. Discourse analysis was utilised to explain how the business persons used the conflict-softening strategies in business discourse and to understand the discourse patterns in an on-going interaction. Politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and rule of rapport (Lakoff 1982) were also used to analyse the discourse in particular contexts.

The presentation will explore a number of conflict-softening strategies, such as the soft-no strategy, sa-nuk versus non-task talk, code-switching, compromising, which were used as a means to achieve transactional and interactional goals in the meetings. These strategies will be demonstrated with examples from the data. Some significant cultural values underlying the use of these conflict-softening strategies will also be investigated. The analysis of these strategies may uncover the existence of the Asian "folk term" (Yotsukura 2003) in communicative strategies.

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to encourage a discussion on broad developmental issues facing Sub-Saharan Africa, and to draw attention to the potential of the Development Communication (DC) process in accelerating the human and economic growth process. The paper will endeavour to define
Development Communication within the context of social and economic development issues and to express the author's views about the main components within this process. Because of its nature, DC is a fragmented field without any integrated approach while the word development touches more on the less developed nations of the world and pays a lot of attention to the issue of poverty, its causes, and possible means of its reduction and gradual alleviation. Development projects and proposals are not marketable until they give a positive impact. The paper will lead a dialogue into the marketing endeavour that can create impact. The goals of DC are to promote the understanding of the various interrelated factors that influence economic growth and lift social welfare. It may be concluded therefore, that DC aims at enhancing the understanding of broad economic issues that retard growth; boosting social intercourse; linking the needy to those with means; generating employment opportunities; enhancing the understanding of sustainable development issues; encouraging people to generate income and wealth through value adding activities, and promoting a society based on moral values and hard work.

Negotiating dominance in procedural discourse: instruction in office conversations

Abstract
Background
Many interactions at the workplace involve giving instructions or explaining procedures. In this type of interaction, one speaker plays a dominant role as the one who controls the discourse, and in some cases this corresponds to an institutionally dominant role in relation to the addressee. This talk draws on an analysis of nine workplace conversations involving procedural discourse recorded in a variety of offices in the UK and the US.

Key questions
Two key questions will be addressed:
1) What linguistic and interactive devices are used by discursively dominant speakers in procedural discourse?
2) How does discursive dominance interact with institutional dominance? Does the relationship between the speakers have any influence on the linguistic choices made by the discursively dominant speaker.

Research methods
A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used to address these questions. The frequency of a range of instruction-giving devices, including imperatives and modal verbs, was examined across the corpus; and each encounter was then analyzed in detail to explore the relationship between discursive and institutional dominance.

Indicative findings
The analysis revealed that instruction givers generally avoid the use of direct imperatives and tend to prefer more indirect devices, such as modal verbs and hedges. The results seem to indicate that discursive dominance plays a greater role in terms of linguistic choice than does institutional dominance. Furthermore, it appears that the presence or absence of a long-term working relationship between the speakers may be a more important factor than the precise institutional nature (i.e. in terms of hierarchy) of that relationship. The study also showed that despite the many similarities between the different procedural conversations examined, speakers used a range of different devices in "doing" procedural discourse, including the use of some quite creative involvement strategies. These findings will be illustrated with examples from the data, which show that procedural discourse involves a high level of interpersonal skill on the part of the dominant speaker.

Communicative purpose in written advertisements: the relationship between language and context

Abstract
The present paper concentrates on advertising genre, as one of discourse types which among other things is distinguished by its function. A created message is based on the conscious use of expressive resources, which means that there are certain mechanisms leading us to a certain measurable effect. Therefore, an analysis of an advertisement can determine not only the level of comprehension and interpretation of the receivers, as well as the intentions of the addresser, but also at a structural level the relationship between units.

The aim of the present study is a comparative analysis of vocabulary and structures selection between two defined types of advertisements coming from "The Economist", which indicates that there exists a difference regarding preference of the vocabulary used. By means of our analysis we can observe a certain structure followed by both of them in order to be easily interpreted. However, as for the use of grammatical features, first dissimilarities start to emerge, and this is due to their communicative goal that differs them one for another.

A method employed for critical discourse analysis of advertisements is based upon three stages: description of the text in terms of its function, the relationship between text and communication process in terms of grammatical features used, and explanation of the relationship between text and social context.
The analysis is based on thirty samples of advertisements from "The Economist".

Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro - PUC-Rio, Brazil
mdocarmo@terra.com.br
jrgomes@iag.puc-rio.br

The composition of a participant view for the management of organizational communication

Abstract
One of the current main discussions on the management of organizational communication is concerned with the need to abandon the notion of tutoring and adopt a participant view. With the notion of tutoring, communication is usually seen as an instrument whose main objective is to generate conformity and obedience to norms that are pre-established by organizational heads. In the participant view, communication is conceived as an arena of collective construction of meaning that includes the actors and their means of interaction, the particularities of everyday life and the macro structures of the context. The objective of the present article is to identify the aspects that have an impact on the construction of this participant view. The background is the case study of a company that is facing important challenges to its strategy. The research method combines semi-structured interviews with employees, the observation of meetings and the analysis of official documents of the organization. The results suggest that the management of organizational communication needs to be sensitive to different factors that are by nature referential, structural, instrumental, and relational. Based on the results, we propose an analytical plan that may help managers of organizations to devise a strategy for developing a kind of communication that focuses on participation.

Abstract
This paper presents findings on how candidates can convey, linguistically, a given impression to their interviewer in a job interview and identifies discrepancies between some impressions conveyed by the candidates and the interviewers' expectations, thus illustrating how linguistic features of impression management can vary cross-culturally.

Impression management was first analysed by Erving Goffman in The presentation of self in everyday life (1959). It describes 'the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them' (Preface). Job interviews provide a good opportunity for studying impression management because candidates usually set out to make a good impression on their interviewer to try to get the job. Good impression management can also be decisive if we consider that interviewers could be influenced by impression management tactics regardless of the candidate's qualifications and work experience (Gilmore and Ferris 1989). Research also suggests that self-presentation is constrained by one's culture (Akinnaso and Seabrook Ajirotutu 1982; Béal 1990; Bond 1991; Gumperz 1992; Bilbow and Yeung 1998).

This paper examines extracts from a pilot study of five role-play interviews in French with either French or Australian candidates, and French interviewers. To judge of the effect of impression management, I used 'metapragmatic assessment' (Kasper and Dahl 1991) of the candidates' discourse that is I conducted separate follow-up interviews where the candidates commented on the impression they had tried to convey and the interviewers commented on their impression of the candidate. I then analysed the language of the interviews using the theories of Conversation Analysis (Sacks et al 1974), politeness (Goffman 1972; Brown and Levinson 1987) and Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1994), in particular the systems of Mood and Appraisal (Eggins S & Slade 1997; Martin 2000; White 2002).

References
Akinnaso, F.N. & Seabrook Ajirotutu, C. (1982). Performance and ethnic style in job interviews. In J.J. Gumperz (Ed), Language and social identity (pp. 119-144). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Béal, C. (1990). 'It's all in the asking': A perspective on problems of cross-cultural communication between native speakers of French and native speakers of Australian English in the workplace. ARAL series S, No. 7,16-32.
Bilbow G., & Yeung, S. (1998). Learning the pragmatics of 'successful' impression management in cross-cultural interviews. Pragmatics, Vol.8 No.3, 405-417.
Bond, M.H. (1991). Cultural influences on modes of impression management: implications for the culturally diverse organization. In R. Giacalone, & P. Rosenfeld (Eds), Applied impression management: how image making affects managerial decisions (pp. 195-215). Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eggins, S., & Slade, D. (1997). Analysing casual conversation. London: Cassell.
Gilmore D. C., & Ferris, G. R. (1989). The effects of applicant impression management tactics on interviewer judgments. Journal of Management, Vol. 15 No. 4, 557-564.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin Books.
Goffman, E. (1972). Interaction ritual: essays on face to face behaviour (reissue of Goffman 1967). London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold.
Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215-247.
Martin, J.R. (2000). Beyond exchange: APPRAISAL systems in English. In S. Hunston, & G. Thompson (Eds), Evaluation in text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 142-175). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sacks H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696-735.
White, P.R.R. (2002). An introductory tour through appraisal theory. Available on the World Wide Web: http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal

Evaluation, point of view and PowderJect Pharmaceuticals plc:
A study of conflicting messages in a corpus of business texts

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate the different ways in which one British biotechnology company is represented in texts and the effects different representations may have on the company's corporate image and identity. The company in question is PowderJect Pharmaceuticals plc, a listed company in the UK involved in the development of vaccines, which was involved in a cash-for-contracts scandal in spring 2002. Of primary interest here is, on the one hand, the image and identity which the company seeks to create for itself and, on the other hand, the image and identity created for it by sections of the British media.

Issues of image and communication are particularly interesting in the biotechnology sector as a result of the controversial nature of biotech research. In addition, a positive corporate image and an effective communications strategy are vital if companies are to attract investment, which is essential for survival: because R&D activities are costly and often lengthy, biotech companies require high levels of investment, particularly in the early stages. However, the fact that outcomes are uncertain in this sector means that for investors the level of risk is high. Companies are therefore faced with a difficult situation which requires a carefully planned communications strategy.

The findings presented here are based on an analysis of 18 press releases issued by PowderJect between 2000 and 2002 and 46 media articles based on these press releases which appeared in the British media. A variety of media sources were used, including those with a relatively general audience (e.g. The Independent, BBC News Online) and those of a more specialised financial nature (e.g. The Financial Times) whose target audience includes existing and potential investors.

The analytical approach adopted is based primarily on work in text linguistics and pragmatics and builds on work by Jacobs (e.g. 1998, 1999) on press releases, and research on various types of business texts (e.g. Rogers and Swales 1990, Swales and Rogers 1995). The paper will look in particular at the ways in which linguistic resources of evaluation are used to foreground a particular point of view, in this case with regard to PowderJect and its activities. Relevant devices include naming strategies adopted to refer to the company and descriptions given of the company. It will be shown that the strategy of PowderJect in its press releases in 2000, 2001 and 2002 was constant: at all times the company was concerned with creating and projecting a favourable corporate image. However, it will also be shown that the image of PowderJect projected by the media was very varied. Prior to the cash-for-contracts scandal, reports were generally supportive of the company. Since the scandal, however, the picture has been more complex: on the one hand, the general press has tended to present PowderJect as an unscrupulous company with a tarnished reputation, with the result that the presentation of PowderJect since April 2002 has been predominantly negative, while representations of the company in the financial press have been more closely related to business developments and the company's financial position, and have consequently been more favourable. It will be suggested that these differences in stance may be linked to considerations of audience, particularly the interests and concerns of different audience categories.

Whatever the reason for the varied representations, it will be argued that such a myriad of conflicting messages and images cannot be in any company's interests and that for a company such as PowderJect, which is heavily dependent on the community of investors, the consequences may be especially undesirable.

Eduardo J. MARCOS CAMILO

University of Beira Interior, Portugal
ecamilo@alpha2.ubi.pt

Symbolic fights among commercial brands: the advertising conflicts

Abstract
This paper is a reflection about advertising struggles which I conceive like a sort of 'aggressive advertising discourse reaction' to some brand competitor's speech productions and communicational strategies (classified as institutional or commercial threatening).
I intend to reflect and demonstrate the existence of an 'agonistic discourse' among some advertising messages. I'm also interested in knowing how the specificities of the 'agonistic advertising discourse categories' may be affected by some advertising deontological rules (which are responsible by some advertising and political propaganda discursive distinctions).
This paper comprises two parts.
In the first one, I will identify the main advertising conflict origins and reasons, emphasising that they are always related with the existence of several brands whose promotional discourses reports to similar production and consumption values.
On the second part, I will classify and characterise some advertising discursive conflicts modalities. For example, the 'advertising polemics' - which are a kind of a positive dispute (based either on implicit or explicit comparisons or else on the demonstration of the brand supremacy by the 'traditional' advertising contests); and the 'advertising satires' - discursive ways by which the communicational brand conflicts are relatively negative (the brand mocks the concurrent brand attributes).

Dorien Van De MIEROOP

University of Antwerp, Belgium
dorien.vandemieroop@ua.ac.be

The unofficial goals of business speeches

Abstract
The analyses in this paper fit in the framework of studies of genre (Drew and Heritage 1992). In this research, the main aim is to identify typical characteristics of a specific genre, to establish the functional basis of these characteristics and on the other hand, to analyse variation within the genre. Finally, it addresses the fundamental question whether genres actually exist, or whether they are merely constructed over and over again, on the basis of more general demands such as face saving and social positioning.

The genre that I am studying is that of informative speeches that were held during a number of business seminars. The speakers of these presentations were all invited on the basis of the companies they worked for. During 2001 and 2002, I videotaped 40 speeches and after the preliminary analysis of 10 speeches, I divided my corpus in a number of subcategories on the basis of the 'unofficial'goals of the speaker.

These goals of the speakers are interesting elements of variation within the corpus. All the speakers come to the seminar with the intention of giving an informative presentation, which was also their official task. Some speakers however, pursue a combination of goals, for instance they want to give information and at the same time, convey a positive image of their companies. Hence, the goal of corporate image building is present as well. These goals are reflected in the way the speakers position themselves and their companies towards the audience. This social positioning can easily be linked to pronoun analysis, which forms the basis for dividing my corpus into a number of subcategories.

In this paper, I give an overview of the different subcategories and indicate how the speeches are distributed over these categories. This way of analysing the speeches shows which goals the speakers predominantly want to pursue. It is self-evident that speakers who come to such a seminar day with the task of giving an informative presentation, keep this assignment in mind. Therefore, a lot of speakers take this as their main goal and thus give a quite neutral presentation. However, a great deal of other speeches contain elements of corporate image building as well. There are also a limited number of presentations in which the speakers promote themselves too. As a conclusion, I give an overview of some commonly used techniques to obtain these goals and I show how they can sometimes interact with one another.

References
Drew, P. en Heritage, J. (1992). Talk at work - Interaction in institutional settings (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 8). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Abstract
This presentation aims to show the results of an analysis that explores the interpersonal features in legal discourses, focusing modality; it is interested in the way Brazilian lawyers use the Portuguese language to convince judges to reformulate their decisions. The theoretical backgrounds is the Systemic-Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994), and it uses Corpus Linguistic as a methodological tool (Wordsmith Tools (OUP) (Berber Sardinha, 2000). Results suggest that most of the uses of modality express meanings of obligation and necessity, in both negative and positive propositions, realized by modal operators such as não pode, deve, and tem que in Brazilian Portuguese (corresponding to can't, must and should, in English).

Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto, Portugal
mjose_a@iscap.ipp.pt

Abstract
In this presentation I will deal with the research in the field of social values in business discourse. This paper is part of my PhD thesis, in the domain of discourse analysis, which focuses on the theory of argumentation defined by O. Ducrot and J.-C. Anscombre. Through this model and essentially by the concept of "topos" it is possible to establish the link between ideology and discourse.
We can then define the semantic direction of the discourse through the articulation of the argumentative linguistic structures and we can also gain access to social values and their evolution, which means the ideological direction, by the confrontation between different points of view or "énonciateurs".
The corpus has been selected among texts extracted from company publications during four years (1998/2001). In this paper I will analyse a text and I will try to prove that the sequence and articulation of "topoi" and "énonciateurs" can define the ideological and semantic dimensions in business discourse.

La comunicación escrita como habilidad profesional básica en las Áreas Tecnológicas. El caso de los informáticos de los Servicios Centrales de la Caixa

Abstract
En este trabajo se describe un caso de desarrollo profesional, basado en el factor crítico de la competencia de la comunicación escrita. Se trata de los técnicos del Área de Sistemas de Información de "la Caixa", primera institución financiera de Cataluña, primera Caja de Ahorros española, y tercera entidad bancaria de España. "La Caixa" cuenta con el que es, probablemente, el equipo de desarrollo informático más innovador y potente del sector bancario español.

El equipo profesional de las Áreas Técnicas, responsable del desarrollo del software empleado en la gestión de la organización, está formado por algo más de 400 profesionales. En un principio, estaba principalmente orientado a la construcción de productos informáticos; es decir, los técnicos llevaban a cabo una relación unilateral individuo-máquina basada en un lenguaje no natural, el de programación. Sin embargo, a lo largo de los últimos cinco años, la dirección técnica ha tomado la decisión estratégica de externalizar la mayor parte del desarrollo material de los proyectos informáticos. A partir de ese momento, la labor de los informáticos de "la Caixa" pasa a consistir en diseñar los proyectos, explicitar convenientemente los requisitos relevantes para su ejecución a fin de que terceros puedan realizarlos, y dirigir el grupo y gestionar los proyectos de modo eficiente hasta su finalización. Como resultado, el mecanismo profesional fundamental en el quehacer cotidiano deviene la comunicación entre humanos (individuo-individuo), bilateral (con retroalimentación y negociación del sentido), basada en lenguajes naturales (catalán y castellano, lenguas oficiales de la comunidad autónoma de Cataluña y lenguas oficiales también de "la Caixa"), realizada básicamente a través del canal escrito y, principalmente, mediante el ordenador.

En este punto, aparecen algunas dificultades, debidas a un conocimiento superficial de las técnicas de escritura y de los mecanismos del código escrito. Es entonces cuando resulta evidente para los propios técnicos que para reconvertirse de manera eficaz en gestores, necesitan formación en comunicación escrita. Ante la demanda del Área de Innovación Tecnológica, hemos diseñado un curso de comunicación escrita que contiene las siguientes fases, brevemente sintetizadas aquí:

a. Preliminar: Identificar los "cortocircuitos" comunicativos más frecuentes producidos en el área técnica. Por un lado, mediante encuestas elicitadoras solicitadas a los profesionales; por otro, mediante una auditoría textual en la que se revisó un ingente número de documentos, pertenecientes a distintos géneros (mensajes electrónicos, manuales de instrucciones, presentación de proyectos, etc.)
b. Formación:
b.1. Dotar a los técnicos de una plataforma de reflexión sobre las principales propiedades de la comunicación escrita, así como de las secuencias textuales más utilizadas en su quehacer profesional (descripción, exposición, argumentación y, especialmente, instrucción). b.2. Analizar y practicar mediante diferentes enfoques metodológicos los mecanismos lingüísticos y discursivos más relevantes para la elaboración de sus documentos.
c. Valoración final. Muestra una muy alta satisfacción de los profesionales ante la utilidad de los contenidos en comunicación para el desarrollo de su profesión.

Communicative Genres and Forms - A Two-Level Approach for the Study of Organizational Talk

Abstract
The present talk makes use of the concept of 'genre' to show that the structures of organizational talk should be analyzed at least on two levels: a micro-level, where certain communicative 'forms' are typically routinized up to a very high degree, like, for example, the daily exchange of planning data in a production plant, and a meso-level, where these forms or activity types are attached or assembled to larger communicative encounters in work processes, called communicative 'genres'.
Since Mikhail Bachtin spoke of 'genres' as an absolutely basic category for the analysis of language, the term has been re-defined in very different ways. The most prominent example, perhaps, is the manner, Hymes made use of the term when he outlined the methodology of the ethnography of communication. However, as it could be shown by a critical reading of his work, this use is quite far from being consistent (Briggs/Bauman, 1992:138). The impreciseness in the definition of the term for the most part originates from - what I want to call it - a "formal paradoxon:" We already know quite well, that social communities dispose of a certain number of communicative genres as a budget for the accomplishment of social tasks. For the members of the community, genres belong to the most important orienting frameworks. On the other hand, these frameworks are not fixed in the sense of a functional system. Communicative genres are constituted in dynamic ways, by the use of adequate or preferred linguistic forms. Therefore, the outcome of an interaction or its social meaning may be totally different to what the interaction was supposed to stand for (cf. Schwartzman, 1981). Genres are the resource and the outcome of interaction.
I will argue, that the analysis of organizational talk has to deliberate the structures of organizational text, the scripts of organizational meetings, and so on, by pointing out different perspectives on language in use. The analysis of authentic data has shown, for example, that the dynamics of social meaning on a meso-level of interaction varies in manifold ways. Nevertheless, without the reconstruction of this meaning, we will not be able to understand the ideological underpinnings of organizational talk, the social relevance of certain interaction units, and, finally, the construction of organizational 'culture' (cf. Müller/Kieser, 2003). This approach combines methods of linguistic anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics. It is based on a six-year study on the ethnography of organizational communication.

Briggs, Charles L./Bauman, Richard (1992): Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. In: Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2-2, S. 131-172.
Müller, Andreas P./Kieser, Alfred (eds.) (2003): Communication in Organizations. Structures and Practices. Frankfurt: Lang.
Schwartzman, Helen B. (1981): Hidden Agendas and Formal Organizations or How to Dance at a Meeting. In: Social Analysis 9, S. 77-88.

Abstract
This paper is part of a Doctorate research that I am developing at the University of Brasília (Brazil). The focus of this research is on media discourse and the democratization process in Brazilian society. Drawing upon Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), my purpose is to problematize how media discourse constructs the kind of democracy which is practised in Brazil. In this presentation, I will consider how minorities - especially street children, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous people are represented in the press. For this purpose, I study aspects such as: vocabulary, modality, voice representation, nominalization, irony and negative sentences. I also investigate the production context of the press discourse in Brazil, in relation to the wider social reality. I point out that these minorities play a secondary role in the press discourse to the extent that their participation in this social process is made invisible and I raise problems related to their representation. The question of their agency and the possibility of change in their social condition are also minimized. I also argue that the struggle for a wider democracy in Brazil is absent as issues involving minorities are seen as specific problems, not as part of the social exclusion that characterizes Brazilian society.

Mobbing, holding, leasing: the lexical jungle in English and its role in the Spanish business world.

Abstract
The fact that English is the lingua franca for business and economy is not hidden from anyone. The fact that, despite the reluctance of some, many of the lexical terms handled by Spanish economists, businessmen, entrepreneurs and users in their day-to-day routine work are in English is also a reality. But this assertion is not as simple as it sounds, and the truth is that borrowings, as in many other languages, do not take the straight path of one-to-one equivalence, as one would have it. The Spanish language of economy and enterprise adapts those borrowings to its needs, usage and communicative purposes, and a naive or uninformed translation could end up in disastrous consequences for the business in hand. To try to give a pattern for the adaptation of borrowings and to clarify some obscure lexical areas for the benefit of specialists in both Economics and Linguistics will be the aim of this paper. Several lexical areas, such as export-import, Stock Exchange or legal terms, pertaining to business and commerce, will be identified and the origin of a potential communicative hindrance will be dealt with. Through these procedures we will try to demonstrate the way in which languages in general, and Spanish and English in particular, preserve the individuality of a unique socio-economic and cultural reality.

The Marketisation of Discourse about Education in UK General Election Manifestos

Abstract
After 1945, a broad 'post-war consensus' developed in the West. There was general agreement that the state had an important role to play in such areas as macroeconomic management, environmental protection, and social provision for health, education and welfare. But since the late 1970s, as part of the neo-liberal project to extend the market into every aspect of social life, there has been a backlash against 'inefficient', 'bureaucratic', 'unwieldy' and 'inflexible' state provision. In this paper I examine the discursive dimension of one facet of the 'new capitalism': the marketisation of education in the UK. Using frameworks derived from critical discourse analysis, I analyse texts from three election manifestos: the Labour and Conservative manifestos from the 1987 election (a turning point in UK education policy), and the Labour 1997 manifesto. I show how aspects of textual organisation, such as patterns of transitivity, the representation of social actors, semantic prosody, and coherence, have a central role to play in the construction of 'comprehensive' and 'market' conceptualisations of the domain.

Political advertising discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis approach to election campaign advertisements

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the main characteristics of political advertisements in the context of election campaigns. There is no doubt that politicians -or rather the agencies in charge of campaings- use techniques typically associated to advertising discourse.

If the aim of an advertisement is to persuade the audience to buy a product, in election campaigns the aim is to persuade the audience to vote a certain party. Therefore, it is necessary to outline the main characteristics of advertising and political discourse and to distinguish between propaganda and political marketing to try to establish the characteristics of political advertising.

The range of political advertising is wide, from party political broadcast to advertisements published in newspapers or posters. In this paper, we focus our attention on posters, analysing a selection released by the main British parties (Labour and Conservative) during the election campaings of 1997 and 2001. The analysis is based both on linguistic means, such as verbal connectors or verbal cohesive devices, and semiotic aspects, through layout, the spatial arrangements of blocks of text, of pictures and other graphic elements of the page (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1998:187). The different parties use these devices differently, conveying significant ideological aspects. The analysis shows the importance -or lack of importance- of good political campaigns in the final result of elections.

What Alter says and Eo hears: a discourse perspective on control, trust and information

Abstract
People today recognize the importance of trust in organizations, in terms of leadership, change, contractual devices, etc. Management control has been for a long time mainly considered as a set of tools, techniques and information systems to optimize, but the framework opened to more managerial considerations and their impact on formal control systems. We start by redefining organizational control as a social exchange relationship, in order to integrate time and space, essential to a dynamic perspective on trust and control. The problem can then be divided into two main questionings: What are the characteristics (the main dimensions) of this control relationship? What role does trust play?

In this study, we adopted an interpretive point of view, through discourse analysis, which was focused on understanding, as suggested by Burrell & Morgan (1979), the fundamental nature of the social world at the level of subjective experience. If one really wants to capture the dynamics of organizational life and the of individuals' behaviors, efforts must be directed on the actors' expressed and hidden representations of the social world in which his action is embedded, as Hardy, Palmer & Philips (2000) recognized the possibility for individuals to engage in discursive activity and to access different discourses to generate new meanings that help -or hinder- the enactment of particular strategies. By focusing on a very particular aspect of social networks and human dynamics, discourse analysis enlighten the importance of sensemaking (Weick, 1979, 1995) in organizational cognitive processes.

We studied the behaviors of different strategic groups of actors in a French Public Hospital regarded as an innovative new hospital, on medical, technological and managerial fields. The latest attempts to reduce expenses in the healthcare sector in France lead to the implementation of new control devices to regulate financial flows and increase the medical profession's and the institutions' action scope and management responsibility. Georges Pompidou European Hospital (GPEH) is the materialization of one of the largest reorganizations ever conducted in the public healthcare system in France, gathering people from three different hospitals: Boucicaut, Broussais, Laennec. The strategic goals were to build a 'patient-centered organization' to favor a patient global quality care process. This changing form of organization and structuring reshaped the relationships between controllers and clinicians, thus modifying power equilibrium.

To understand the nature and dynamics of control relationships, and the influence of trust, we analyzed discourses, utilizing thematic content analysis of data, which resulted from detailed qualitative interviewing of several strategic groups of actors. Using graphical forms (Huberman & Miles, 1991), and drawing near Langley's 'visual mapping strategy' (1999), the discourse analysis process allowed, at first, the identification of five dimensions of control relationships: control, information, communication, interpersonal relations and trust. The analysis of those key aspects revealed different control strategies followed by different groups of actors and lead to the elaboration of control typologies. Second, the analysis reveals that what is exchanged in control relationships is information. Moreover, we show that trust relationships constitute the dynamics of that information exchange, since it influences both, the way informations are exchanged in organizational control settings, and the way informations are interpreted. Two status of information - 'data' or 'message' - are distinguished depending on the existence, or not, of trust relationships between individuals. The results insist on the importance of trust on the interpretation of information, as it reduces 'noise' and increases the efficiency of the communication process in general, and of organizational control in particular.

University of Santiago, Spain
University of A Coruña, Spain
University of A Coruña, Spain
gabipv@usc.es
luziads@hotmail.com
lxmlopez@dc.es

Discourse Analysis applied to communicative problems in client/professional interaction: the example of a pioneering case study in Galicia

Abstract
Many of the problems that arise in relations between clients and professionals are directly linked to discursive misunderstandings resulting either from the existence of varying interpretation frameworks or from the absence of the communicative strategies necessary to ensure successful interaction within an institutional context. The various qualitative methodologies applied to discourse analysis - conversation analysis (Boden and Zimmerman, 1992; Drew and Heritage, 1992), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982; Auer, 1998) or critical discourse analysis (Martín Rojo and Whittaker, 1998; Iedema and Wodak, 1999) - allow for the analysis of the interactive sources of these problems. In addition, they enable the results obtained to be applied to the creation of a series of measures aimed at improving communication management (Gunnarson, 1997; Pan, Wong Scollon and Scollon, 2002).
The purpose of this paper is to describe our analysis and communicative audit of client-professional communication, part of the COMTECNO project. We will be presenting the research and actions we have carried out in a company which currently shares joint responsibility with a local authority for the management, invoicing and other aspects related to water, sewage and waste collection services. This study is based on the recording and ethnographical observation of eighty exchanges that took place in the aforementioned company. The methodology used is that of a qualitative analysis within the framework of the interdisciplinary context of discourse studies. For the purpose of this analysis, communicative interaction is taken to be a co-construction carried out by the participants in which a range of discourse resources are used in order to negotiate interactive meanings. In this sense, no discourse strategy or communicative style can be considered to be better or worse than any other; instead, their effectiveness will depend on whether they are appropriate in terms of both the context and the desired communicative goals.
The analysis of the data obtained shows that the professionals possess an extremely limited range of strategies. As a result, they are unable to adapt their discourse to the various types of clients, frames or problems. Our work therefore consisted of applying the results of this analysis to the creation of a series of activities designed to enable the professionals to successfully undertake the following: (a) to extend their range of discourse strategies; (b) to employ and mobilise the most appropriate and effective strategies, in accordance with the contextual factors existing; (c) to reflect on their communicative competence and to assess the success of their communicative performance; and (d) to develop new skills and strategies based on their own experience.
Specifically, this paper will show the analysis of the various types of communicative strategies employed by professionals in discursive conflicts. Having assess the effectiveness and success of the strategies employed, it then goes on to present the auditing activities developed in conjunction with the group of professionals that are the object of this research (discussion groups designed to increase their capacity for the self-assessment of their own communicative competence; data analysis sessions; practical workshops for the development of discursive skills and strategies; the research-based creation of didactic material, etc.). Finally, we will highlight the need to further develop the area of applied discourse (Gunnarson, 1997) in order to solve communicative problems.

Learning to know & knowing to learn: discursive practices as knowledge enablers

Abstract
The growing importance of knowledge in today's information society has forced organisations to pay more attention to the management of organisational knowledge. This is especially true in project organisations where the ability to lead projects to successful completion requires a complex interweaving of domain knowledge, judgement and communicative skills. Crucial questions are: 1. how to create a culture where experts willingly share their experiences and expertise, 2. what are the best repositories and enablers for such sharing, and 3. what role does language play in the management of knowledge and information, e.g. discourses, genres and texts.
To date, project organisations avail themselves of a variety of formal structures to ensure that project-specific knowledge is shared within the organisation. For example, the institutionalisation of standards, regulations, governing principles and practices are seen to function as repositories of explicit knowledge and to allow for the perpetuation of generic organisational activity. This institutionalisation process is largely achieved through the use of sophisticated IT systems in the form of standardised management tools and procedures for the transfer of information and knowledge. However, while formal structures may serve as viable repositories for the accumulation and transfer of explicit (codified) knowledge, they are incapable of capturing the enacted, context-specific practices of a workplace. In other words formal structures cannot capture the dynamic organisational knowledge created through the ongoing discursive interplay between people involved in situated action.
Drawing on Baktin and theories of organisational learning, activity theory and socio-cultural genre theory, this paper analyses organisational activities and discourses that support ongoing learning and enable the sharing of knowledge. The findings are based on a case study of a high-tech project-based consultancy firm's endeavour to solve the problems mentioned above. Their quest resulted in a fundamental change of view concerning the nature of knowledge. From explicit and information-based, professional knowledge is redefined as dialogic and inter-subjective. Moreover, professional knowledge is acknowledged as encompassing both technical components and components dealing with communication, motivation and social interaction. To manage this ensemble requires a common discourse, which needs to be collectively developed and maintained. For this purpose a professional praxis - the dialogue seminar - was developed. In these seminars, reading, reflective writing, listening and discussion are used as tools to weave together the technical and the social in order to create a common professional knowledge base and language.
This paper argues that individual as well as group learning is highly dependent on the context in which that learning takes place as well as familiarity with the language games used to express that knowledge. Issues which an organisation must consider when developing a learning environment are how to: establish a language through which knowledge can be expressed, legitimise time and space for dialogue and reflection, use situated examples and analogies to build a shared conceptual base, validate chaotic thinking, establish formal and informal communicative dialogical practices. This paper advocates the dialogue seminar as an effective means of learning to know and knowing to learn both in the workplace and in the business-communication classroom.

Abstract
This paper aims at discussing the problems presented by Brazilian flight attendants when speaking English. I analysed the features of their discourse as seen by themselves, their employers and the passengers. This research was developed aiming at elaborating an English course designed especifically for these professionals, since this represents a lack in the English teaching market. This work is based on Halliday`s (1994) and Eggins’ (1994) studies about Systemic-Functional Grammar. The methodology used to carry out this research was questionnaires, interviews and analysis of the speeches made by the flight attendants in the airplanes. The results identify features of their discourse in English at work including important cultural linguistic needs in English .

Gesture and the (Workplace) Imagination: What gesture reveals about management’s attitudes in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract
While much of the official literature on workplace discourse in pre-1994 South Africa focused on “Black workers’ attitudes” (cf. Laburn 1992; Pheta 1992), researchers also attempted to understand the complexity of White’s attitudes to Blacks, the effect of historical prejudice on racialist attitudes (Macrone 1937), and the role of the Afrikaner myth as “a justification of social discrimination and … a defense mechanism against feelings of social insecurity” Crijns 1959, p. 47). More recently, the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission forced Afrikaans writers to wrestle with their own role in the oppression of Blacks and their responsibility for creating economic and political justice in the new South Africa (Krog 2000; Malan 1990; Godwin 1996). The problem is particularly difficult in the workplace, where differences in race were invisibly inscribed in policies of job reservation and a heavy reliance on transitory labor. Today, industry needs trained workers, but the new government is dependent on industry to educate the so-called “lost generation” of Black workers who were denied education under the oppressive Bantu Education Laws. The problem of illiteracy directly affects safety and training in coal mines (Leon 1994), which have some of the highest accident rates in the world.

The present project draws upon data collected in 1997 at the Kloppersbos Training Center near Pretoria, South Africa, investigating the role of gesture in workplace training in a particularly difficult cross-cultural context. The present project analyzes the gestures of trainers in pre-training interviews in order to disambiguate their beliefs about Black workers and their attitudes to training. These responses were calibrated against U.S., British, and South African coal miners at various stages of expertise. Analysis of the semantic content of gesture and its relation to speech revealed that trainers use three primary semantic forms: a control gesture, a regulated gesture, a scale/size gesture, and a visualize-see gesture. In speech, trainers stated that they wanted feedback from the audience and an interactive style. They hoped that they could help Black workers understand new safety measures from a scientific perspective. Trainers’ gestures, by contrast, depict a landscape that demarcates a line between educated (white) and uneducated (Black) workers. Control and regulation gestures are not applied to safety systems, as one might expect, but to issues of worker-management disagreement over issues of safety. Trainers’ notions of a highly regulated workplace thus undercut the presumed purpose of the training session: to help miners move into positions of decision-making and authority where they can take responsibility for the health and safety of colleagues. Finally, trainers’ scale gestures and visualize-see gestures support their assumption that workers will immediately see the relation between the simple plexiglass model and their own experiences underground—a difference grounded in disciplinary and institutional hierarchies of knowledge and power. These findings have important implications in the training sessions, where workers were confused about the process of ventilation, the role of methane in a coal dust explosion.

More theoretically, this paper extends McNeill’s (1992) taxonomy of viewpoint in order to distinguish analytic gestures that are highly situated (e.g. describing the layers of rock inside the mine) from those gestures which depict general processes and dynamic events within a large system (e.g. the process of ventilation)—a distinction that may not be apparent in laboratory conditions but is critical to a risk decision-making perspective.

Abstract
Communication in organizations can be understood as spaces of changes and mediations. Without a doubt, they are "discourses" places. The discourse notion is rich of possibilities and represents, in each one of them, a strategy to learn or to demonstrate the sense of the corpus: analyzed text, or speaks transformed in text.
In case of the organizational communication and Quality Programs, as well as in communication in general, the relevance of sharing faiths and culture is imperative in the construction of speeches. This interaction, influences the deconstructions and resignifications that happen in the communicational process, interfering in the efficiency of the communication. The sociological and ideological discourse's character is pressed and expressed by formal elements that represent what is said and "communicated" through the language and for the subject's behavior involved in the communicational process.
This paper present the method of analysis of discourse from Patrick Charaudeau, used as a communication contract. It is a model that integrates the different dimensions (cognitive, social and psychosocial and semiotics) that constitute the enunciation process in multiple social practices of the language presents in the communicational processes of organizations. The symbolic subjects and your relationships with the problem of the communication in quality programs in researched organizations is our interest.

Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão, Leiria / ULICES, Portugal
maria_silvestre@clix.pt

Abstract
In spite of having legislation, affirmative action programs and diversifying efforts to implement the principle of equal treatment for men and women as regards access to employment, vocational training and promotion, and working conditions, women are still underrepresented in managerial positions. However, when few percentages reach top positions, these women are still devalued through stereotypic views of genders.
Mass media play an important role in the production, maintenance and reproduction of these views, which, in my view, do not keep apace with the European legislation of narrowing sexual asymmetries in the professions. This is the case of the magazine under analysis: The Economist.
This study is inscribed within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989, 1992,1995). The overall aim is to unpack media discursive practices in which discrimination is materialised through stereotyping semantic devaluation of a concept that people might think of as neutral: rationality. I also want to add that these social practices constitute an invisible constraint to promotion within the framework of equal opportunities policy, hence perpetuating patterns of relative disadvantage and marginalisation.
My specific objective in this paper is to analyse how media text producers use language to portray male and female executives and construct their representations. My focus will be on rationality. I will try to show how reason, one of the most high-valued trait representative of ruling people, is distributed by male and female executives and how.
As an analytical tool, I will analyse mental processes that encode meanings of cognition, affection and perception (Halliday 1994) in order to find out how journalists portray the internal world of the mind of the sensers (male and female).
My corpus, which totals 26 articles, is composed exclusively of FACE VALUE, a regular weekly feature article devoted to different prominent people in the business world who occupy high positions in well-known companies.

Kim SLEURS

Ethnographic writing research in a business context: preformulation in press releases

Abstract
This paper reports on the results of ethnographic research into how press releases are written. Starting from previous discourse-analytic work on the topic, I aim to show that a diachronic, ‘natural histories of discourse’1 view of news management routines confirms the impact of so-called preformulation on the discursive practices of public relations.

Press releases have been shown to play an important role in the construction of the news (cf. Bell 1991) and the promotion of company image. They are short texts which are issued to journalists by companies, organisations or private persons who hope their press releases will be reproduced in the media. Previous research has shown that press releases are heavily ‘preformulated’ i.e. they mimic typical features of newspaper articles to allow for easier copying (cf. Jacobs 1999).

My research aims to integrate a linguistic-pragmatic methodology with insights from cognitive-psychological writing research. Specifically, I combine concurrent and retrospective protocols with ethnographic methods, such as interviews and participant observation.

Recently, researchers have stressed the need for ethnographic research into the complex relationships between writing and the social context in which that writing develops (Odell & Goswami 1985). Press releases are a good example of such complex writing: they are built up from multiple sources, written by multiple writers and aimed at multiple readers. Recent research even shows that press releases are used as a means of internal communication.

In addition, cognitive-psychological writing research has until recently been restricted to experimental settings and mainly academic writing. Unfortunately, this kind of restriction denies the importance of context in order to account for the full complexity of the writing process.

Drawing from fieldwork and participant observation at two Belgian banks, this paper sets out to explore what role preformulation actually plays in writing up press releases. Both banks have their own in-house PR-department and through fieldwork I was able to observe the press officers in their natural setting.

In my analyses, elements of preformulation, such as third-person self-reference, (pseudo)quotations and the strategic use of titles are taken into account. These analyses show the impact of preformulation, as a means to promote company image, on the construction of press releases in a business context.

References
Bell, A. (1991). The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell
Jacobs, G. (1999). Preformulating the News: An Analysis of the Metapragmatics of Press Releases. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Odell, L. & D. Goswami (eds) (1985). Writing in Nonacademic Settings. New York: The Guilford Press.

Footnote 1: from Silverstein, M. & G. Urban (eds) (1996). Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: Chicago University Press

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to describe how the interaction between a company and their customers develops through throughout advertising brochures in the business-to-business market (B2B), which deals with transactions where a company sells products or provides services to another company rather than to an individual customer. The potential size of this market in a globalized world can easily justify this research and make its findings valuable both for Brazilian companies intending to sell their products and services to English-speaking companies and for global companies wanting to adapt their English materials to local markets.

Based on the conceptual framework of Halliday’s (1989, 1994) Systemic-Functional Linguistics and on the Register and Genre Theory described by Martin (1984, 1997), Martin and Eggins (1997) and Ventola (1995), this research has analyzed twelve brochures from a US telecommunications company focusing both on written language and layout. It was found that this interaction unfolds in four interaction stages, which may be instantiated by different resources and in a non-linear sequence, where all stages may be simultaneously found in a single page and throughout a brochure. Finally, these results were interpreted at the light of my previous experience in the technological and marketing sectors to show how context and ideology may affect this interaction.

Danielle TOLEDO PEREIRA

Análisis del discurso de los guías de turismo y de museos en la ciudad de São Paulo y su necesidad de saber lengua española

Abstract
La preocupación por la enseñanza de SSP (Spanish for Specifc Purposes) es bastante reciente en Brasil. Con el comienzo del Mercosur y la globalización, la lengua española pasó a formar parte del cotidiano del brasileño, sobre todo en relación al trabajo. Se empezó a hacer negociaciones en ese idioma y muchas empresas españolas han invertido en Brasil. Los profesionales se han encontrado con un nuevo idioma que pensaban saber. Pero con el contacto más estrecho, muchos han tomado conciencia de que lo que “sabían” no era más que una mezcla del portugués y del español, el pidgin denominado portuñol. Pensando en la necesidad de los profesionales del área de turismo de aprender español, propongo hacer un trabajo cuyo título es “Semejanzas y diferencias en el discurso de los guías de turismo y de museos en Brasil y en España”. Ese trabajo no visa sólo a analizar las características de su discurso en los dos países, sino también analizar la necesidad que esos profesionales brasileños tienen de aprender la lengua española y sugerir un curso instrumental con enfoque en la habilidad oral que satisfaga esa necesidad. El objetivo de este paper es presentar la parte de ese trabajo que se ha desarrollado con los profesionales brasileños. Primero, presentaré las características más importantes del discurso de los guías de turismo y de museos de São Paulo. Se hará el análisis con el uso del WordSmith Tools y del Abordaje Sistémico-Funcional (Halliday - 1994; Martin & Eggins - 1997). Enseguida, presentaré el análisis de la necesidad de saber español.

Abstract
Recent years have seen an increased interest in the notion of genre within the area of applied (educational) linguistics. Present-day LSP-related genre analytic studies usually concentrate on the distinctive features of academic and professional genres used in different disciplines. However, situations where, for example, LSP practitioners have to deal with mixed classes may justify a common core approach to the teaching of genres. The same applies to comprehensive LSP examinations where the aim is to reliably test the linguistic abilities and subject-specific conceptual background knowledge of candidates with different areas of specialisation.

.The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to establish the macro-level prototype of a prominent shared genre, short technical reports which professionals working in the fields of agriculture, business and economics, law, medicine and technology produce, and further, to consider variations in layout, formality level, audience and types (sub-genres). In addition, overlapping content areas within the five specialist areas were identified, which, together with the common core macro-level prototype, are assumed to allow for the teaching and testing of pre-work and in-work professionals' report-writing skills in a realistic framework.

The paper will summarise the results of the study: the prototypical short report will be described in terms of layout, communicative purpose and generic structure and business-related generic report writing tasks (items) will be presented which have been developed on the basis of the shared content areas identified and which allow for conversion into discipline-specific tasks. The discussion will highlight generic conflicts and cross-cultural differences in genre use as well as the factors which constrain genre construction. The paper will conclude that common-core genres and content areas are more often than not business-related which, together with other factors such as mixed groups, multidisciplinary education or teachers’ lack of discipline-specific knowledge, may justify the teaching of business communication to both pre-work and in-work professionals of other areas of specialisation, too.

Abstract
The main objective of this presentation is to discuss how business language can be taught based both on the students’ genre knowledge and other theoretical functional principles such as Generic Structure Potential (Halliday & Hasa, 1989) and Register & Genre Theory (Eggins & Martin, 1997).
The presentation will be based on a course for professionals from a major Brazilian bank located in the city of São Paulo and their need to participate in meetings with businesspeople from all over the world.
Taking into account professionals’ communicative needs, departmental necessities and the genre they were supposed to perform, the functional concepts of Generic Structure Potential (Halliday & Hasan, 1989), Register and Genre Theory (Eggins & Martin, 1997) and genre knowledge (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995) were used as the starting point to plan the course.
We conclude by pointing out suggestions on designing a genre-based course, as well as contributing to theoretical discussions on genre/register theory.

Entrepreneurial Young Engineers: collaborative discourse and power in an entrepreneurial skills program for undergraduates

Abstract
Drawing on the work of Hardy and other researchers, this paper examines from a discursive perspective, power relationships evident in engineering students’ evaluation of collaborative communication in an entrepreneurial skills program.

The text of students’ evaluation of communication within their teams is analysed in terms of the dynamics of collaboration, and specifically, power relationships. Issues of cultural mix and communication within the power dynamics are illuminated.

Results of the analysis will inform the facilitation of communicative processes with respect to power, for these and other students.