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The referendum debate in Ireland on whether voting in favour of the Lisbon Treaty has filled the pages of newspapers and the online media. Several anti-EU campaigns have emerged and politicians have shown their own attitudes towards the ratification process. Being our first contact with reality newspapers enable potential readers to better understand their lives and socio-political events (Van Dijk, 1991; Richardson, 2007). It has been argued that newspapers construe public identities for individuals and social groups through specific textual strategies and contribute to our understanding of belonging to a community (Fairclough, 1995a). Some scholars have proved that, in reporting on European matters, British newspapers are mainly Eurosceptic and tend to depict EU leaders in a negative light (Musolff, 2004; Nasti, 2012). It has also been demonstrated that when reporting on European integration newspapers tend to define what it means to be a European citizen by construing their own images of Europe. By doing so, newspapers have the power to support or subvert the feeling of European belonging by showing desired or unwanted scenarios. In his analysis of newspaper discourse, Fowler (1991) points out how transitivity is of great interest in newspaper analysis as it is a potential tool to investigate the same event in different ways, thus providing different views on the social and political events reported.

Against this framework, the present chapter aims to analyse, by combining a quantitative and a qualitative approach, how newspapers construct professional, social and private identity of the European politicians involved in the Lisbon Treaty debate following the features introduced by Fairclough (1995b) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) transitivity model. This study also investigates what qualities and features are attributed to EU leaders and to what extent the stereotyped roles of previous studies are also revealed through the analysis of material, mental and verbal processes.

In times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 global pandemic, journalists who write about biomedical information must have the strategic aim to be clearly and easily understood by everyone. In this study, we assume that journalistic discourse could benefit from language redundancy to improve clarity and simplicity aimed at science popularization. The concept of language redundancy is theoretically discussed with the support of discourse analysis and information theory. The methodology adopted is a corpus-based qualitative approach. Two corpora samples with Brazilian Portuguese (BP) texts on Covid-19 were collected. One with texts from a monthly science digital magazine called Pesquisa FAPESP aimed at students and researchers for scientific information dissemination and the other with popular language texts from a news Portal G1 (Rede Globo) aimed at unspecified and/or non-specialized readers. The materials were filtered with two descriptors: “vaccine” and “test.” Preliminary analysis of examples from these materials revealed two categories of redundancy: paraphrastic and polysemic. Paraphrastic redundancy is based on concomitant language reformulation of words, sentences, text excerpts, or even larger units. Polysemic redundancy does not easily show material evidence, but is based on cognitively predictable semantic association in socio-cultural domains. Both kinds of redundancy contribute, each in their own way, to improving text readability for science popularization in Brazil.

In this chapter, we explore uses of corpus linguistics within higher education research. Corpus linguistic approaches enable examination of large bodies of language data based on computing power. These bodies of data, or corpora, facilitate investigation of the meaning of words in context. The semiautomated nature of such investigation helps researchers to identify and interpret language patterns that might otherwise be inaccessible through manual analysis. We illustrate potential uses of corpus linguistic approaches through four short case studies by higher education researchers, spanning educational contexts, disciplines and genres. These case studies are underpinned by discussion of the development of corpus linguistics as a field of investigation, including existing open corpora and corpus analysis tools. We give a flavour of how corpus linguistic techniques, in isolation or as part of a wider research approach, can be particularly helpful to higher education researchers who wish to investigate language data and its context.

Departing from the assumption that discourse is both socially constituted and constitutive, and that social reality is co-constructed by the institutions of mass communication, this chapter takes under scrutiny media representation of the recent refugee crisis in Europe. The objective behind it is to maximise the validity of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), drawing on the insights from Critical Discourse Studies, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, in explicating how the media can potentially impact on the salience of issues and thus on public perception of problems and threats along with measures to be taken to deal with them. Examining the data from Poland, a European Union member state from Central Europe, criticised for its anti-refugee stance and refusal to accept the assigned quotas of migrants, and, importantly, the country ‘experiencing’ migrant crisis without refugees, we look at the role of word co-occurrence patterns in the discursive representation of refugees and immigrants in Rzeczpospolita daily and Niezależna.pl, the Polish right-wing press. The analysis, of both quantitative and qualitative nature, focuses on lexical associations of two nouns, uchodźca ‘refugee’ and imigrant ‘immigrant’, and their role as epistemic, axiological and emotional proximization triggers in the process of mediated construction of crisis and European security.

This chapter aims to explore how emotional language construing experiences of UK COVID-19 lockdown in the present frames expectations for future behaviours and intended memories. We analyse 102 responses collected through an online narrative survey during the first lockdown in the United Kingdom. The survey asked participants to articulate ‘an image to remember lockdown by’. Taking a positive discourse analysis approach, using corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics tools, we challenge the primarily negative mainstream discourses of COVID-19 and lockdown experiences and explore how language choices evaluating different aspects of life in lockdown evoke emotion to construe a desired projected future. Findings indicate that respondents actively and selectively articulate primarily positive intended memories based on kinship peace and nature that contrast with normal life experiences. Such choices are framed within emotional states enacted through language choices. We argue that these projected memories act as a ‘time capsule’ whereby decisions to retain positive memories help to promote adaptive well-being in the face of potentially overwhelmingly negative circumstances.

Organizations often view current market situations from the customers’ viewpoints. To do so, they face an incredibly vast volume and variety of data. Data visualization makes huge amounts more accessible and understandable and helps to communicate complex information more accurately and effectively. This chapter discusses how to utilize user-generated data in the tourism industry to enhance the customer experience through data visualization tools. Five analysis tools are used to identify the factors that contribute to hotel guests’ dissatisfaction in five top city destinations. Identifying and eliminating dissatisfaction is the first step in enhancing the quality of the experience and in fostering loyalty in the long run.

Companies are often accused of using sustainability disclosures as public relations tools to manage financial and non-financial stakeholders' impressions. The purpose of our study was firstly to determine how comprehensive the human rights disclosures of a sample of large international companies were and secondly, whether different narrative styles are associated with levels of disclosure to manage readers' impressions about the company. We analysed the public human rights disclosures for 154 large, international companies obtained from the UN Guiding Principles Reporting website. On average, companies complied with only one-third of the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework criteria. Communication about policies has the highest compliance, whilst communication about determining which human rights aspects are salient to the company, remedies for transgressions and stakeholder engagement have the lowest disclosure. When we split the sample between high disclosure and low disclosure companies, we found that the readability of the human rights disclosures is exceptionally low and even more so for low disclosure companies. Low disclosure companies used words implying Satisfaction significantly more than high disclosure companies, which provides some support for suspecting that low disclosure companies practise impression management by only presenting a ‘rosy picture’, as well as obfuscation via low readability. We add to the literature on impression management by large corporations in their sustainability reporting, and specifically human rights disclosures, by revealing how the interplay of low disclosure, low readability and overuse of words signalling Satisfaction contributes to impression management, rather than sincere attempts at accountability to all stakeholders.

The way organizational actors use language to think about and communicate their organizational experiences is central to how organizational actors enact organizational paradox. However, most inquiries into the role of language in the organizational paradox literature has focused on specific components of language (e.g., discourse), without attention to the complex, multi-level linguistic system that is interconnected to organizational processes. In this chapter, we expand our knowledge of the role of language by integrating paradox research with research from the linguistics discipline. We identify a series of linguistic tensions (i.e., generalizability-specificity, universalism-particularism, and explicitness-implicitness) that are nested within organizational paradoxes. In the process, we reveal how the organizing paradox of control and autonomy is interconnected to other paradoxes (i.e., performing, learning, and belonging) through the instantiation of linguistic paradoxes. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on paradox and language.

This study examines the association between management control systems (MCSs), specifically the interactive and diagnostic use of controls, with the corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure-action portrayal gap (i.e. the disparity in employees’ perception of their organisation’s emphasis on CSR disclosures relative to CSR actions) and the subsequent impact on employees’ perceptions of organisational performance, both operational performance and corporate social performance. Data were collected using a survey of US lower-level managers, with the data obtained from 209 respondents and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The results reveal that the interactive and diagnostic use of controls both exhibit a significant negative association with the CSR disclosure-action portrayal gap, that is, the use of these controls reduces the gap. In addition, the various dimensions of the CSR disclosure-action portrayal gap exhibit a significant negative association with both operational and corporate social performance, that is, lower gap, higher performance. The study contributes to the CSR literature by providing the first empirical insight into employees’ perception of both CSR disclosures and actions, and hence, the CSR disclosure-action portrayal gap. In addition, the study contributes to the MCS and organisational performance literature by providing the initial empirical insight into the role of MCSs in mitigating the gap through enhancing the interactive and diagnostic use of controls, and the negative association between the gap and employees’ perceptions of organisational performance.

Recent changes in the funding and governance of academic research in many OECD countries have altered established authority relationships governing research priorities and judgements. These shifts in the influence of a variety of groups and organisations over scientific choices and careers can be expected to affect the development of different kinds of intellectual innovations by changing the level of protected space they provide researchers and the flexibility of dominant intellectual standards governing the allocation of resources and evaluation of research outcomes. Variations in these features of public science systems influence scientists’ willingness to pursue unusual and risky projects over many years and help to explain cross-national differences in the rate and mode of development of four innovations in the physical, biological and human sciences.