English in Specialized Domains. The Multifaceted Construction of Identity

The main purpose of this book is to trace a linguistic profile of the concept of identity as it is expressed through English in specialized fields, particularly in institutional discourse. Institutions have long been the object of many investigations in the fields of media, cultural, and organizational studies. More recently, there has been a “linguistic” turn in the study of institutions with language-focused explorations of how power and discourse may function in specific institutional and organizational settings. Following recent studies on the construction of identity through language, the book aims to show how specific language features, such as the selection, frequency and collocations of words, rhetorical devices and stylistic choices, contribute to deliver the speaker’s/writer’s image, stance and position, thus influencing public opinion and shaping identity. To this end, the book presents linguistic studies on three broad fields of institutional discourse, namely technical institutional English in the EU, political discourse, and academic language in economics, applying corpus linguistics tools to text and discourse analysis. A blended methodology is adopted, to integrate the descriptive and analytical frameworks of discourse analysis with computational techniques.