“Variation across spoken and written genres in internal corporate communication: multimodality and blending in evolving channels”.

The data are three sub-corpora taken from an authentic corpus of in-house business communication, compiled and transcribed by the author, produced by a multinational US company specializing in organizational consulting. These are a series of oral presentations in audio-conference mode, the slides (written language, diagrams, graphs, tables etc.) accompanying the presentations and a collection of e-distributed newsletters to employees. Similarities and differences are identified between the spoken and written sub-genres in terms of metadiscourse structure and organization, pragmatic markers, interactional strategies, and terminological and metaphorical usage. The study also focuses on the blending and cross-influences between the two channels, the written constraints of the oral presentations, and the “personalization” and “conversationalization” of the discourse of the newsletters, the “speech in writing” typical of much e-mediated communication. The value of this linguistic analysis lies in how effective employer branding is enacted in a variety of fast-evolving computer-mediated channels and multi-modalities, through timely, transparent and relevant communication practices inside the company itself.