Exploring political and banking language for institutional purposes

This contribution aims to identify the features and explore the potential strength of English in the construal of institutional discourse with reference to the topic of economic crisis. For this analysis the speeches of two outstanding figures are considered, delivered in the period between June and September 2011: Josè Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, and Mario Draghi in his triple role as the Governor of the Bank of Italy, the President of the Financial Stability Board and a candidate to the presidency of the ECB. Given the specific topic and period, the documents are characterized by a homogeneous content and a similar mixed genre, as they were delivered orally based on a written draft, then divulged on websites. The documents have been processed in two sub-corpora which are comparable according to topic, size and supra-national audience. This contribution has three objectives. First of all, to confirm the importance of small and sample corpora (Sinclair 1991, Stubbs 1996) for the analysis of specialized language, particularly in the case of documents where language expresses contents strongly influenced by economic principles, as well as by social and political instances. Second, to detect similarities and differences within the wide territory of institutional language: the sender’s identity and his institutional position affect the macro-structure and the speech organization in relation to the relevant aims and the connected arguments (Benwell and Stokoe 2010). Finally, to integrate the quantitative analysis of the corpora, which allows us to closely observe aspects of keyness and aboutness (Bondi and Scott eds. 2010), with a qualitative discourse analysis so that the construction of messages can be investigated at multiple levels of textual organization (Salvi 2001a). In the present research quantitative analysis aims to prove the assumption that a prevalence of political and economic/banking language characterizes Barroso’s and Draghi’s speeches respectively; furthermore, discourse analysis helps to show the high level of valutative language in the two sub-corpora and the speakers’ position in the specific context of the crisis in both a local and a global perspective (Hunston and Thomson 2000). As already discussed in an analysis of academic lectures in the field of economics (Salvi 2011b), the comparison between corpora (Biber et al. 1998), although of a small size, shows particular pragmatic aspects which reflect identities, ideology and social relationships developed in context.