Languaging in corporate discourse

In the light of languaging meant as “a process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” (Swain 2006: 98) and following Cortese’ s approach according to which “the notion of ‘languaging’ holistically frames discursive practices as negotiations of individual epistemologies in which affective response has a large share” (2001: 200), this chapter aims to investigate the functions of evaluation and persuasion as they appear in corporate websites. These linguistic functions generate the interaction between companies and customers, so much so that corporate websites often promote themselves by describing their history and their experience, appealing to the prospective customers through the development of information and even technical knowledge. In other words, companies catch people’s attention by pivoting on their awareness and cognitive response. Following previous studies on the same topic (Salvi 2007, 2012, 2013), the present analysis concerns the websites of British electricity supply companies, namely the Big Six suppliers (British Gas, EDF Energy, E.ON, Npower, Scottish Power, SSE). The recent EU regulation of the market in electricity requires a new negotiation between companies and consumers in relation to changed socio-economic and cultural factors. The focus is then on linguistic aspects of corporate communication (from vocabulary to pragmatic usage) which involve customers in active interactions based on specific goals and requirements. Languaging in this context contributes to the creation of new corporate identities and the understanding of social values in terms of fair competition, appropriate consumer protection, regularity and quality of service, price and environmental protection.