Sylvia Jaworska

University of Reading · English Language and Applied Linguistics

International business is increasingly conducted through the medium of English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF). Yet, little is known about interactional strategies in BELF, specifically in internal written business communications. Our study turns to this hitherto less explored area and investigates one of the most important speech acts in the co...

Introduction: What consumers say about food and what kind of words they use to do so offers direct insights into their perceptions, preferences, reasoning, and emotions. Methods: This study explores evaluations of hybrid meat products of 2,405 consumers from England, Denmark, and Spain. As part of a large survey, consumers were prompted to note...

This study explores an emergent genre of corporate image repair videos that were produced and disseminated on YouTube by three large corporations Facebook, Uber and Wells Fargo following major corporate scandals and mismanagement. Utilising a critical multimodal genre analysis, the generic and semiotic features of this new corporate multimodal ‘pro...

In this article, we reflect on the epistemological frameworks and priorities of intercultural communication research regarding ‘cultural differences’. With the current challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the growing political and social polarisation in recent years, we argue for a need to (re)focus attention to the ways acts of dis...

Understanding leadership as a discursive performance, this study explores televised speeches and press briefings on Covid-19 given by the German chancellor Angela Merkel in March and April 2020. Merkel’s televised communications deserve special attention for at least two reasons; first, Merkel was hailed as one of the few national leaders who succe...

This paper looks at the intersection between motherhood and online illness narratives, examining the ways in which women conceptualise their maternal bodies in the context of postnatal depression. Specifically, we examine how discourses of motherhood in distress are positioned in relation to societal norms and expectations, and the othering of the...

A volume with the title ‘The Language of Crisis’ could not be timelier. As we listen to yet another governmental Covid-19 press briefing, read news about looming recession, and argue about still-to-be-done online homework, it is obvious that any crisis situation is as much material and personal as it is discursive. And this is what the book promise...

There is a growing interest in flexitarian diets, which has resulted in the commercialisation of new hybrid meat products, containing both meat and plant-based ingredients. Consumer attitudes towards hybrid meat products have not been explored, and it is not clear which factors could affect the success of such products. This study is the first to o...

Consumer understanding and acceptance of health claims are influenced by a variety of factors including personal knowledge and familiarity with the information, characteristics of the product (such as the ingredients) and the way the claim is presented (e.g. wording and visual aids such as symbols). The official wording of authorised EU health clai...

Drawing on recent debates around food, space and digital media, this paper introduces and develops the concepts of the digital foodscape and 'good' food grammars. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the digital platforms, discourses and personas, we investigate the ways a key set of digital food influencers (DFIs) construct, curate a...

It is not an overstatement to say that these days we are saturated with advertising. We do not even need to enter a commercial space such as a shopping mall or flick through a glossy magazine where we can reasonably expect some advertising practices taking place; public spaces that traditionally had nothing to do with commercial activities such as...

Experts increasingly use social media to communicate with the wider public, prompted by the need to demonstrate impact and public engagement. While previous research on the use of social media by experts focused on single topics and performed sentiment analysis, we propose to extend the scope by investigating experts' networks, topics and communica...

The lockdown imposed following the COVID-19 pandemic of spring 2020 dramatically changed the daily lives and routines of millions of people worldwide. We analyse how such changes contributed to gender inequality within the household using a novel survey of Italian, British, and American families in lockdown. A high percentage report disruptions in...

When the civil society makes ‘transition’ its label, it cannot be assumed that different civil society actors share compatible varieties of localist or radical transformationists discourses. This study has comparatively analysed the discourses in four civil society sustainability transition proposals using a corpus-based methodology. We found that...

This study investigates the hitherto understudied area of the use of phrasal verbs (PVs) in expert academic writing in the discipline of Linguistics. It uses a novel methodology combining the notion of grammatical collocation with the Quirkian approach to clause structure analysis and insights from Frame Semantics to identify the extent to which PV...

The existence of fictitious users of financial statements has been confirmed in previous research. Our study investigates how this powerful yet ‘made-up’ construct is deployed within the discourses of the main stakeholders including ‘real’ users themselves, as they shape regulatory debates in the international accounting standard-setting arena. We...

Taking as the starting point the importance of adopting an intersectional approach to studying mediatised representations, this study focuses on media construals of the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius. Spanning a range of intersecting identities – he is white, male, disabled, a sports champion and a convicted murderer – Pistorius presents an...

Health research highlights transformative and therapeutic effects of peer-to-peer online communication. Yet, we still know little about the practices and processes that generate such effects. This paper seeks to contribute to this understanding by examining polylogue online stories about postnatal depression (PND) on the popular parenting website M...

Drawing on the notion of gender as a socially constructed category performed inter alia through language, this study examines the ways in which women and man use language to do person-in-pain in real-life interactions about chronic and terminal illness. It is based on a secondary analysis of a large corpus of health and illness narratives collected...

Although a great deal of communication in science and the humanities is conducted through the medium of spoken language, ‘talk’ had long led a shadowy existence in research in science communication and only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. The purpose of this chapter is to offer an overview of this slowly growing body of research. By...

This study explores the use of personal pronouns in the context of political agitation on Twitter in the run-up to the EU referendum 2016. Using a combination of corpus linguistic and discourse analytical techniques, it shows considerable differences in the way in which personal pronouns were employed by the two opposing groups the Leavers and Rema...

Using corpus-linguistic tools and methods, this article investigates the discourses of climate change in corporate social responsibility and environmental reports produced by major oil companies from 2000 to 2013. It focuses on the frequency of key references to climatic changes and examines in detail discourses surrounding the most frequently used...

Taking up the claim made by Partington et al. (2013: 12) that ‘we are not deontologically justified in making statements about a relevance of a phenomenon observed in one discourse type unless […] we compare how the phenomenon behaves elsewhere’, our chapter explores the methodological potential of using multiple data sets in corpus-assisted discou...

This paper investigates public discourses of multilingualism in Britain. In contrast to previous research that focused on specific language varieties, we examine multilingualism as a metalinguistic construct and are interested in what is frequently said about multilingualism. More specifically, we explore the extent to which media discourses are co...

This study examines the impact of a global sports event on gender representations in media reporting. Whereas previous research on gender, sport and media has been mainly concerned with sports events in the North American or Australian context, this study investigates the British media reporting before, during and after the London Olympics 2012. Ou...

A diachronic corpus-based study into the effects of age and gender on the usage patterns of verb-forming suffixation in spoken British English Article Accepted Version Laws, J., Ryder, C. and Jaworska, S. (2017) A diachronic corpus-based study into the effects of age and gender on the usage patterns of verb-forming suffixation in spoken British Eng...

Despite the widely disseminated assumption that metaphors are the key persuasive devices in promoting tourist destinations specifically those located in tropical regions, there has been to date no systematic research investigating the use of figurative language in tourism promotional discourse. Using a corpus-assisted approach to the identification...

Recent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have demonstrated that apart from indexing cultural stereotypes (Stubbs 1998), public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of references to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes (Leuschner 2013, Schröter/Leuschner 2013). This paper i...

Our study focus on the constructions of postnatal depression (PND), which is a highly stigmatised condition and the leading cause of maternal death in the UK (Oates 2003, NHS 2011). Using a comparative corpus-assisted discourse approach (CADS) (Partington et al. 2013), we examine the constructions of PND in four discursive domains including 1) lay...

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how the combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic methodology can be used to study global sports events, especially their impact on the representations of identities. The study of media texts around global events, such as the London Olympics and the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Af...

Using the novel technique of topic modelling, this paper examines thematic patterns and their changes over time in a large corpus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports produced in the oil sector. Whereas previous research on corporate communications has been small-scale or interested in selected lexical aspects and thematic categories id...

Eric Frigal & Jack A. Hardy, Corpus-based sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. x, 312. Pb. $49.95. - Volume 45 Issue 2 - Sylvia Jaworska

Most research concerned with the representations of hosts in tourism discourse points to the prevalence of stereotypical images of local people asserting that contemporary tourism perpetuates colonial legacy and gendered discursive practices. This claim has been contested, to some extent, in studies that explore representations of hosts in local to...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To this effect, a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced British students of German (WHiG) was compared with a corpus of argumentative essays written by German native speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis re...

This state-of-the-art review reports on the major studies conducted in the field of Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache (academic German) since the late 1990s. To begin with, the current position of German as a language of academic communication nationally and internationally will be discussed, focusing especially on the challenges posed by the status...

This paper explores the linguistic practice of digital code plays in an online discussion forum, used by the community of English-speaking Germans living in Britain. By adopting a qualitative approach of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, the article examines the ways in which these bilinguals deploy linguistic and other semiotic resources on th...

Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism se...

By applying methods of cognitive metaphor theory, Jaworska examines metaphorical scenarios employed in the discourse of anti-Slavism, which featured prominently in radical nationalist propaganda in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. She does so by analysing metaphorical expressions used to refer to the Polish population living in the eas...

The aim of this chapter is to examine the current status of the German language in Poland and to envisage its future standing in the linguistic marketplace in this part of Europe. Some may wonder why such an undertaking is necessary. After all, German is a prestigious language in this part of Europe — a new lingua franca. Indeed, for some time ther...