International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 29, Issue 3, 2024

Recent years have seen a considerable increase in e-commerce, with sales forecast to continue rising over the coming years. This study provides a corpus linguistic analysis of item descriptions on eBay’s UK website, on which both members of the public and businesses can offer goods for sale. It is based on two corpora of items sold on the site in 2015 and 2020 which together contain 412,601 item descriptions and over 57 million words of text. The analysis applies corpus linguistic methods to gain further insight into the diachronic development of language use on eBay, to explore linguistic features in item descriptions and across product categories, and to relate word choice to product selling price. Its findings offer new understanding of the changing language of online selling and indicate how a corpus linguistic methodology may be used to explore the impact of linguistic features on sales figures.

We examine a corpus of integrated reports endorsed as best practice to explore how the concept of ‘capital’ and its novel extension into six types of capitals — including ‘human’, ‘social and relationship’, and ‘natural’ — are discursively constructed and legitimised in the corporate field. Our findings show that the new capitals are mentioned frequently, but in a bullet point-like way without elaboration on their significance — a response strategy that we call ‘management by keywords’. Our analysis suggests that the collective business mindset remains centred on financial value creation, with the new capitals acting as servants to financial objectives. This questions the transformative power of the six capitals, hailed as a business innovation, to move corporate practices towards more social and environmental sustainability via enhanced corporate accountability. At the conceptual and methodological level, the study showcases the potential of corpus linguistics for fostering interdisciplinary research involving linguists and scholars in business and accounting.

Big corporations are a leading contributor to global carbon emissions and their investment decisions have a significant impact on the world’s ability to tackle climate change. This study combines corpus and discourse approaches to examine how major corporate emitters have responded to the Paris Agreement, how they legitimize their practices amid mounting public pressure, and how companies operating in high- and middle-income countries differ in their framing of climate change. The results show that carbon majors place increasing focus on climate issues, widely support the goals of the Paris Agreement, and are increasingly making net-zero pledges. However, close inspection of linguistic patterns reveals a troubling disconnect between proclaimed goals, the solutions advocated for, and the radical steps needed to address the escalating climate crisis. Companies from middle-income countries devote comparatively less attention to climate change, which points to the need for better coordinated global efforts to address this problem.

Amid COVID-19 and the so-called “digital pivot”, online virtual communication is at the heart of our professional and private lives. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for better understanding of communication in the online workplace. This paper contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of indicators of engagement in multi-party communication online, as evidenced by a corpus-based multi-modal study. It showcases the importance of building naturally-occurring spoken corpora that go beyond written transcription and include annotation of non-verbal behaviour. The work focuses on the incidence, frequency, position, and function of spoken and head nod backchannels, exploring coordination and co-occurrence of these features in online talk. Findings point to a changing profile of how engagement is displayed in online workplace meetings, which appears to be linked to the functionality of platforms.

This mixed-methods study investigates English-medium oral online intercultural communication within the Irish-based international technology sector. The initial phase of the research consisted of a survey investigating participants’ (N = 113) experiences of virtual communication. Following the survey, to linguistically investigate such interactions, the International Virtual Team Corpus (IVT Corpus) was created. This corpus consists of approximately 80,000 words of transcribed speech gathered from 30 web-based recordings of meetings, which include both Irish and international colleagues speaking in English. This paper reports on some of the relevant quantitative and qualitative survey results, uncovering both preconceptions and embodied experiences of international virtual meetings. Following this, it presents corpus-based results of significant frequent and keyword clusters that provide a window into the discourse patterns of international virtual team meetings in this sector. Some tentative implications and applications for work-based virtual communication are explored in the closing discussion.