This article responds to recent calls to investigate the role of agents and the connections between layers of agency in the development and implementation of language policy and planning (LPP). Using a corpus linguistic and discursive approach to language policy, we identify interventions made in plenary sessions by Secretary-Generals and Member…

China has had an ambivalent policy for the learning and teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) over much of its history. The explicit and implicit implementation of language policy has had a significant impact on the content of EFL textbooks and the ideologies underlying them. However, studies exploring such ideologies remain sensitive…

This article sets out to explore the relationships between parental language ideologies, and language use and negotiation in parent-child interaction. The primary dataset is composed of around 10 h of audio recordings of everyday interactions of family members (i.e. a Brazilian mother, a Norwegian father, and a 3-year old Norwegian born daughter)…

The research presented here constitutes the first investigation of the standard language ideology (SLI) in Great Britain that takes account of a multiethnolect -- namely Multicultural London English (MLE). A corpus-informed discourse study was conducted to explore representations of MLE and its speakers in two corpora: one containing data from…

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain.…

This paper examines how intercultural communication (ICC) and the notion of culture are framed in on-line promotional discourse of higher education (HE) ICC courses. It analyses a specialised corpus comprised of 14,842 words from 43 course websites of master's programmes in ICC in the UK and the US--internationally, the two largest providers of…

Although significant attention has been devoted to the notion of facework and its functions, facework among L2 speakers, whose cultural backgrounds and language proficiencies vary, has remained unexplored. The present study attempts to explore situations of intercultural communication in which facework is used as a way to remedy moments of…

This article presents the findings of a corpus-based study of the use of English vis-à-vis Cantonese and Putonghua in Hong Kong's Legislative Council in the past four decades. The objective of the study was to track the changing fortunes of the three languages in a key government institution during a period of unprecedented political, economic and…

On the basis of a corpus of British and German press coverage of European Union (EU) politics over the 1990s, the paper analyses uses of the geopolitical HEART metaphor. Over the course of the 1990s, successive British governments promised to work "at" the "heart of Europe". However, no one ever claimed that Britain was…

This paper provides an analysis of texts containing the noun "the Balkans" and the adjective "Balkan" in a small corpus of approximately 80 journalistic texts from different south Slavic regions currently available online. The texts were published over the last 10 years. The term "the Balkans" and its derivations…

This paper introduces a method for computer-based analyses of metaphor in discourse, combining quantitative and qualitative elements. This method is illustrated with data from research on German newspaper discourse concerning the ongoing system transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Methodological aspects of the research procedure are…