Euphemisms in South African English economic discourse: Socio-cultural aspects

South African English economic discourse remains underexplored despite its significance in shaping public perception and policy in the region. One of its critical understudied facets are euphemisms, which are heavily influenced by historical and social background and play a crucial role in moderating sensitive issues and managing communication across diverse societal norms. This study aims to fill this gap by identifying how euphemisms reflect and respond to South Africa’s socio-cultural setting. The study involved compiling a corpus of approximately 500,000 words sourced from speeches, interviews, and publications by South African specialists with subsequent identification of euphemisms. As a results, 338 euphemisms were found in the corpus. Through continuous sampling, the study then identified, categorized, and quantitatively assessed the socio-cultural aspects of euphemisms across various economic discussions. According to the study results, euphemism in South African English economic discourse correspond to five main thematic groups: Economic and Racial Inequality, Corporate Governance and Ethics, Impact of Migration, Healthcare Economics, and Influence of Globalization. Each thematic group demonstrates patterns of euphemisms occurrence that reflect intentional communication efforts to address or mask sensitive socio-economic issues. The study results posit that euphemisms emerge as a frequently leveraged linguistic device moderating South African English economic discourse. They reflect an adaptive response to South Africa’s socio-cultural setting where managing the multifaceted societal norms and historical sensitivities is imperative for effective communication and policy dissemination. The study argues for closer examination of the linguistic composition of South African English economic discourse. The findings contribute to the fields of sociolinguistics and intercultural communication as they expose how euphemisms function as a tool for managing complex socio-economic processes

Communicative strategies and tactics of speech manipulation in intercultural business discourse

The study considers the communicative strategies and tactics of linguistic manipulation used by the representatives of professional communities speaking two national varieties of English, British and American, to identify the content and functional-pragmatic characteristics of communicative strategies used in the framework of intercultural business communication in general, and in the framework of two specific genres in particular, presentations and business interviews. The authors also provide general analysis of some gender aspects of speech behaviour in intercultural business communication. The study is conducted along the lingua-pragmatic and socio-cultural lines of research with evaluation of data backed by quantitative analysis. Research material is represented by business discourse texts used by American and British male and female respondents. The authors make inferences about the manipulative nature of communication, single out some of its key features, and present an outline of gender-based differences encountered in professional discourse. The study ultimately holds that gender-based parameters of communication can be described as flexible, which is essentially due to the extensive scope of contextual settings to be considered

Manipulative Potential of Humor in Business Media Discourse: Drawing up a “Starter Pack” for LSP Teaching

The article investigates the manipulative potential of humor in business media discourse and its application in Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) teaching. Recognizing humor as a tool for simplifying complex ideas and engaging a broad audience, the study aims to identify the functional-stylistic means through which humor is conveyed in business media, focusing on its capacity to influence audience perceptions and attitudes. Employing continuous sampling along with descriptive, comparative, and discursive methods, the research analyzes utterances from Russian- and English-language business media to explore humor’s various functions – such as persuasion, focus-setting, and entertainment – and how these can be harnessed to facilitate linguistic manipulation. The findings reveal that humor, through rhetorical devices like metaphors, idioms, understatement, allusion, sarcasm, and oxymoron, plays a key role in making business concepts accessible and engaging. A “starter pack” of tools is identified for LSP education, equipping students to recognize and utilize humor’s manipulative power in professional contexts. This toolkit aims to prepare future business communicators to craft and recognize humorous statements. Implications for LSP educators, students, and business communication professionals are significant, advocating for an integrated approach in curricula that balances the creative and manipulative implementation of humor. This prepares students for global business communication, emphasizing humor’s strategic importance in effective leadership

Корпусный подход к исследованию корпоративной коммуникации

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a decisive reputation tool for companies and as such, a key concept in corporate communication as a phenomenon of intercultural and global significance. This has warranted a comprehensive examination of the language of CSR reports reflecting the principles of the corporate culture. Studies exploring the narratives of CSR reporting currently lack insights into the distribution of meaningful priorities evidenced in language use. This study sets out to explore the linguistic environment of the most frequently occurring language tokens to identify recurrent language patterns used to ensure efficient CSR reporting, and to further establish priority directions in CSR narrative composition evidenced in language use. A corpus-based approach and contextual analysis were adopted to examine CSR reports issued by Microsoft over the last seven years and recognised as an example of best practices in the corporate field. The corpus was compiled using the Prime Machine corpus concordancer tool and comprised 99,176 tokens. Following the study results, the study makes a number of inferences regarding the use of pronouns, “Microsoft + a verb denoting positive action”, “more + than,” “more + adjective”, “Corporate” as part of compound terminological units, as well as a set of key tokens encountered within a descriptive linguistic environment with positive connotation. This, in turn, proved helpful in identifying the hierarchy of priorities distribution revealed in the course of material analysis. The results contribute to a systemic appreciation of corporate language policies facilitating efficient stakeholder communication and can be used in further research investigating related matters of scientific interest.Корпоративная социальная ответственность (КСО) стала действенным инструментом под-держания репутации компаний и одной из из ключевых концепций корпоративной коммуникации. Это привело к необходимости всестороннего изучения языка отчетов КСО, отражающего принципы корпоративной культуры как феномена межкультурной и глобальной значимости. Существующие исследования, рассматривающие тексты отчетов КСО, не дают представления о распределении смысловых приоритетов, проявляющихся в особенностях языкового оформления. В данном исследовании проводится анализ лингвистического окружения наиболее частотных языковых единиц с целью установления повторяющихся языковых моделей, используемых при составлении эффективных отчетов КСО, а также с целью определения приоритетных направлений их текстовой композиции, отражаемых в языке. Корпус-ный подход и контекстуальный анализ применяются в исследовании отчетов КСО, опубликованных компанией Microsoft за последние семь лет и признанных стандартом качества в корпоративной сфере. Корпус был создан с использованием конкордансера Prime Machine и инкорпорировал 99176 единиц анализа. На основе результатов исследования в работе предлагаются выводы в отношении использования местоимений, конструкций «Microsoft + глагол, обозначающий положительное действие», «more + than», «more + прилагательное», «Corporate» в составе составных терминологических единиц, а также набора ключевых единиц, встречающихся в рамках лингвистического окружения с положительной коннотацией. Это, в свою очередь, позволило идентифицировать иерархию распределения приоритетов, обнаруженную в ходе анализа материала. Полученные результаты способствуют системному осмыслению корпоративной языковой политики, позволяющей поддерживать эффективное коммуникативное взаимодействие с заинтересованными сторонами, и могут быть использованы в дальнейших исследованиях, рассматривающих смежные вопросы как объекты научного интереса

Making sense of “buzzword” as a term through co-occurrences analysis

The study argues that while the existing research on buzzwords mainly involves the functional and pragmatic analysis of their individual specimen, such as “engagement”, “synergy” or “development”, an alternative approach can be implemented to look into the nature and immediate implications behind the term in question. The suggested approach involves investigating the occurrences of the term proper as opposed to analysing individual buzzwords. The authors hypothise and demonstrate that linguistic context of the term “buzzword”, i.e. the peculiarities of its occurrence alongside different language units and patterns, may provide credible inferences concerning the key properties attached to the term and afford some illuminating perspective on the prevailing attitudes towards it. The study uses titles of research and newspaper articles retrieved from Google Scholar as material for the research due to better representation of the term in titles as opposed to full texts, as well as titles' higher informativity and better descriptive saturation. Apart from the prevailing focus on the immediate linguistic context surrounding the term, the inferences made in this study also stem from the frequency data showing how often a certain feature of buzzwords is being mentioned in the titles. The study showed that while the greatest emphasis is being placed on the field of use and temporal lifecycle of buzzwords, the attitudes towards them can be best of all described by examining the place of the term in oppositions. As illustrated in the paper, these oppositions reflect the idea of the term's inferior status by opposing it to more favourable concepts

English Borrowings in the European Economic Press: the Functional Aspect

The article provides the analysis of English borrowings in a number of European languages (Italian, French and German) based on the material of economic media and studies the functions realized by them in professional language. The regular use of English borrowings by European languages speakers is evident in the economy sphere due to their functional aspect analyzed in the paper

The expressive function of colloquialisms in professional discourse: The linguopragmatic aspect

In this study the expressive function of colloquialisms is examined through the lens of linguopragmatics using the material from professional discourse, which is marked by a strict structure of expressing ideas. The study identifies expressive means of influencing the recipient and traces general trends of using colloquialisms in the English-language mass media texts as well as transcripts of business talks held between some major companies. The paper elucidates the concept of linguopragmatics and defines the subject of studies within this discipline, as well as addresses notions of colloquialisms and their expressive function. We have found that colloquialisms are increasingly used in professional discourse. The study provides an overview of the concept of lexical-semantic field, as colloquialisms are mostly actualised at the lexical level. The authors investigate the lexical-semantic field “to invest money” comprised of colloquialisms from English-language mass media outlets, along with colloquialisms used in transcripts of large companies. The following expressive means of producing an influence on the recipient have been found in the texts: bold type, capitalisation of each word, italics, numerals, capitalisation of abbreviations (the graphic level); phrasal words, metaphors, allusions, positive particles, abbreviations, epithets, short forms of nouns (the lexical level); declarative sentences, interrogatory sentences, parcellation, antithesis, parallel structures (the syntactic level). The expressive function of colloquialisms is widely reflected in professional discourse. After comparing the use of colloquialisms in mass media texts and talks transcripts we found that the most frequent expressive means are declarative sentences at the syntactical level and metaphors at the lexical level