The Place of East European Researchers in International Discourse

Abstract

Globalisation connects cultures which may have had little awareness of each other and whose values often differ or even are in conflict. The present study explores relations of power in research discourses from the East and West of Europe. Last century in socialist Bulgaria, one was taught to ignore theories with no Marxist grounding. Among those neglected were names such as Chomsky, Halliday, Firth - researchers who have had formative impact on linguistics in the West. Based on diverging roots, nowadays two disciplines could be expected to exist - Eastern and Western linguistics. With the collapse of the communist block, the interactions between the two is a topic worth investigating. The discourse in an international specialised journal is explored here as a reflection of the relations in the worldwide research community. Because Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) studies structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control‏, it is the method employed to establish whether researchers from the former communist block participate in international discourse on a par with their colleagues from West European countries. Methods from CDA are combined with Corpus Linguistics (CL) approaches. The conclusions concern the place of East European researchers in international linguistics discourse and sociolinguistic factors shaping the situation. Key words: Critical discourse analysis, power, globalisation, corpora, search engines