Establishing sharedness through lexis. An analysis of linguistic choice and the reader/writer relationship in economic journalism

This paper has as its starting point Fairclough’s observation that we can consider social life as interconnected networks of stabilized or ‘institutionalised’ social activities of diverse sorts and that every social activity always includes discourse. For example, the concept of a ‘knowledge society’ suggests that economic and social processes are ‘knowledge driven’ and that given that knowledges are generated and circulate as discourses, this means that these processes are therefore ‘discourse driven’. Discourses include representations of how things are and have been, but are also representations of how things might, could or should be. However all discourses are inherently positioned and “see” and “represent” life in particular ways. Is it true that the ‘social role’ of the economics’ specialist has changed and that he/she is now expected to “ ..contribute something contingently practical, in terms of forecast, advice, recommendations and proposals.” (Merlini Barbaresi)? If so, how is this achieved? By comparing the lexical discourse features of a specific sub-genre of journalism in two periods, 1996 and 2006, we will consider what lexical choices have been employed in order to establish and maintain knowledge in this specialized discourse and note any differences between the two corpora. We will also consider whether the writer/reader relationship has changed? In a knowledge driven society, do readers have more or less prior knowledge than before. Do they ‘know’ about the events, situations and people which provide their conceptual framework for interacting with the world of the text? By examining the lexical features employed to establish and maintain writer/reader common ground we will analyse the extent to which the need to establish common ground has changed and the linguistic consequences of this shift. The study will use both quantitative (Wordsmith 4) and qualitative analysis of two corpora, the first from ‘Lex - The Financial Times’ 1996 and the second from ‘Lex - The Financial Times’ 2006.