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The Business of Words examines the practices of 'high-end' language workers or wordsmiths where we find words being professionally designed, institutionally managed, and, inevitably, objectified for status and profit.
Aligned with existing work on language and political economy in critical sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the volume offers a novel, complementary insight into the relatively elite practices of language workers such as advertisers, dialect coaches, publishers, judges, translators, public relations officers, fine artists, journalists, and linguists themselves. In fact, the book considers what academics might learn about language from other wordsmiths, opening a space for 'dialogue' between those researching language and those who also stake a claim to linguistic expertise and a way with words.
Bringing together an array of leading international scholars from the cognate fields of discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, this book is an essential resource for researchers, advanced undergraduate, and postgraduate students of English language, linguistics and applied linguistics, communication and media studies, and anthropology.
List of contents
List of Contributors
Chapter 1 – The (Grubby) Business of Words: What ‘George Clooney’ Tells Us
Part 1: Language Work and the Business of Words
Chapter 2 – Unequal Language Work(ers) in the Business of Words
Chapter 3 – The Linguistic Business of Marketing
Part 2: Wordsmiths and Professional Language Work
Chapter 4 – Unwriteable Discourse? Co-crafting the Language of Science News
Chapter 5 – Voice Work: Learning About and From Dialect Coaches
Chapter 6 – EAT, LOVE and Other (Small) Stories: Tellability and Multimodality in Robert Indiana’s Word Art
Chapter 7 – Judges as Wordsmiths: Crafting Clarity and Neutrality in Summing-up for Juries
Chapter 8 – Making (up) the News: The Artful Language Work of Journalists in ‘Reporting’ Taboo
Part 3: Linguists and Political Economies of Expertise
Chapter 9 – Framing Elite Knowledge in Shifting Linguistic Economies: The Case of Minority Language Translation
Chapter 10 – Beyond the Academic ‘But’: The Pleasures and Politics of Collaborative Language Work in the Publishing Industry
Chapter 11 – The Commercialisation of Linguistic Expertise in the Asylum Vetting Process
Chapter 12 – Engaging with School Principals as Language Policy Workers
Index
About the author
Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication in the Department of English at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Summary
The Business of Words examines the practices of 'high-end' language workers or wordsmiths. An essential resource for researchers, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of English Language, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Communication and Media Studies, and Anthropology.
