This study applies discourse analysis to examine how 23 cider producers in the Hardanger region promote their farms and products through language, humour, images, and layout, crafting multisensory narratives that evoke sight, smell, and taste.

Contact persons: Kristin Rygg and Agnes Bamford

DIGITAL COLLABORATION PLATFORMS AS LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN MULTILINGUAL BUSINESS COMMUNITIES

This conversation analytic research project investigates linguistic and multimodal practices acquired and developed on a digital platform at a multinational IT company, where English is used as a lingua franca. The project provides novel insights into how contemporary multilingual workforce juggles between multiple parallel tasks and online communication channels while acquiring, using and adapting linguistic, discursive and multimodal practices. The project answers a call for a more holistic research approach that takes multilingualism into consideration in second language acquisition studies, while engaging with the entirety of semiotic forms which contribute to meaning-making.

Contact person: Kaisa Sofia Pietikäinen 

This project investigates climate change metaphors through a corpus-assisted discourse study. It focuses on identifying the variables that correlate with different ways of framing climate change and exploring what these patterns can reveal about societal attitudes and priorities. A key part of the project is the comparison of academic and non-academic discourse, examining how different communities talk about climate change and how that shapes public understanding. By analyzing language across contexts, the project aims to shed light on the dynamics of climate communication and contribute to more effective and informed discourse.

Contact person: Alida Røvik Langås

The Norwegian ‘politeness marker’ vennligst, often described as the equivalent of please in English, is commonly used to signal politeness in professional and public communication.

A corpus linguistic analysis of both contemporary and historical data suggests that 'vennligst' is appropriate in corporate and public contexts, such as on signboards, in surveys and forms, or on webpages intended for the general public. In these settings, vennligst functions as a conventional, formulaic expression of formal politeness and is typically unmarked.

In personal communication, such as professional emails, the use of vennligst is generally best avoided, as it can increase the directive force of a statement to the point of being interpreted as a command. Historical corpora of vennligst in interpersonal communication, however, indicate that its requestive force was previously perceived as less face-threatening, illustrating how the interpretation of politeness markers changes over time and across contexts.

Contact person: Kristin Rygg

This corpus-based study examines how multinational corporations that engage in environmentally harmful operations in Colombia - through forms of resource extraction and community engagement that would be unlikely in their home countries - frame their sustainability discourses in the Colombian context compared to their domestic settings. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis and the automated retrieval of linguistic features enable a systematic analysis of the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of these companies’ green discourse, including the deployment of buzzwords, legitimation strategies, euphemisms, and the balance between abstract and concrete language. A key aim of the project is to assess whether discrepancies emerge in their persuasive strategies, claims and objectives when operating in a country with more flexible regulations on corporate social responsibility and human rights, as compared to their practices and discourses at home.

Contact person: Margrete Dyvik Cardona

• KIAP - CULTURAL IDENTITY IN ACADEMIC PROSE: 2002-2006

  The main research question of the KIAP project was whether cultural identities in academic discourse exist, and if so, to what degree these identities can be linked to discipline or to national language.

  The aim of this project was to describe the genre of the research article with a point of departure in certain linguistic features that may point to similarities and differences between articles written in different languages and within different disciplines.

  The project was doubly comparative, since 450 refereed articles in three different languages (English, French and Norwegian) from three different disciplines (linguistics, economics and medicine) were studied. The project found that both discipline and language had an effect on the frequency of all the six features studied, but for most of them discipline turned out to be more important than language.This project was funded by the Research Council of Norway.

  Contact person: Trine Dahl

  LINGCLIM 

  LINGCLIM (Linguistic Representations of Climate Change Discourse and Their Individual and Collective Interpretations)

  The primary objective is to generate new and integrated knowledge about the role of language in climate discourse through developing an innovative multidisciplinary methodology including an opinion survey and a psychological experiment in addition to comprehensive linguistic and discursive analyses.

  This is a three year project funded by the Research Council of Norway.

  For futher information:

  LINGCLIM

  Contact person: Trine Dahl

  POLAME

  Poverty, language and media in Latin America: The cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

  POLAME is a multidisciplinary project funded by the Research Council of Norway. It aims to study the linguistic representation of poverty in Argentinean, Brazilian, Colombian and Mexican agenda-setting media in order to uncover how language use reproduces ideologically conditioned views on poverty.

   

  The project will also build a web-searchable taxonomy of the language of poverty.

  For futher information:

  POLAME

  Contact persons: Beate Sandvei and Margrete Dyvik Cardona

  CLIMLIFE

  The CLIMLIFE project studies how Norwegian citizens relate the challenges of climate

  change to their day-to-day life choices. Recent research shows that, when asked about solutions to tackle climate change, Norwegian citizens generally say “we must all contribute”. However, what does this mean more specifically? How willing are we to change our lifestyle? How do people, in particular young people, relate these challenges to their everyday life choices? We suggest that people use mainly four strategies for integrating, or not, the challenges of climate change into their lives: 1) Activism, 2) Responsiveness, 3) Resignation and 4) Rejection. The CLIMLIFE project studies these questions through a cross-disciplinary collaboration, including researchers from linguistic, media, political and natural sciences.

  CLIMLIFE

  Contact person: Trine Dahl

  MIGRATION AND THE MEDIA

  Migration and the media is a corpus-based research project which studies how media outlets, particularly newspapers, linguistically frame migrants and migration. The automated retrieval of linguistic features allows for a reliable analysis of semantic and pragmatic properties assigned to migrants across different newspaper articles. One of the main aims of this project is to ascertain whether migrants are presented in a way that influences their process of integration into their host societies.

   

  Contact person: Margrete Dyvik Cardona