This paper is meant to discuss two diverse but mutually entailed goals, underpinning the analysis of media business discourse. On the one hand, it promotes a critical understanding of how gender marks discourse and encodes power in business discursive communities, thus playing a key role in “shaping the expectations about people’s behaviours” (Koller 2004: 178). On the other, it promotes an interdisciplinary approach so as to disambiguate the discursive and argumentative strategies in the construction of media content by focusing on the symbolic organization and interaction between citizens and the discursive communities, in terms of male/female representations, given the way they throw global challenges and/or replicate stereotypes and particular ways of perceiving (Carter 1994: 5) the business discourse in terms of enunciation. The contrastive analysis of a corpus of magazine texts, covering news in April and May 2011, with a large readership in the global scenario, in Portuguese and in English (Sábado, Visão, Time and Newsweek), uncovers the power imbalance created when media texts pass on stereotypical patterns of behaviour in business and everyday discursive communities.

This paper discusses the possibilities of a corpus analysis applied to literary study and interpretation. It is thus its goal to present some findings related to the disambiguation of some pronominal references, i.e. you and one, as they occur in speech and thought presentation in prose fiction, across periods in the 20th century. The texts selected are two of Virginia Woolf's novels (early and late modernist period) and one by Hugo Hamilton (in the postmodern era). The analysis benefits from a multi-layered interpretive framework drawing on discourse analysis, corpus-based approaches and literary study, particularly in that it unpacks ways in which writers make use of linguistic structures. These involve readers in a dialogic interpretation of the text's “polyphony” and “heteroglossia”, either conveying the generic pronoun reference or the protagonist's inner voice.

This paper aims to analyse a set of communicative events within the service encounter genre in tourism and leisure interdiscursive domains as displayed in course books on professional communication in English (commonly pointing to ESP). These supposedly replicate interaction in real life settings. Therefore, it is relevant to uncover the ways authentic interactions can be interpreted in the pedagogical setting of workplace conversation from a discursive and pragmatic perspective. More specifically, this empirical and exploratory study discusses ways of improving rapport management skills in interpersonal and intercultural communication, in general, and in professional interaction, in particular, in a selection of excerpts on greeting / asking for info exchanges. The study uncovers participants’ possible co-constructions of civility and politeness strategies in naturally occurring classroom discourse supported by course materials in English for glocal communication across segments in the tourism domain as object of this study.