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The paper suggests establishing a separate sub-discipline on the crossroads of Applied Linguistics and Business Communication studies - Business Linguistics - a complex, interdisciplinary field for researching the use of language in business and verbal specifics of business communication. The author initiates the exploration of Business Linguistics, defining its key areas and practical purposes. The discursive approach is adopted to provide the basis for investigating this promising sphere, therefore a complex definition of business discourse is proposed. The author starts exploring the field of Business Linguistics by investigating the corporate websites and blogs of leading US companies - they represent all the four types identified by the author on the basis of the four types of social implications in their discursive rhetoric: (a) directly related to the development of information and communication technologies, e.g. Google, (b) manufacturers of mass market consumer goods, e.g. Coca-Cola, (c) financial sector companies, e.g. Bank of America, and (d) big oil corporations, e.g. Exxon Mobil.
Keywords: Linguistics, Business discourse, Business communication, Corporate web discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
1. INTRODUCING BUSINESS LINGUISTICS
The recent accelerated informational and technological development of society has caused a greater interdisciplinary interaction of separate fields of knowledge and has stimulated a new perspective of cross-border disciplines appearing in these zones of contact. In the linguistic sphere, examples of such cross-border disciplines are Media Linguistics, Political Linguistics, Judicial (or Legal, or Forensic) Linguistics, and Ethno-linguistics. Meanwhile, business is no less important a sphere of human activity - it concerns almost everyone. And the sublanguages of business and business communication have their specific properties that require linguistic examination.
The opponents will ask, «But isn't the language of business the same as the language in general? Do businesspeople speak another English (Chinese, German, etc) - different from 'ordinary' English (Chinese, German, etc)?» The incorrectness and fallacy of such criticism are clearly revealed with asking similar tricky questions - Do politicians or jurists speak another language - different from the 'ordinary' one? No? Still, nobody questions and doubts the existence of Political Linguistics or Forensic Linguistics and their necessity. And business communication deserves more than equal linguistic attention.
The really true answer to these questions is «No and Yes», without any internal contradiction: No - because Business English...