ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|20 pages

The (grubby) business of words

What ‘George Clooney’ tells us

part I|2 pages

Language work and the business of words

part II|2 pages

Wordsmiths and professional language work

chapter 4|14 pages

Unwriteable discourse?

Co-crafting the language of science news

chapter 5|19 pages

Voice work

Learning about and from dialect coaches

chapter 6|24 pages

EAT, LOVE and other (small) stories

Tellability and multimodality in Robert Indiana’s word art

chapter 7|15 pages

Judges as wordsmiths

Crafting clarity and neutrality in summing-up for juries

chapter 8|14 pages

Making (up) the news

The artful language work of journalists in ‘reporting’ taboo

part III|2 pages

Linguists and political economies of expertise

chapter 9|22 pages

Framing elite knowledge in shifting linguistic economies

The case of minority language translation

chapter 10|16 pages

Beyond the academic ‘but’

The pleasures and politics of collaborative language work in the publishing industry