Bøger i Forum für Fachsprachen-Forschung serien

Ethics. Whether explicit or implicit, it plays a key role in our lives, guiding our decisions and shaping our view of what the world ¿ including the world of business ¿ is or ought to be like. This volume provides a thorough description of the language that is used to encode ethics, to deal with ethical issues, and to express ethical values in business and professional discourses. It explores the relationship between ethics and ethos in a variety of professional and corporate texts and genres, and investigates the role and positioning of ethics in today¿s cultural environment, shedding light on how it is negotiated vis-à-vis other values in the pursuit of business and professional goals. Thanks to its rigorous linguistic approach, the analysis fills a significant gap in the burgeoning scholarship on ethics in discourse, laying the ground for a better understanding of what ethical pronouncements do, linguistically and pragmatically.

The forms and genres of academic communication have changed considerably over the past decades - from standardised ways of producing texts on/for paper to a (less?) standardised way of communication in Web 2.0. Published papers are now available to a greater number of readers, interaction among colleagues can take place in real time via written, audio or visual formats, and it has become much more comfortable for students as well as for those outside the scientific community to access academic information and to contact its authors. It seems, however, that many aspects of academic communication have not yet changed, and its participants - either in the "old" or in the "new" generation - are ill-equipped to work within the multimedia context. This volume, therefore, takes a look at academic communication in the multimedia environment, in order to throw light on how these processes are linked to new multimedia affordances, while at the same time encapsulating old genre conventions and participant interaction with the medium.