Cultural identities in international, interorganisational meetings: a corpus-informed discourse analysis of indexicalwe

To date, there have been very few studies employing corpus techniques in the analysis of intercultural interactions. This study analyses the indexing of cultural identities in international, interorganisational meetings. The approach used draws on methods and insights from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, professional communication, intercultural studies and identity studies. It explores how a statistically significant single item, we, in specialised corpora of authentic professional meetings, signals different identities at different moments in the unfolding discourse. Specifically, two research questions are answered: What cultural identities are explicitly indexed in business meetings through we?What can corpus linguistics contribute to IC studies?While the first question comprises the bulk of the paper, the second question is discussed in the final section, along with limitations of the approach applied here.