Corpus-Assisted Comparative Study of British Job Advertisements: Sociocultural Perspective

摘要

The paper provides a nuanced picture of discursive practices used in the professional genre of job advertisements through a comparative study of key words retrieved from adverts for leading and non-leading positions. The corpus compiled includes texts available on websites of the two national British newspapers The Times and The Guardian. The methodology of corpus linguistics is applied with the purpose to explore the semantic difference in the key word data that are used to describe requirements for leading and non-leading job categories, in this way revealing similarities and differences in the patterns of meaning that are determined by socio-cultural peculiarities of the genre. The semantic analysis shows that texts for leading positions are characterized by prevalence of lexis with meaning of power, change and planning used in the job description. Advertisements for non-leading positions comprise lexis that belong to the semantic categories of help, organization and reciprocity that focus on everyday activities. The two corpora also reveal significant differences in the way qualities and attributes of an ideal candidate are discursively construed in the two job categories. Applying the framework of Appraisal Theory, the study reveals that evaluative lexis is not evenly distributed in the two corpora. While key words specifying requirements for an ideal candidate, related to the subcategory of Capacity, are common for the two corpora, evaluative lexis related to the subcategories of Tenacity and Propriety is mainly found in the corpus of texts for non-leading jobs.