Language Engineering and Media Management Strategies in Recent Wars

This book is concerned with the realisation of language engineering and media management strategies observed in recent years during wars that have been in the forefront of public opinion. These wars involved complex and dramatic issues such as humanitarian crises, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The focus is on the language used by English-speaking national and international institutions involved as key-players in these events. Although the study makes use of several sources and methodological approaches it relies principally on the analysis of political discourse supported by corpus linguistics. Predominantly, the inquiry intends to pursue the ways in which institutions try to generate, maintain and sometimes manipulate the so-called "ideology of consensus". Starting from this assumption the book focuses on three specific corpora of linguistic data. Each corpus is queried, analysed and interpreted to find evidence of the complex processes and mechanisms which have been labeled "language engineering". The study also considers those intercultural elements that are pertinent to the construct of the ideology of consensus and those elements which show a specific way of "languaging" the cultural values of the discourse communities analysed.