Managing Relations: a study of positioning strategies in British international discourse

This work deals with corpus-assisted research into speaker ideological positioning in the language of diplomacy. It concentrates on the resources used by the foreign minister Margaret Beckett to construe the speaker “orientation” (Lemke 1992) through the analysis of the main participant in the discourse that is international community and the subject matter being debated namely terrorism. The findings have shown assertiveness and determination from the speaker by the use of contractive mechanisms. The image of the international community is based on cooperation and unity just like a family and it is appraised mainly through judgements of tenacity. These are the resources required to fight terrorism always seen as an ever-present potential threat.