3. Variation across spoken and written registers in internal corporate communication

Rapid developments in technology, together with dependence on electronically-mediated communication, are providing international business with new opportunities and challenges. This paper focuses on the attempts of a multinational corporation to achieve the goals of internal “employer branding” through a communications network which makes use of a variety of sub-genres and registers, written, spoken and multimodal. Three corpora will be compared and contrasted: oral presentations in audio-conference mode, a corpus of the accompanying power point slides, and a series of e-newsletters to employees. Using the textware of corpus linguistics, the mutual influence and multimodal blending between the spoken and written sub-genres will be traced, in terms of metadiscoursal structure and organization, interactional strategies, and terminological and metaphorical usage, in order to identify the written constraints on semi-formal speech production, and conversely the “speech in writing” typical of much e-mediated communication.