Quantitative and qualitative analysis of institutional and professional identity

This paper focuses on the analysis of two types of identity construction in a corpus of professional speeches, namely institutional identity of the company and professional identity of the speaker. Since the corpus under study is rather large, three interesting speeches are selected on the basis of quantitative pronoun analysis. Discourse analysis of this subcorpus reveals the complexity of the techniques used to build the two types of identity. On the basis of this qualitative analysis, the hypothesis emerges that there is a very clear division between the two identities, as such completing one another: the institutional identity stresses the achievements of the company, while the professional identity emphasizes the speaker’s thoughts and critical mind. This hypothesis is tested and corroborated by the quantitative analysis of the dichotomy between agentive and epistemic self-references, the former reflecting institutional and the latter professional identity.