Given China’s rise as the world’s leading automotive producer and the radical transformation of the Russian market, societal acceptance of new market entrants remains a difficult communicative task. Against the backdrop of growing sales and persistent consumer ambivalence, this study examines how Russian consumers discursively construct, challenge, and renegotiate the legitimacy of Chinese automobile brands in online forums. Drawing on Suchman’s multidimensional legitimacy framework and Van Leeuwen’s legitimation mechanisms, we conduct a mixed-methods content analysis of 1,144 comments sampled from two leading Russian automotive platforms (2014–2023). The approach combines manual polarity coding, which traces the temporal shift from early skepticism to societal acceptance, with a thematic analysis that maps consumer narratives across the pragmatic, moral, and cognitive dimensions of legitimacy. Within each dimension, we specify the discursive strategies and linguistic means consumers use to secure (de)legitimation. The findings reveal an asynchronous legitimation process: pragmatic legitimacy, anchored in cost–benefit and reliability discourse, consolidates first; cognitive legitimacy is accomplished through normalization and historical analogies; moral legitimacy, by contrast, proves the most resistant to change, sustained by value-laden metaphors and social identity debates. We further show that legitimacy formation is not linear but a dialogic exchange between professional automotive journalism and lay consumer discourse on digital platforms. By reworking market categories through everyday communicative practices, ordinary consumers act as active legitimacy agents. Taken together, the results provide a processual, empirically grounded account of brand legitimation in transitional markets with practical implications for market entrants and policy-makers, and extend research on digital professional communication by documenting the growing weight of electronic word-of-mouth in institutional market debates.
Teaching philosophy statements (TPSs) are high-stakes promotional documents required for academic hiring, tenure, and promotion in higher education worldwide. Despite their gatekeeping function in professional academic discourse, TPSs remain an underexamined occluded genre: prescriptive writing guides offer general advice, but few empirical studies have described the rhetorical structure of authentic statements. This study addresses this gap by investigating the move-step structure and lexicogrammatical features of TPSs from an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) perspective. A specialized corpus of 46 authentic TPSs written by faculty members and graduate students from North American universities (2004-2016) was compiled and analysed using corpus-based genre analysis. Functional moves were coded in MAXQDA with an inter-rater reliability of 94.9%, and keywords and three-word n-grams for each conventional move were extracted with AntConc. The analysis identified fourteen moves across three categories (teacher-focused, classroom-focused, and teaching/evaluation process), of which five were conventional. The most frequent and cyclical move was focus on teaching practices (100%), indicating that concrete classroom examples outweigh abstract philosophical declarations. The genre proved hybrid and flexible, with no fixed move order, combining features of academic prose (prepositional-phrase n-grams) and promotional genres such as CVs and application letters. Substantial variation emerged between faculty and graduate-statement corpora: faculty privileged philosophical concepts and mentorship, while graduate students foregrounded concrete activities, technology use, and diversity. A systematic comparison with twelve prescriptive writing guides revealed partial alignment but also several moves – such as acknowledging mentors and addressing students’ difficulties – that occur in authentic texts but are absent from the guides. The study contributes a genre model grounded in authentic data, offers empirically derived lexicogrammatical resources for novice writers, and provides pedagogical implications for teacher training and ESP instruction in academic genres.
Although epistemic stance in academic discourse has been extensively researched in linguistics, relatively little is known about diachronic change and variation in its expression across disciplines, and still less about the grant proposal abstract, a genre produced under strong promotional pressure. The present paper addresses this gap by testing whether the widely reported trend towards research “hype” is reflected in the epistemic stance of grant proposal abstracts and, if so, whether it is uniform across disciplines. We examined three groups of epistemic stance expressions (hedges, boosters, and modal auxiliaries) in a 99.4-million-word corpus of openly available abstracts of successful NSF grant proposals representing seven disciplinary groups (biological sciences, computer and information science, engineering, geosciences, mathematical and physical sciences, social, behavioral and economic sciences, and education) and spanning the period 1987–2024. Using Kendall’s tau and linear regression, complemented by autocorrelation diagnostics, we established whether there is a consistent upward or downward trend in the incidence of these features in each discipline over time and estimated the size of the differences. The results complicate the picture drawn by existing discipline-specific studies of epistemic stance. Contrary to the upward trend observed in medical research abstracts, the frequency of boosters decreases consistently across four disciplines and in the corpus overall; the frequency of hedges follows a comparable downward trajectory, and modal auxiliaries decline overall, a trend accounted for largely by the high-frequency future marker will, though one that falls short of our consistency criterion, while individual modals move in opposite directions. These findings suggest that trends in the expression of epistemic stance are highly dependent on discipline and genre, and that the assumption that the language of research is becoming uniformly less cautious and more promotional merits comprehensive, cross-disciplinary empirical examination. The study contributes to ESP research by demonstrating that the promotionalisation of academic writing does not operate uniformly across professional genres and disciplines.
Verbal and visual metaphorical and metonymic images are key instruments of political satire, enabling the concise and expressive conveyance of evaluative attitudes toward socio-political realities. However, the multi-level mechanism of creating and decoding such figurative constructs in polycode cartoon texts has not yet received a systematic account. The aim of this study is to identify the stages of encoding and decoding metaphorical and metonymic images, expressed visually and/or verbally in English-language political cartoons, and to establish the role of linguistic and pictorial codes in meaning-making through conceptual integration. The empirical material comprises 200 political cartoons (100 British and 100 American) published as editorial illustrations in The Guardian and The U.S. News & World Report from May 2024 to May 2026. The study draws on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, Johnson), Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier, Turner), and the principles of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (O’Halloran); Trim’s (2024) six-level framework for monomodal political media texts is adapted to model the stages of figurative creation and decoding. The findings reveal that Trim’s six-level model is transformed into a five-level structure: cultural and political contexts are integrated at a single level, while the visual/verbal metaphor, metonymy, or metaphtonymy is distinguished as the initial decoding stage. The analysis identifies the dominance of the pictorial code and three types of intersemiotic ties between the visual figurative unit and the verbal component: weak (the linguistic element is uninformative), elaborative (the verbal code provides minor clarifications of reference and/or enhances the satirical message), and key (the linguistic component determines the reference domain of the visual image). Special attention is given to cases of metaphtonymy, in which metaphor and metonymy function inseparably within a single polycode sign. The study contributes to the investigation of metaphorical encoding and decoding stages in semiotically heterogeneous texts and opens avenues for a comparative analysis of British and American satirical traditions.
