Wor(l)ds and meanings in the language of British and Indian university websites

Abstract

The global economy is having a tremendous impact on higher education due to increased trade, investment and mobility of people across borders. Making reference to recent studies which underline the potential of corpus linguistic methodologies for the study of language as a social phenomenon, this dissertation focuses on word meaning (some of the words analysed are 'international' and 'quality') in a small specialized corpus consisting of the About us section of 340 British and Indian university websites. The results suggest that some distinctive features can be identified in the two subcorpora and that differences in the cotextual environment seem to be related to different perspectives in the contextual environment.