This volume is a collection of empirical studies investigating the ways and means through which culturally-shaped identities are manifested in and through discourse in documents and texts from multiple spheres of social action. It also looks at possible ways in which understanding and acceptance of diverse cultural identities can be moulded and developed through appropriate education. Language being one of the most evident and powerful 'markers' of cultural identity, discourse and text are sites where cultures are both constructed and displayed and where identities are negotiated. The approaches to the analysis of culture and identity adopted here to account for the multifaceted realisations of cultural identities in the texts and documents taken into consideration span from multimodality, to discourse and genre analysis, to corpus linguistics and text analysis. The volume then offers a varied picture of approaches to the scientific enquiry into the multifaceted manifestations of identity in and across national, professional, and disciplinary cultures.

Professional identities are not only constructed through discourse, but can also be studied and analysed through discourse and communication behaviour, which is probably the most powerful resource available for the understanding of their nature and function. The present volume investigates the ways in which the discourses produced in a variety of professional contexts, especially in business, legal and institutional spheres of action, shape and manifest professional identities. The focus of the studies in this collection is on whether, and to what extent, the in-group identity of a given professional community and the norms elaborated by it affect the communicative behaviour of the individual participant or whether, and to what extent, the professional communication is also affected by the participant's specific objectives in the performance of that professional practice. Most of the studies reported here employ discourse and genre analytical and corpus linguistics tools to highlight the ways and means by which discourses contribute to the analysis of typical identity traits of various professional communities to provide some account of the way members of these professional communities strategically manipulate linguistic resources to achieve their professional objectives.

The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language and legal culture has had to adjust to legal concepts very different from those of the English law system. Many of the papers were inspired by two major projects on legal language and inter-multiculturality: Generic Integrity in Legislative Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts based in Hong Kong and carried out by an international team and Interculturality in Domain-specific English, a national project supported by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research, involving research units from five Italian universities.

The studies collected in this volume contribute to shedding light on the multi-faceted complexity and stratification of identity within the context of corporate communication, by definition characterized by the interplay and intersection among genres, discursive practices and communicative events involving both individual and collective actors. The texts investigated include openly promotional genres specifically aimed at constructing and promoting a company's image in the marketplace, such as those used in sponsorship and advertising, as well as organizational genres which in spite of their primarily operational purpose also incorporate cues aimed at the planned self-representation of the enterprise. The arguments presented in the various chapters and the research results supporting them bring evidence to the crucial role discourse plays in the construction of corporate identity at all levels.

The notion of 'genre' has established itself as a key concept in many disciplines and fields as a means of describing social action and/or recurring patterns of form. Recent social and technological changes are driving the emergence of new genres, the evolution of traditional ones as well as variation within them. In this volume a range of approaches addressing the evolution of genre are presented. Many draw on corpus analysis of the lexicogrammatical features employed in the communicative artefacts addressed; several extend traditional corpus analysis to include non-linguistic or extra-linguistic features involved in multimodal communication. Connections with social theories are discussed, as is the notion of families or groups of genres co-existing within broader constellations. Genres are examined in detail for their linguistic and non-linguistic realisations and forms of expression across related genres and within the 'same' genre when subjected to differing social or medial constraints or possibilities. In all cases, we see how genre continues to function as an effective tool for following communication as it, its contexts of use, and its social functions evolve.