Inclusivity and exclusivity in English as a Business Lingua Franca: The expression of a professional voice in email communication

In this article, we explore the interpersonal functions of language in the field of English as a Business Lingua Franca. Our study is based on a corpus of 400 emails sent and received by 14 French professionals who use English for both internal and external communication. After reviewing the notion of positioning and its relevance in professional discourse analysis, we explore the hypothesis that English users not only adopt an L2 voice, as one might expect but, also, professional and corporate voices respectively defined by how professionals appraise situations according to the field of activities in which they are engaged and by the strategic choices made by the companies in which the exchanges occur. Our findings are based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a set of features which are believed to either “include” or “exclude” the other participants' voices.