The complementarity of two identities and two approaches: Quantitative and qualitative analysis of institutional and professional identity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of two types of identity construction in a corpus of 40 professional speeches, namely: institutional identity (of the company) and professional identity (of the speaker). Since the corpus under study is rather large, two of the most interesting speeches were selected on the basis of a quantitative pronoun analysis. A further, qualitative discourse analysis of this subcorpus revealed the complexity of the techniques used to build the two types of identity. On the basis of this qualitative analysis, it is hypothesized that there is a very clear division between the two complementary identities: institutional identity stresses the achievements of the company, while professional identity emphasizes the speaker's thoughts and critical attitude. This hypothesis is tested and corroborated by the quantitative analysis of the dichotomy between agentive and epistemic self-references, the former reflecting institutional, the latter professional identity.