'National’, ‘international’ and ‘global’ across university websites

The World Wide Web has expanded to become the world's largest content delivery system and can be thought of in terms of a global hybrid where glocal identities interact, and where promotion as a communicative function plays a relevant role. One of the consequences of the globalization of higher education is that universities use the Web as an advertising forum to appeal to local and international students like many companies and organizations that consider their homepage a virtual gateway to the world. This paper analyses a small corpus consisting of the verbal component in the ‘About us’ section of 160 British and Indian university websites focusing on the potentially evaluative function of the adjectives national, international and global. Although these adjectives cannot be considered evaluative in themselves, they seem to express to some extent the rhetorical act of evaluation conveying different meanings depending on the cultural background they are related to. The analysis has been carried out using corpus analysis software in order to observe the behaviour of the investigated adjectives as well as the relation they enter into with other words around them in terms of contribution to meaning. The preliminary results suggest that some distinctive features can be identified in the British and Indian subcorpora and that, in spite of the globalizing trends in promotional academic discourse, there seem to be differences between the two perspectives in the use of the adjectives analysed.