The Language Around quality in British and Indian University Websites

The increasingly entrepreneurial attitude of public universities has had a significant impact on higher education discourse, where the rhetoric of the free market is manifested not only in business-related lexis, but also in the promotional culture that permeates university websites. This paper analyses a corpus consisting of the verbal component in the ‘About us’ section of 340 British and Indian university websites exploring how universities create and project their corporate culture in relation to the issue of academic quality. Within a view of discourse as social practice and drawing on recent developments in the use of corpora that stress the potential of corpus linguistic methodologies for the study of social meanings and the construction of social reality, the study focuses on the investigation of lexis associated with the word quality. Particular attention is devoted to potential differences in the relationship between macro-level social phenomena and micro-level linguistic features that emerge in the two subcorpora. The analysis, carried out using corpus analysis software, aims to observe both typical collocational behaviour and meaning relations revealed by wider stretches of text.