The paper seeks to investigate how the shift towards the ‘marketisation’ of academia, widely discussed by critical discourse scholars and researchers specialising in academic discourse, is refl ected in the genre of university admission bulletins. The study examines two sets of texts: the admission bulletins published by four Polish universities in the years 1978-1981, and the ‘Admissions/Information for candidates’ sections found at the websites of those universities in June 2014. Acknowledging the rather obvious differences between the two corpora stemming from the development of Internet technologies, the analysis focuses on the evolution of the communicative goals of the genre and its inner structure, seen as being largely determined by the external social context. The fi ndings indicate that although some of the structural elements appear to remain rather stable over time, others demonstrate a considerable tendency to being colonised by promotional functions. The linguistic/ communicative strategies realising particular moves confi rm the evolution of the genre, refl ecting the broader shift towards ‘marketisation’ of academia.

Grounded in the cognitive approach to speech act theory, whereby the boundaries between speech act categories are perceived as fuzzy, resulting in their directness/ indirectness being viewed as a matter of degree, the paper investigates the ambiguity of indirect speech acts found in the discourse of customer testimonials. The analysis is based on a corpus of 150 customer testimonials published on the home pages of 7 retailing companies offering their products online. The study reveals some interesting patterns in the persuasive/promotional use of (often ambiguous) micro speech acts contributing to the realisation of the macro-act of praising. It then attempts to rationalise customer testimonials as acts of boasting performed by organisations using customer quotes as word-of-mouth tools.

The present paper aims to discuss recruitment advertising as a promotional genre, as well as to investigate its rhetorical structure and provide a tentative comparison between job ads and the central promotional genre, i.e. marketing-type (or ‘mainstream’) advertising. Based on an analysis of a corpus comprising 400 online job advertisements, the study discusses the communicative purposes of the genre (juxtaposed with the general goals of promotional genres), and attempts to identify and describe the prevalent structural patterns found in the sample. It also offers a rough comparison between job ads and prototypical/marketing-type advertisements in terms of the rhetorical structure and other defi ning characteristics, following Bhatia (2004, 2005) and Cook (2001). The analysis confi rms numerous similarities between job advertising and the central promotional genre, yet it also identifi es major differences, particularly those pertaining to the communicative goals, structural elements (company identifi cation, targeting the market, justifying the ‘product’, offering benefits/incentives, making use of testimonials and pressure tactics), as well as other significant features including the level of ‘artistry’, the number of voices involved, generic stability, provoking controversy, being parasitic upon other genres, occupying the space at the centre/periphery of attention.

This paper aims at investigating whether the linguistic strategies and features generally attributed to academic discourse are reflected in the texts of online academic job postings, and if so, to what degree such elements make academic job ads different from their corporate counterparts. This corpus-based study focuses on job advertisements understood as samples of written academic and corporate discourses. The function that academic job postings perform for academic communities may be considered parallel to the role that recruitment ads announcing business-related positions play in corporate communities. This functional homogeneity is reflected in numerous similarities between the textual strategies used in both sub-corpora. The more ‘academic’ character of academic job postings manifests itself primarily through a higher degree of grammatical formality, and limited use of the personal voice and explicit persuasion.