Exploring the language and rhetoric of economics

Willie Henderson, Tony Dudley-Evans, Roger Backhouse

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

An awareness of language matters to a discipline because claims to knowledge can be made only by using language. The importance of language to philosophy is clear: much of twentieth-century philosophy has been concerned with language. The role of language has, generally, not been seen by economists as raising any significant issues. Economic methodologists have, therefore, focused on issues such as falsifi-cationism and empirical testing, not on the way in which meanings are negotiated. The pervasiveness of problems to do with language means that the problem of language has been approached from many different perspectives. In applied linguistics two approaches are of interest: discourse analysis and genre analysis. Discourse analysis aims at establishing patterns of organization of text at a level above that of the sentence; genre analysis applies this basic approach to the analysis of particular genres such as the journal article.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEconomics and Language
PublisherTaylor and Francis
Pages1-20
Number of pages20
ISBN (Electronic)9781000110715
ISBN (Print)9781138419179
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 1993 Willie Henderson, Tony Dudley-Evans and Roger Backhouse.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Economics, Econometrics and Finance(all)
  • Business, Management and Accounting(all)

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