Expressions/Representations of the Relationship between the ‘State’ and the ‘Citizen’: Register Analysis of Local Government Discourse

Abstract

In this paper the discursive construction of states and citizens is examined by considering the meanings of texts in the light of Bourdieu’s (1991) notions of linguistic markets and Halliday’s (1978) notion of language as social semiotic.  Register Theory is used to provide a framework for text analysis of discourse produced by a local government institution in order to map linguistic changes onto changes in the apparent relationship between citizens, states and ‘the market’.