The language of leadership in American movies: a corpus-driven analysis with the AntConc concordancer

This paper intends to show how corpus linguistics concepts and tools can be used to reveal how language in movies is used to represent business oral communication. In particular, the analysis focuses on how leaders use spoken language to establish and negotiate their role and on how different leadership styles are constructed and represented through talk. Two leaders in the movies The Devil Wears Prada and The Intern were compared in order to investigate how they communicate with their followers. Differences in the use of personal pronouns, deontic modality and discourse markers emerged from the analysis. The results reveal that one leader tends to use a non-collaborative way of communicating and a directive style of leadership, while the other leader tends to adopt a cooperative style of leadership.