Modelling the Construction of Corporate Identities on Social Media Across Cultures

Motivated by the research niches, this chapter is devoted to addressing the theoretical preliminaries for the empirical study by constructing a social semiotic framework for analyzing the construction of corporate identities on social media across cultures. To this end, it first introduces the evolving studies of register within SFL and registerial cartography (Matthiessen in The world told and the world shown: Multisemiotic issues. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 11–38, 2009; Matthiessen in Letras 25:15–90, 2015a; Matthiessen in Functional Linguistics 2:1–48, 2015b) in particular, which constitute the theoretical foundation of the study. It then depicts the analytical framework developed upon registerial cartography to investigate the construction of corporate identities on social media across cultures, which is followed by illustrations of all the operationalized analytical toolkits for the framework.