ABSTRACT
In modern democracies, governments produce vast amounts of text, talk and images that are made available to the public: news releases, social media postings, policy documents, televised speeches, broadcast interviews, advertisements, and so forth. In this chapter, I provide suggestions as to how communication practices of executive government institutions could be conceptualised and operationalised for a discourse-analytic study. I delineate several competing ways in which scholars have written about government communication, flesh out three example analyses of government officeholders' strategic language use, and point at some conflictual aspects of government communication that would merit further linguistic study.
