1,720,981 research outputs found
Standardizing the Language of Corporate Internal Investigative Reports: Linguistic Perspectives on Professional Writing practices.
No full textDrawing on Bhatia's (2008) notions of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, this study examines generic and lexico-grammatical features found in a corpus of anonymised internal investigative reports produced by a large multinational company. It considers how insights gained from genre analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Partington 2008, 2013; Alessi 2013 ) may furnish the company with future recommendations in fine-tuning these reports for a previously unaccounted for external readership by lawyers and paralegals. On a more general scale, my interests attempt to illustrate how academic research findings, based on the study of existing communicative practices, might better inform, improve and shape future professional practice.
My study addresses reports produced by a large multinational corporation, which conducts internal investigations regarding problematic employee behaviour, such as misconduct, accidents, theft, complaints, and issues of compliance. These reports are based on investigator-employee interviews, which were intended only for internal use only. They may however be unexpectedly required, at a future date, for legal purposes such as in litigation cases between an employee and the company.
The company involved, expressed interest in employing external linguistic expertise - or mediation - in examining how individual reporting could be best standardized, in order to avoid detailed editing and re-writing. In an effort to establish more uniform lexical and grammatical choices amongst authors, the company hopes that the reports might create higher degrees of shared certainty and more objective evaluation of the circumstances between the various cases and investigators. A principle aim is to produce standardized documentation, which foreseeably could be better defended in court. In linguistic terms, the company is intent on imposing register variation and re-contextualizing language of these internal reports in order to create documentation, which can be legally defended while using English as a Lingua Franca.
Corpus-assisted and genre-based approaches, together with Sketch Engine applications, will provide input into describing current report macrostructure, lexico-grammatical choices, and what suggestions can be made to standardize and render reports written by international agents legally resistant. Particular attention is given to prescribing choice of reporting verbs, contents and moves of the executive summary, vague versus explicit language, expressing factuality and allegations.
References
Alessi, Glen M. "The Language of Insurance Claims Adjustments: Interviews or Interrogations?" Three Waves of Globalization: Winds of Change in Professional, Institutional and Academic Genres. Ed. Franca Poppi and Winnie Cheng. [S.l.]: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2013. 23-36. Print.
Bhatia, V. "Genre Analysis, ESP and Professional Practice." English for Specific Purposes 27.2 (2008): 161-74
Partington Alan. 2008. The armchair and the machine: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies, in Carol Taylor Torsello, Katherine Ackerley, Erik Castello (eds) Corpora for University Language Teachers, Bern: Peter Lang, 189-213.
Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid & Charlotte Taylor. 2013. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies: methodologies fro tracking language change over recent time.
Full text linkThis paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three ‘sister’ corpora of parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the research team to which the author belongs (the SiBol group) for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the paper.
The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or ‘quality’ newspapers. Given the important role of newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of various social and cultural themes and issues, ranging from what is seen as a moral issue, to the rhetoric of appeals to science, to how antisemitism is debated, has developed over the time period in question. The concluding section discusses the relationship between the methodologies employed in modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies and wider scientific research methodology.
SiBol is a portmanteau of Siena and Bologna, the two universities involved in initiating the project. http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/clb
Genre Analysis of Medicine Information Leaflets
No full textThis study identifies generic features in medicine information leaflets and reveals insights in to how they successfully acheive their communicative tasks. It includes a comparative analysis beteen an Italian medicine information leaflet and and a comparative English leaflet, revealing how culturally both the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industries use distinctive discursive strategies when producing leaflets. It includes a brief summary of considerations in defining genre analysis is followed by detailed discussion of the corpus, methodology, pattern analysis, and conclusions
Business English as a Lingua Franca in Chinese-Italian Business Negotiations: A corpus-assisted case study of communicative strategies.
No full textThis is a corpus-assisted analysis of English used as a Lingua Franca in the context of spoken business communications between Italian and Chinese interlocutors. It examines communicative strategies used during negotiations between a small Italian toy-marketing firm and their Chinese suppliers. The focus of the study is to examine how Italian importers and Chinese exporters employ spoken conventions during negotiations in a workplace BELF context to achieve cooperation and to avoid miscommunication. It also points what might be considered the communicative shortcomings in the negotiation and suggests corrective measures to the Italian company on how future interaction might be better informed
The Use of Metadiscourse in EAP Presentations by Native Italian Speakers
No full textThis paper intends to explore one of the key-genres of academic discourse, i.e. research presentations. In particular, the study analyses the use of metadiscursive techniques on the part of Italian native speakers, by showing that this device contributes to a more effective organisation of information in delivering presentations
Whose loss? Whose fault? The language of insurance claims adjustments, from interview to final report
No full textInsurance adjusters in the United States act as independent third parties, interviewing accident victims to establish an accurate report of events and to judge whether the testimony is reliable. In this context, this work serves as an investigation of how to contextualize the language of insurance claim adjustments, in the attempt to identify areas of linguistic inquiry and to highlight the relationship between assessment interview questioning and interrogation questioning. On the basis of both an oral and a written corpus, the analysis reveals the presence of highly predictable wording, formulaic question types and sequencing of interrogatives to establish and confirm shared knowledge in the telephone interviews. In addition, data show that reporting verbs are often used in reports in order to skilfully qualify information reported in the prior sentence as being tenous. Overall, findings suggest that language use in the setting of insurance claims points to generic hybrids defining themselves somewhere between neutral business sector institutional discourse and investigative paralegal discourse
The language of insurance claims adjustments: interviews or interrogations
No full textThe Language of Insurance Claims Adjustment Interviews: interviews or interrogations?
Glen Michael Alessi Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Insurance adjusters in the United States act as independent third parties, interviewing accident victims in order to establish both an accurate report of events as well assess degrees of testimony reliability. The resulting information helps in determining who is at fault, and influences assigning liability for damages. Adjusters are hired by insurance companies to provide impartial expertise in accurately reporting the context, sequence, conditions and chronology of events involved in the accident. When impossible to conduct a face to face interview at the scene of the accident, interviews are conducted via telephone. The interviews follow a predictable sequence of guided semi-scripted questions on the part of the adjuster and unscripted recall on the part of the interviewee.
The study here presented is based on spoken corpus of 17 taped and transcribed adjuster-victim interviews comprising 98,936 tokens . It describes the discourse features found in these assessment interviews and compares them with features found in police interrogations.
Initial observations revealed highly predictable formulaic question types and sequencing of interrogatives which establish and confirm shared knowledge. Adjusters encourage spontaneous and unsolicited information through open questions only after confronting factual minimal response answers from closed questions. Open questions may elicit more detailed yet tenuous information along with unsolicited answers, contradictions, silences or corrections ; which, as in interrogations, may prove self-accusatory and influence establishing reliability of testimony and assigning fault.
Interviews began with closed questions requiring minimal standardized responses. Further on, questions evolved into open questions requiring more detailed yet tenuous information, evaluation and occasional interpretation by interviewee. “ So” questions implying accusation or a presumably shared assumptions were generally used more to restate and summarize information given by the interviewee in the previous turn. The adjuster firmly manages the conversation and elicits information through careful back-channelling, topic management, turn-taking, name repetition, tags, and selection between characterisation and relational identifications or numerical and official identifications.
References
Buenker, Josef F. The Interpreter's Guide to the Vehicular Accident Lawsuit. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Print.
Drew, Paul, and John Heritage. Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge [England: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.
Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise. Professional Discourse. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
Heydon, Georgina. The Language of Police Interviewing: a Critical Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Holt, Elizabeth, and Rebecca Clift. Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
Koester, Almut. Workplace Discourse. London: Continuum, 2010. Print.
Magarick, Pat. Casualty Investigation Checklists. New York, NY: C. Boardman, 1985. Print.
Martin, Warren. "Warren, M. 2009. The Phraseology of Intertextuality in English for Professional Communication. Language Value 1/1: 1-16." Language Value 1.1 (2009): 1-16. Print.
Pomerantz, Anita. "Descriptions in Legal Settings." Ed. Button Graham. Print. Rpt. in Talk and Social Organization. Ed. John R.E. Lee. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1987. 226-43. Print.
Shuy, Roger W. The Language of Confession, Interrogation and Deception. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1998. Prin
Frequently Asked Questions : Who writes them and why?
No full textThis paper outlines the initial steps taken to explore key linguistic and communicative features of online FAQs, as found on e-commerce websites. More specificallty, it focuses on lexical, grammatical and discourse patterns which reveal potential authorship, i.e. the customer, the company or a form of co-authorship
Reading for Research in Psychology
No full textThis Volume is for elementary and intermediate level students who are studying for a degree in Psychology. The aim is to help students to read texts in English more efficiently. This could be for research purposes, for example writing dissertations, or also in their daily work lives. Students are introduced to a variety of texts, mainly specialist or semi-specialist, and their attention is drawn to characteristics of each particular type, in terms of format, overal organisation and language. Topics covered include such issues as educational psychology, social psychology, stress, dreams and nightmares, alcoholism and eating disorders
Two ways of sticking together and getting along in discourse: propositional cohesion and evaluative cohesion.
No full textIn this paper, we intend to describe two systems of what is often referred to as ‘standard’ cohesion, namely entity/propositional cohesion and evaluative cohesion, the first of which has been far more extensively analysed in the discipline of linguistics, especially, grammar, than the latter. Cohesion means, of course, ‘sticking together’. According to Thompson (1996:147-??) cohesion teaches a ‘set of resources’, which ‘the speaker [writer] attempts to employ to enable the listener [reader] to make sense of a piece of communication by ‘organizing the ways in which the meanings are expressed’, by having them connect together in some way. Here we have to underline that the kind of ‘meanings’ held together in standard cohesion practice range from simple entities, objects, people, places to more complex propositions encapsulated in lengthy stretches of text. ‘Standard” cohesion, then affords a set of tools and techniques by which the the speaker [writer] hopes to make the flow of text comprehensible (often named ‘coherent’) to an audience and, in some forms of texts, also engaging.
However, the study of standard cohesion can tell us a great deal about how a text is rendered coherent, but it sheds little light on the communicative (the perlocutionary) intents of the speaker [writer] in the first place, that is, why and what it is they wish to communicate and how. A vast amount of human communication involves the expression of evaluation; in essence the appraisal of an entity as good or bad, though good or bad in an infinity of different ways. We very rarely discuss entities or propositions without evaluating them in some way. Indeed the presentation and arrangement of information without the speaker [writer] evaluation would not only by very dry but largely uninformative on an interpersonal level.
Texts then are also held together, they cohere, in terms of the evaluations they express, and it is the study of evaluative coherence (sometimes referred to as evaluative harmony) which sheds light on what speakers [writers] intend to do when they communicate to others. As Aristotle noted, human communication largely consists in attempts to connnect with and to influence the beliefs and even behaviour of other people (Partington, Duguid and Taylor 2013 ??), in other words, to persuade them (of everything from the fact that you are a person worth listening to, to how they should spend their money, to how they should vote.)
In order to study how evaluative cohesion functions in detail, we will utilise concordancing of relevant lexical items, lexical templates often called units of meaning, as they appear in the Siena-Bologna (SiBol) Modern Diachronic Corpora suite of corpora. This consists of four sister corpora, the first three of UK newspaper texts from different but contemporary periods in time, designed and compiled to be as alike as possible to eliminate potentially complicating variables. They contain all the articles published by the three main UK broadsheet or so-called ‘quality’ newspapers, namely The Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian in the years 1993 (the SiBol 93 corpus), 2005 (the SiBol 05 corpus) and 2010 (the SiBol 2010 corpus). They contain, respectively, circa 100 million words, 150 million and 140 million words. The 2013 corpus wave, instead, contains the output of that year of 12 English language newspapers, including the original The Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian plus two UK tabloids, the Mirror and the Mail, two US newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Times of India, the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Daily News (Egypt), Gulf News (UAE), This Day Lagos (Nigeria). It contains a total of 327 million words
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