As mentioned in the episode, there is a lot of literature on readability in financial communication and its effects. A few selected studies are:

Both Bernard and Erika mention PhD work on financial communication. Bernard’s student Nils Smeuninx completed his thesis in 2018; the title is “Dear Stakeholder. Exploring the language of sustainability reporting: A closer look at readability, sentiment and perception”. Erika refers to a PhD study on how small investors respond to plain English as opposed to more complex or less readable text:

For her part, Veronika co-supervised a student – Xiaoxi Wu, now at Bocconi University in Milan (Italy) – with the Accounting department at Lancaster University (UK), resulting in this article: 

Erika mentions the Juno app, which is designed to explain technical financial language to lay investors. Here is the screenshot of the example she mentions:

Bernard then refers to Veronika’s first foray into financial communication and narrative accounting: 

An agentless passive, the sentence ‘mistakes were made’ helps to avoid blaming anyone for making mistakes. It has become a catchphrase, often used humorously to hint at disaster, including in gifs and memes:

Back to financial communication: Referring to the gendered metaphors that it often features, Erika mentions this book chapter:

A cross-cultural study into accounting language is 

In the first part of the episode, we also discuss tone as an important concept in financial communication. Intriguingly, media studies have shown that coverage in itself is good enough for the so-called “markets” (investors, analysts, fund managers) to have a positive attitude towards a company:

Finally, the 2019 annual report by Lockheed Martin, which includes the CEO statement that we analyse at the end of the episode, can be found here. 

We will be back in 2025, with some changes to the podcast – stay tuned!

In an episode on business (or is it corporate?) communication textbooks, we cannot help mention the one we wrote ourselves and are currently revising. The first edition of Language in Business, Language at Work is available here.

Other books that we mention in the introduction are:

Here is how ChatGPT answered Bernard’s question “Is there a difference between business communication and corporate communication?”: 

“Yes, there is a distinction between business communication and corporate communication, although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The differences lie in their scope, focus, and the context in which they are applied:

Business Communication:

Corporate Communication:

We also searched for the phrases ‘business communication’, ‘corporate communication’ and ‘organizational communication’ in large corpora of American and British English in general. Here is part of concordance (see glossary) from the British National Corpus 2014:

Still in the introduction, we then look at a critique of economic textbooks, drawing on the work of our interview guest from episode 26 (the language of corporate social responsibility Part 2):

In the  interview, Jonathan Clifton challenges the idea that “in a court of law, or in a civil court, whosoever is right is going to win, and whosoever is wrong is going to lose”. Instead he says, success depends on “how successful lawyers or defendants or witnesses, expert witnesses can marshal resources to make a convincing argument”. This echoes a scene in the film Anatomy of a Fall (2023): when the suspect assures her lawyer that “I did not kill him”, her lawyer replies: “That is not the point.” The film is much recommended – courtroom dramas don’t get better than this!

Jonathan’s book is broad in scope, ranging from legal language to football punditry. As for the latter, he mentions the popular BBC programme Match of the Day, which is hosted by former player and outspoken commentator Gary Lineker.

In the final part of the episode, we first look at advice for email writing from this textbook:

The authors of that textbook in turn quote:

The AI-generated email is too long to reproduce here (and that’s part of the problem with it), but we can include the anonymised email that Veronika received from her former student:

From: [name and email address]
Sent: 22 September 2023 12:41
To: Koller, Veronika
Subject: Qualified documents for application

Dear Veronika,

Hope you had a wonderful summer break!

First of all, I would like to express my huge gratitude to you for providing substantial support during my postgraduate application season. I really appreciate that you agreed to write a reference letter and this means a lot to my application. 

I’m writing to request your help in sending the official transcript to [university] for fulfilling the academic condition. I have been accepted to the [programme] at [university]. However, due to my health issues […] I have to defer my entry to 2024. [University] approved my deferral request and extended the deadline for submitting qualified academic evidence (i.e. my transcript and graduate certificate) to the end of September.

I sent an email a week ago to the department. However, [name of administrator] told me that the department cannot send the documents for me and I should send it by myself. I tried to download my documents from [the] dashboard, but it shows that I have no documents to be downloaded. The [University] require[s] that the documents should be sent by the department. So I am in a dilemma now. Since the deadline is approaching, would it be possible for you to give me some advice on it? 

I know you must be very busy at the start of the academic year. Thank you so much for reading this email! I really appreciate your time!

With warmest wishes,

[first name]

That’s it for this episode – see you next time! In the meantime, have a look at Jonathan’s new book: Talking for success!

After this episode, we will take a break for the rest of the year to write the second edition of Erika’s and Veronika’s textbook Language in Business, Language at Work. The revised edition will have Bernard as the third author, and we anticipate it to be available for the start of the 24/25 academic year. 

We start episode 28 by critically reflecting on anti-discrimination efforts in the workplace, which,unless they change the organisational culture, all too often do not have the desired or even an adverse effect. A study providing evidence for this is:  

We then move on to the notion of intersectionality, which linguist and writer Kat Gupta has likened to a deck of cards. 

Acronyms for diversity, equality (or, confusingly, equity) and inclusion, plus belonging and/or justice, keep changing, but the idea that belonging is the effect of DEI (to use one acronym) are often represented in a Venn diagram.

The fascinating finding that feelings of non-belonging are neurologically similar to physical pain is reported here:

Moving on to the language aspect of workplace discrimination, Bernard entions Erin Carrie’s  and Rob Drummond’s Accentism Project, which, among other things, is a real treasure trove of testimonials.  

For a light touch, we look at how film characters are stereotyped through their accents – who could forget Babs and Rocky from Chicken Run?

In another corner of the cinematic universe, the villain with a British Received Pronunciation accent is so common that he has sparked parodies in advertising. Some thoughts on the stereotypes and intercultural relations  involved can be found here. In real life, however, this particular accent is nearly extinct:

Linguistic stereotyping and accentism can have harsh consequences, for how competent someone is perceived to be to how much investor money they can attract or the severity of court sentences: 

As is usually the case, language-based stereotyping and discrimination, too, diminishes the more familiar an accent becomes: 

Our second guest, Annelise Ly, mentions the metaphor of culture as an onion with layers. This idea goes back to Geert Hofstede’s work on national cultures in the workplace:

While still influential, Hofstede’s work has been the subject of much criticism, and other metaphors have been proposed:

The complete report is available both in Chinese and in English. 

In the final part of the episode, we use Mats Deutschmann’s RAVE resource to test our own stereotypes around accents. Mats and his colleague Anders Steinvall have written about how to use the resource to counter prejudice: 

We encourage you to give it a go yourself, it’s quite an eye-opener. 

If you would like to know more about accentism and language discrimination, in the workplace and elsewhere, you could watch back this webinar that Veronika gave together with sociolinguist and consultant Maame Nikabs in November 2022. We also recommend the Lexis podcast, which often discusses accentism, e.g. in their episode 26.

Although we are now off to write the new version of the textbook, we will still be on Facebook and Twitter – and of course you can explore our by now quite substantial back catalogue. See you for episode 29 next year! 

In the introduction, we mention a number of  language-related AI applications, including DALL-E, which generates images from language prompts; Scite, which identifies references supporting or questioning research findings; ELSA, which stands for English Language Speech assistant and is meant to help language learners; Wordtune, which can rewrite texts i different “tones”; and the codings apps Copilot and CodeWhisperer, which convert language inputs into code.

Some examples of how the AI-powered version of the Bing search engine produces answers that are troubling or face-threatening are mentioned in this article.

Our interview guest, Andreas van Cranenburgh, refers to how OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, uses low-paid content moderators in developing countries, often exposing them to traumatic content. This practice was described in Time Magazine.  

Following the interview, we talk about how the notion of communicative competence needs to be extended for interactions with chatbots.  Dell Hymes published his seminal paper back in the early seventies: 

He revisited the idea twenty years later:

Hymes’ original formulation of communicative competence dates from six years after the first ever chatbot, Eliza, was developed. (It is not known if he was aware of it.) The creator of that application, Joseph Weizenbaum, named it after Eliza Doolittle, the character in Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (later made into the musical and film My Fair Lady). In that modern take on the Greek myths of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with one of his statues, a linguistics professor teaches a working-class woman how to sound upper-class. Are chatbots the malleable female creations of male developers? And why does Erika, a female user, think of ChatGPT as a man?

As they say, there is a paper in that.

And finally, here is the ChatGPT-generated text we analyse in the last part of the episode:

Dear [Customer Name],

Thank you for reaching out to us. We understand that high energy prices can be frustrating and we want to help. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Our company’s energy prices are affected by a number of factors, including changes in the global energy market and increasing demand for energy. However, we are committed to finding ways to help our customers manage their energy costs.

We recommend some simple steps to conserve energy, such as turning off lights when they’re not in use, adjusting your thermostat, and using energy-efficient appliances. Additionally, we offer a number of energy-saving programs that could help you save money on your energy bills.

We value your feedback and appreciate your loyalty. If you have any further concerns or questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,

[Your name] 

Our next episode will conclude the mini-series in CSR – see you then!

In the introduction, we mention the Yale Programme for Climate. Its most recent survey of  on public attitudes to climate change dates from 2022 and includes the following two maps:

Here, dark red indicates a higher percentage of the population worrying about climate change.

Dark blue indicates a low percentage of the population thinking that climate change will have a direct impact on them. 

The article on metaphors in climate change discourse is

This article gives a good overview of war metaphors more generally: 

We also talk about a chapter in the following book: 

The cue for our discussion about presuppositions in proverbs about pigs is taken from this article by our interview guest: 

Here are the collocations he found:

The origin of the German phrase ‘Schwein gehabt’ meaning having been lucky is not entirely clear, but may go back to a mediaeval custom to give a pig as a consolation prize to someone who had lost in a competition. 

The idea that pigs are filthy is also expressed in the film Pulp Fiction (1994), where animals consumed by humans are compared to pets. The different ways in which humans relate to animals are put into stark contrast in this row of shops in a small English town:

Our discussion of presuppositions draws on 

Our interview guest, Arran Stibbe, is the founder of the International Ecolinguistics Association and runs a free online course called The Stories We Live By. During the interview, Veronika mentions Buy Nothing Day in Britain, which is on the last Friday in November (but feel free to buy nothing on any day of the year!). 

The seminal work in ecofeminism was

while a recent article focuses on the language angle is 

In the analysis part of the episode, we report on the work on CSR reporting by a number of researchers from China. We mention some recent work that a previous interview guest, Matteo Fuoli, has done with Annika Beelitz, on the discourse of energy companies.  

Here is a two-page spread from the text we analyse, the 2021 CSR report by China Southern Airlines 2021:

The complete report is available both in Chinese and in English. 

Finally, we’d like to mention that Erika, Veronika and Bernard are working on the second edition of the Language in Business, Language at Work textbook (Bloomsbury, 2018), which will feature a new chapter on CSR. 

See you again for the third and final part of this mini-series!

Early in the introduction, Erika cites two definitions. She first cites the definition of sustainability in a 1987 report by the World Commission on Environment and Development (a sub-organisation of the United Nations) called “Our Common Future”. It can be found here. The second definition is on corporate social responsibility and taken from the website Investopedia. 

The examples we give of CSR in action, including attempts that backfired, are body-positive Barbie dolls such as these:

the “inclusive” and desexualised M&M candy figures:

and a now (in)famous Benetton advert. The latter is reproduced in Erika’s and Veronika’s textbook Language in Business, Language at Work (Macmillan Higher Education, 2018; the second edition will have Bernard as the third author):

Still in the introduction, we also mention this article on the social responsibility of business:

Every summer, the Pride season in Western countries now comes with many examples of “pinkwashing”, where companies claim to be queer-friendly, but either don’t have relevant policies or even have practices that go against LGBT equality. Some examples from 2022 can be found here. 

Towards the end of the introduction, Veronika talks about legitimation as a discourse strategy, based on these two works:

We then proceed to the interview with Garrath Williams. Two of his relevant publications are

On the links between ‘responsible’ and ‘response’, the Oxford English Dictionary has the following to say (shortened – the OED has lots of detail):

While we mention but do not elaborate on the Drink Responsibly campaign in the UK, someone else has, in a 2014 report on alcohol and the night-time economy. 

During our analysis of the ExxonMobil press release, we wonder if the company has a Chief Sustainability Officer The answer is no but it has had an external sustainability advisory panel since 2009. 

In episode 26, we’ll talk about language and the environment – see you then!

In this episode on ‘selling, hard and soft and everything in between’, we want to raise advertising literacy by showing and identifying how language and semiotics are used in marketing to influence people’s buying behaviour. In the introductory chat, it soon becomes obvious that advertising is everywhere in different shapes and forms and that all three hosts have succumbed to it: we even shamelessly do it on the podcast itself (can you spot all instances?) and we have to admit to having bought clothes, paintbrushes and ice-cream ourselves, fuelled by subtle and less subtle advertising. 

In the introduction, Erika refers to Arran Stibbe’s work, in which he analyses the discourse in textbooks on economics:

• Stibbe, A. (2020). Ecolinguistics and economics: The power of language to build worlds. World Economics Association Commentaries, 10(3), 2-7. https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/ecolinguistics/

We then move on to elusive types of advertising, where the genre is bended and blended with others so it is harder to spot. Veronika starts with an example of so-called native advertising:

Later, Bernard mentions the study below about the phenomenon: Apostol, N.-E. (2020). What is known about native advertising in editorial contexts? A descriptive literature review. Journal of Media Research 37, 59-81.

Veronika also refers to product placement and illustrates how the appearance of the Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses in the Tom Cruise blockbusters Top Gun and Maverick boosted sales (and US Navy applications).

In a similar vein, the Tom Hanks films Castaway and Forrest Gump had some not very subtle product placements:

We reference the following study, which showed that product placement is related to larger increases in online conversations on social media and more web traffic for the featured brand. The researchers also found that product placement proximity to advertising during a program can enhance the prominence of placements. Verbal placement apparently also works better than visual placement.

• Fossen, B. L., & Schweidel, D. A. (2019). Measuring the impact of product placement with brand-related social media conversations and website traffic. Marketing Science,  38(3), 481-499. DOI: 10.1287/mksc.2018.1147

Non-conventional and blended advertisements are often referred to with blended (or ‘portmanteau’) words as well: advertorials, infomercials, shopatainment. The last of these includes live sellers on video channels. A recent MA dissertation at Lancaster University addresses the phenomenon from a language point of view

• Tan, K. (2021). A corpus-based analysis on the language in Chinese livestream sales. MA dissertation, Lancaster University.

This case study of one live seller shows that, unsurprisingly, verbs and nouns closely related to purchase and discount are frequently used in livestream sales (‘buy’, ‘get’, ‘coupon’). In addition, live sellers use evaluative nouns (‘beauties’) and personal pronouns like ‘everybody’, ‘we’, etc. to address the customers. Repetitions or interactions with audiences can also be noticed. Hard and soft advertising strategies are applied in livestream sales together, to attract and persuade customers.

Sometimes sellers also simulate gaming with potential buyers:

Huang, D. (2019). A study on persuasive language in personal selling. International Journal English Linguistics, 9(2), 353-363. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ac7c/6ae3d0d6215a04e173e1081fcf3c7f0e9f4f.pdf  

In the run-down of advertising types, we also refer to basic distinctions that are often made, such as hard selling and soft selling (see title of this episode) and reason vs. tickle, which are also covered in Bernstein’s and Cook’s works:

• Bernstein, D. (1974). Creative Advertising. Longman.
• Cook, G. (ed.) (2008). The Language of Advertising (4 volumes). Routledge.

Bernard refers to the typical features of hard selling as the very recognizable aggressive tactics that centralise the product and its features and benefits, while playing on the scarcity principle and fear of missing out:

Veronika’s son, Feranmi Ayo Omoniyi, would like to be given full credit for all his research into hard-selling tactics in computer games – thank you!

Erika mentions that soft selling plays more on emotions, stories, atmosphere and associations, with the possessor reflecting the possessed. Here’s Natalie Portman’s gaze from the Dior ad that Bernard refers to:

Still in the introduction, we also mention Bhatia’s colony of promotional genres, which features both central and more peripheral members:

We then move on to the interview with Joe McVeigh, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki in Finland. You can also find him on Twitter: @EvilJoeMcVeigh (ignore the account handle, he is very nice!). We mention one of his publications during the interview (see here for more):

• McVeigh, J., (2018). Join us for this: Lexical bundles and repetition in email marketing texts. In Kopaczyk, J. & Tyrkkö, J. (eds)  Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics (pp. 213-250). Benjamins. 

Out of curiosity, we repeated his Google search “What is a subject?” and are pleased to report that we got a sound first answer:

In the analysis we look at an example each that we brought. This is the influencer post that Bernard found.

The first feminist discussion of stereotypically feminine speech features was by Robin Lakoff: Lakoff, R. (1973). Language and woman’s place. Language in Society, 2(1), 45-79.

There is also an anniversary edition of her book of the same title: Lakoff, R. (2004). Language and Woman’s Place: Text and commentaries. Oxford University Press.

 Erika’s examples are not for the squeamish:

And finally, Veronika contributes a tweet that was retweeted by the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry winner Joelle Taylor. (Her book C+nto is a poetic exploration of recent queer history)

Right at the beginning, we reminisce about previous episodes. You may want to listen (again) to episodes on crisis communication (S1E6) and on negotiations (S2E19). Later we mention two other episodes S1E7 on storytelling

and S1E11 on impression management.  

We start our topic, computer-mediated communication and identity, with Erika telling us about the very early days of the Internet. A good, accessible book on that history is:

Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1998). Where Wizards Stay up Late: the origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster.

We also mention Peter Steiner’s 199 cartoon “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”, which has become so famous that it has its own Wikipedia entry.

By The New Yorker, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13627120And just as a reminder, the Words & Actions podcast is both on Twitter (@_WordsActions_) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/WordsandActionsPodcast).

We then go on to introduce the theory for this episode, namely Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall’s work on identity construction through spoken interaction:

• Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.
• Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2010). Locating identity in language. Language and identities, 18, 18-28.

Erika gets due credit from Bernard and Veronika for her work on constructing identities in digital spaces, e.g.:

• Darics, E. (Ed.). (2015). Digital Business Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Darics, E. (2020). E-leadership or “how to be boss in instant messaging?” The role of nonverbal communication. International Journal of Business Communication, 57(1), 3-29.
• Darics, E., & Gatti, M. C. (2019). Talking a team into being in online workplace collaborations: the discourse of virtual work. Discourse Studies, 21(3), 237-257.

Still in the introduction, Bernard mentions a study on whether women prefer female bosses:

• Artz, B., & Taengnoi, S. (2016). Do women prefer female bosses? Labour Economics, 42, Pages 194-202. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2016.09.003. 

We contrast this global study with one that addresses very specific contexts:

• Baxter, J. (2015). Who wants to be the leader? The linguistic construction of emerging leadership in differently gendered teams. International Journal of Business Communication, 52(4), 427-451.

Talking about how identity can be indexed in online interaction, Veronika mentions a recent PhD thesis completed at Lancaster University:

• Triebl, E. (2021). I Am What I’m Not: a corpus-based study of negative self-identification in UK web forums. PhD thesis, Lancaster University. Available at https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/154283/

Veronika’s current research on how online identity construction works in political discourse is part of a multi-authored book on which she is lead author and that is currently under review with the publisher (so fingers crossed!). The title is Voices of Supporters: Populist parties, social media and the 2019 European elections. 

The interview guest for this episode is Alexandra Georgaopoulou, a professor at King’s College London who is known for her work on so-called “small stories” and their function in constructing identities, including online. Some of her main works are

• Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Benjamins. 
• Georgakopoulou, A. (2019). Discourse Analysis: An introduction. Edinburgh University Press.
• Georgakopoulou, A., & De Fina, A. (2011). Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge University Press. 
• Georgakopoulou, A., & De Fina, A. (Eds) (2015). The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. John Wiley & Sons. 

During the interview, she also refers to her work on selfies, on status updates on Facebook and on authenticity:

• Georgakopoulou, A. (2016). From narrating the self to posting self (ies): A small stories approach to selfies. Open Linguistics, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2016-0014
• Georgakopoulou, A. (2017). Sharing the moment as small stories: The interplay between practices & affordances in the social media-curation of lives. Narrative Inquiry, 27(2), 311-333.
• Georgakopoulou-Nunes, A. (forthcoming). Co-opting small stories on social media: A narrative analysis of the directive of authenticity. Poetics Today.

Moving on to the analysis part of the episode, we look at the social media profiles of footballer, author and campaigner Marcus Rashford: @MarcusRashford (Twitter), marcusrashford (Instagram), _marcusrashford (TikTok). The fan account in TikTok is rashford10marcus. All three accounts feature a logo based on his initials: 

In analysing the posts, we draw on a matrix first proposed for how CEOs present themselves online:

• Jameson, D. A. (2014). Crossing public-private and personal-professional boundaries: How changes in technology may affect CEOs’ communication. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 77(1), 7-30.

We start our discussion of language and technology with voice recognition. Bernard mentions a general bias towards female voices, as discussed in this paper:

Edworthy J., Hellier E., & Rivers J. (2003). The use of male or female voices in warnings systems: a question of acoustics. Noise and Health, 6(21): 39-50. 

Pitch range is also important, as demonstrated in the experiment on using different voices for sat navs that Erika mentions: 

Niebuhr, O., & Michalsky, J. (2019). Computer-generated speaker charisma and its effects on human actions in a car-navigation system experiment: or how Steve Jobs’ tone of voice can take you anywhere. In Misra S. et al. (eds) Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 11620:  375-390. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24296-1_31 

Moving from acoustics to culture, the following paper discusses how male voices are perceived as more authoritative: 

Anderson R.C., & Klofstad, C.A. (2012). Preference for leaders with masculine voices holds in the case of feminine leadership roles. PLoS ONE, 7(12): e51216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051216

It is worth sharing a few more auto-captioning gems in the lectures of Veronika and her colleagues at Lancaster University: 

“my grammar is leaving me” →  “my grandma is leading me”

“n-sizes” → “incisors”

“Hardaker and McGlashan” → “heartache and regression”

“institutional” → “it’s too slow” (truth!)

“masculine” → “mass killer” (bit harsh)

And finally, one for fans of the Doctor: 

On readability, Bernard mentions an example from accounting, namely the obfuscation hypothesis. The following paper on the topic is considered the first accounting study that uses automated textual analysis with a very large sample to address readability:

Li, F. (2008). Annual report readability, current earnings, and earnings persistence. Journal of Accounting & Economics, 45: 221–247. doi:10.1016/j.jacceco.2008.02.003 

The first of three interview guests is Joke Daems from Ghent University, whose publications include the following: 

Daems, J., Vandepitte, S., Hartsuiker, R.J., & Macken, L. (2017). Identifying the machine translation error types with the greatest impact on post-editing effort. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01282

Daems, J., Vandepitte, S., Hartsuiker, R.J., & Macken, L. (2017). Translation methods and experience: A comparative analysis of human translation and post-editing with students and professional translators. Meta: Journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 62(2): 245-270. 

We then go on to talk about sentiment analysis, which is used to find out about, for example, brand perceptions or patient satisfaction. Here is an example of the latter:

Hopper, A. M., & Uriyo, M. (2015). Using sentiment analysis to review patient satisfaction data located on the internet. Journal of Health Organization and Management, 29(2): 221-233. DOI 10.1108/JHOM-12-2011-0129

In the context of this episode, we want to distinguish between corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. Although language corpora are used to train systems in machine learning, corpus linguists engage in the computer-assisted analysis of large text collections, often combining automated statistical analysis with manual qualitative analysis. A company using such mixed corpus linguistic methods to provide their customers with insights about their products and services is Relative Insight. (We did not receive any funding from them for this episode, but they are a spin-off company that started at Lancaster University.)

A critical evaluation of another area of computational linguistics, topic modelling, written by two corpus linguists is: 

Brookes, G.,  & McEnery, T. (2018). The utility of topic modelling for discourse studies: A critical evaluation. Discourse Studies, 21(1): 3-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445618814032

(Incidentally, the above paper is also based on data about patient satisfaction.)

The PhD thesis on automatic irony detection that Bernard mentions was written by Cynthia Van Hee and is available here. 

The second interview quest is another one of Bernard’s colleagues from Ghent University, Orphée De Clercq. Her recent publications include: 

De Bruyne, L., De Clercq, O., & Hoste, V. (2021). Annotating affective dimensions in user-generated content. Language Resources and Evaluation, 55(4): 1017-1045.

De Clercq, O., De Sutter, G., Loock, R., Cappelle, B., & Plevoets, K. (2021). Uncovering machine translationese using corpus analysis techniques to distinguish between original and machine-translated French. Translation Quarterly, 101: 21-45.

And finally, we talk to Doris Dippold from the University of Surrey in the UK. Her work on chatbots can be found in: 

Dippold, D., Lynden, J., Shrubsall, R., & Ingram, R. (2020). A turn to language: How interactional sociolinguistics informs the redesign of prompt: response chatbot turns. Discourse, Context & Media, 37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2020.100432

The following screenshots of human-chatbot conversations show that more work remains to be done. See also the publication below for recent research on the performance of Facebook’s open domain chatbot Blender.

A. Seza Doğruöz and Gabriel Skantze. 2021. How ‘open’ are the conversations with open-domain chatbots? A proposal for Speech Event based evaluation. SIGDIAL 2021 : 22ND Annual Meeting of the special interest group on discourse and dialogue (SIGDIAL 2021). pp 392-402.

The episode opens with one of the guests, Krzysztof Kredens, talking about the machine metaphor for translating and interpreting, which still dominates the non-linguistic understanding of those professions. It can be linked to the famous Shannon-Weaver model of communication: first proposed by mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon in 1948 (and later popularised by fellow mathematician Warren Weaver), it conceives of communication as involving a sender or encoder, a message and a receiver or decoder. Message transmission can be affected by channel and noise. A simplified version of it looks like this:

Because human communication does not follow the rules of mathematics, this model has often been criticised as inappropriate and even distorting. Erika calls it a destructive metaphor, citing 

• Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. London: Routledge. 

Our discussion of equivalence in translation draws on the following two works: 

• Baker, M. (2011). In Other Words: A coursebook on translation. London: Routledge.

• Koller, W. (1995). The concept of equivalence and the object of translation studies. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 7(2), 191-222.

Listeners of a certain age may remember, if not Nikita Khrushchev’s wrongly interpreted words from an address at the Polish embassy in Moscow (1956), then perhaps Sting citing them in his song Russians (1985). If you fancy a musical interlude at this point, have a listen here.

When discussing pragmatic equivalence, we give an example of a direct vs. indirect speech act: in the former, a directive is used to make a request (‘Sit down’) while in the latter, the speaker uses a rogative form to realise the request function (‘Would you like sitting down?’).  

Bernard reels off a whole list of films involving translators and interpreters; the excerpt from The Interpreter (2005) that we enact can be found here, at 1:40. If you would like to watch films with a language and linguistics angle, follow @LinguistsMovies on Twitter for updates on their virtual watchalong nights.

Our main interview guest for the episode is Katrijn Maryns, whose  relevant publications include:

• Jacobs, M., & Maryns, K. (2021). Managing narratives, managing identities: Language and credibility in legal consultations with asylum seekers. Language in Society, 1-28.

• Maryns, K. (2014). The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian asylum procedure. London: Routledge.

• Maryns, K. (2017). The use of English as ad hoc institutional standard in the Belgian asylum interview. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 737-758.

In the final part of the analysis, Victoria Nydegger Schrøder analyses the values statement of the headquarters and local subsidiaries of global transport operator Keolis. Here are the screenshots from the French headquarters, Indian subsidiary, and Danish subsidiary.

Victoria kindly mentions two publications by Erika and Veronika (we did not tell her to!):

• Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2018). Language in Business, Language at Work. London: Palgrave.

• Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2019). Social actors “to go”: An analytical toolkit to explore agency in business discourse and communication. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 82(2), 214-238.

In her analysis, Victoria, among other things, comments on the use of ‘we’ and how it can refer to different groups of people throughout a text and often stay ambiguous. This feature of corporate discourse has also been observed by Veronika:

• Koller, V. (2009). Corporate self-presentation and self-centredness: A case for cognitive critical discourse analysis. In: Pishwa, H. (ed.) Language and Social Cognition: Expression of the social mind. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 267-287.

In our next episode, we will discuss machine translation and other applications in language technology – see you then!