'The snowball of emails we deal with': CCing in multinational companies

The ability to copy in relevant stakeholders has rendered the business email a useful tool for managing interpersonal relations and operational matters. However, CCing in business email has remained vastly under-researched in workplace discourse literature, a gap this paper seeks to address. We explore the functions of CCing in workplace emails and the way formality is negotiated by writers in one organisation. We draw on the analysis of email chains and discourse-based interviews and show that employees strategically project professional achievements and assume and deny responsibility for company decisions as they shift between the sender/receiver positions in the chain

Reporting and Interpreting Intentions in Defamation Law

The interpretation and the indirect reporting of a speaker’s communicative intentions lie at the crossroad between pragmatics, argumentation theory, and forensic linguistics. Since the leading case Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., in the United States the legal problem of determining the truth of a quotation is essentially equated with the correctness of its indirect reporting, i.e. the representation of the speaker’s intentions. For this reason, indirect reports are treated as interpretations of what the speaker intends to communicate. Theoretical considerations, aimed at establishing the pragmatic meaning of an utterance and differentiating between presumptive and non-presumptive interpretation, are thus interwoven with the practical legal need of distinguishing a correct indirect report from an indirect one or a misquotation. An incorrect report or a misquotation has the dialectical effect of attributing to the misquoted party commitments that he never held, which the latter needs to rebut. This shifting of the burden of persuasion can be increased by using strategically the conflict between the presumptive interpretation of an utterance and the non-presumptive one, i.e. the different types of pragmatic ambiguity. When an interpreter is confronted with an utterance taken out of its dialogical context, his interpretative process is not guided by the actual context or intention, but rather the most frequent or prototypical dialogical setting or the most typical individual purpose that it could have served to achieve. This presumptive reconstruction can be used to provide a prima facie case that the other party needs to reject. The stronger the interpretative presumptions a speaker needs to rebut, the more effective the misquotation strategy. The conflict between the systematic and the presumptive process of interpretation can be represented as an argumentative mechanism of reconstruction of the individual intention, which allows one to assess the reasonableness of the interpretative reasoning

On the Automatic Analysis of Rules Governing Online Communities

Trabajo presentado en la 16th Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, celebrada en Trujillo (Perú), del 13 al 16 de noviembre de 2018The automatic translation of rules or legal text from natural language into formal language has gained interest in the natural language processing domain, especially in the field of law and AI. Our research goal is to be able to automatically extract, from rules in natural language, the necessary elements that define these rules, such as the action in question, its modality (duty, right, privilege, ...), the first person the rule addresses, the second person affected by the rule, and the condition (if the rule was a conditional rule). As a first step toward identifying these elements, we start by identifying the semantic subjects, verbs, and objects in sentences of online normative texts. This paper presents the SVO+ model that achieves this, and our evaluation illustrates the model’s high precision when tested with the terms of use from websites like Facebook and Twitter.Peer reviewe

Risa/Asirの行列演算の実装(II)

Problem solving (PbS) can be readily described as one of the key activities regularly performed by professionals in any workplace setting. Despite its importance, however, there is relatively little (socio) linguistic research which looks at the complex ways in which problems are constructed in discourse. This article sees the enactment of a 'problem' as a discursive phenomenon with fluid boundaries. It draws on business meeting data recorded in multinational companies in Europe and focuses on excerpts identified by the participants as having a PbS function. The data show that problem solving processes and practice are anchored to the structure of the organizations, the local history and employees' shared perceptions of professional practices and hierarchies in their workplace. The analysis also shows two focal points in the PbS talk of the participants in this study, namely identification of a problem (what the problem is) and its ownership (whose problem it is). These, however, are not predetermined starting points but rather locally constructed in relation to the status, expertise and shared/past history of the interactants