Pragmatic uses of person pro-forms in intercultural financial discourse: a contrastive case study of earnings calls

The important role of person pro-forms in establishing interpersonal relations has long been recognized. During interaction, person pro-forms act as indexicals whose referents are determined by the context in which they are used. This study focuses on the pragmatic functions of first and second person pro-forms in earnings calls, now the primary channel for oral financial reporting in the corporate world. Earnings calls consist of presentations by company executives followed by question-and-answer sessions with financial analysts who participate via teleconferencing. A contrastive case study based on the earnings call of an Italian company and a US company was undertaken to provide insights into how person pro-forms are used in ICT-mediated financial discourse when English is used as a common language. Text analysis software was used to descriptively analyze person pro-forms. In addition, the two datasets were manually examined to identify pragmatic functions that could shed light on interpersonal relations and participant roles. Overall, person pro-form usage was closely aligned with the distinct objectives of the participants as either ‘information seekers’ or ‘information providers’. However, some interesting differences suggest that the Italian executives had a more interpersonal approach to the interaction compared to the American executives. This could be influenced by the importance of relationships in the Italian culture, but could also reflect strategic choices to achieve professional goals. The findings can be used to help both corporate professionals and students of management and finance acquire a better understanding of the pragmatics of person pro-forms, and thus become more effective communicators in intercultural contexts

Hyphenated Phrasal Expressions in Fashion Journalism: A Diachronic Corpus-assisted Study of Vogue Magazine

Following Barthes’s seminal Système de la Mode, there have been relatively few studies focusing on fashion journalism from a linguistic perspective. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of hyphenated phrasal expressions (HPEs) of three or more constituents in the American edition of Vogue. The Vogue corpus covers a timeframe from 2003 to 2019 to provide diachronic insights. Corpus software was used to extract and analyse all hyphenated phrasal expressions. Results showed a general rise in usage over time, with most functioning as adjectives in line with the descriptive and evaluative purposes of fashion journalism. A wide range of structural patterns reflected richly detailed and striking mental images (i.e., *-and-*, *-meets-*), multiple roles (i.e., *-slash-*, NP-NP-NP), and novelty [(*)-of-the-moment, *-to-be]. Extensive clause-like HPEs offered a particularly interesting window on the writing talents of this discourse community. The study provides a useful benchmark for contrastive studies aiming to understand to what extent HPE usage in American Vogue may influence the writing style of journalists of other language backgrounds, with particular reference to Italian fashion journalism

Challenges and Opportunities in Accessing Discourse Data in Business Settings: Some Reflections on Research Experiences

This article offers some refl ections on research experiences in relation to both challenges and opportunities involved in gaining access to authentic corporate data, also in situations where direct personal contacts within companies are lacking. Business organizations are highly intent on protecting their confidentiality and sensitive information, and are thus notoriously reluctant to open their doors to ‘outsiders’. Clearly, this sceptical attitude represents a challenge for discourse analysts who focus on business genres that are produced within companies. The discussion will also include insights gleaned from contacts with a professional who operates externally to companies, but was nonetheless able to shed interpretive light on the results of an analysis and possible motives behind access challenges, while suggesting strategies for going forward. With reference to opportunities, I reflect on an interdisciplinary research experience with colleagues from the field of marketing that provides a fresh perspective on acquiring data in a non-intrusive way. This research highlights the fruitful combination of marketing research processes and in-depth language study in order to collect and analyse data of interest to companies, while exploring new ways to connect business discourse research with professional practice

The Nuances of Brand Personality: A Corpus-assisted Linguistic Analysis of Web-based Communications of Fashion Brands

The ability to establish a particular brand personality (i.e. a set of human personality traits that consumers associate with a brand) is a key component of fashion brand management and communication. A given fashion brand may use language that communicates different personality traits (e.g. glamourous, exciting, youthful, exotic) as a way to define its own personality and distinguish itself from other fashion brands. Based on a corpus consisting of company-produced texts collected from the websites and Facebook pages of over 100 fashion brands, this study aimed to determine which traits of brand personality emerge, which are the most frequent, and which nuances of meaning can be identified within them. This was accomplished by means of text analysis software that identifies statistically significant semantic domains to which conceptually-related lexical items are assigned. The analysis revealed 14 key semantic domains that were linked to various brand personality traits. Among the most prominent were Judgement of appearance: Positive, Time: New and young, Relationship: Intimacy and sex, and Unexpected, highlighting not only the traditional importance attributed to attractiveness, but also to sensuality and non-conventionality as desirable traits of fashion brand personality. Other distinctive traits that emerged as significant involved exclusivity (encoding the value of elitism) and iconicity (emphasizing high stature and uniqueness). The study offers insights into how fashion brands utilize web-based communications to convey brand personality. It also offers a useful methodology that fashion companies can adapt to ensure that they are effectively communicating the intended brand personality

The Pisa Audio-visual Corpus Project: A multimodal approach to ESP research and teaching

This paper presents an ongoing project sponsored by the University of Pisa Language Centre to compile an audiovisual corpus of specialized types of discourse of particular relevance to ESP learners in higher education. The first phase of the project focuses on collecting digitally available video clips that encode specialized language in a range of genres along an ‘authentic’ to ‘fictional’ continuum. The video clips will be analyzed from a multimodal perspective to determine how various semiotic resources work together to construct meaning. They will then be utilized in the ESP classroom to increase learners’ awareness of the key contribution of different modes in specialized communication. We present some exploratory multimodal analyses performed on video clips that encode instances of political discourse across two different genres on the extreme poles of the continuum: a fictional political drama film and an authentic political science lecture

Business English as a Lingua Franca in Advertising Texts in the Arabian Gulf: Analyzing the Attitudes of the Emirati Community

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how organizations communicate with external stakeholders, such as consumers. Recent studies have looked specifically at consumer response to the use of English in advertising texts in a number of different European countries. The use of English in such texts is part of a commonly used marketing strategy to standardize advertising campaigns that builds on the assumption that English is not only neutral but also widely understood. This article presents the results of a survey of the attitudes of Emirati consumers toward the use of English in advertising texts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The survey findings are discussed in terms of the unique social and cultural fabric of the modern-day UAE, as well as of the Emirati community as an economically powerful Muslim population. © The Author(s) 2013

Exploring brand associations: an innovative methodological approach

Purpose The objective of this exploratory study is to propose a new methodological approach to investigate brand associations. More specifically, the study aims to show how brand associations can be identified and analysed in an online community of international consumers of fashion in order to determine the degree of matching with company-defined brand associations. Design/methodology/approach The methodology is two-pronged, integrating qualitative market research techniques with quantitative text mining. It was applied to determine types and perceptions of brand associations among fashion bloggers with reference to three leading Italian fashion houses. These were then compared to brand associations found in company-generated texts to measure the degree of matching. Findings The results showed consistent brand associations across the three brands, as well as substantial matching with company-defined brand associations. In addition, the analysis revealed the presence of distinctive brand association themes that shed further light on how brand attributes were perceived by blog participants. Practical implications The methods described can be used by managers to identify and reinforce favourable brand associations among consumers. This knowledge can then be applied towards developing and implementing effective brand strategies. Originality/Value The authors propose an interdisciplinary approach to investigate brand associations in online communities. It incorporates text mining and computer-assisted textual analysis as techniques borrowed from the field of linguistics which have thus far seen little application in marketing studies, but can nonetheless provide important insights for strategic brand management

Brand personality alignment and consumer engagement to define competitive positioning in online fashion communities: An interdisciplinary methodology

New communication challenges for companies that use social media are: 1) the knowledge and control of the degree of alignment between communicated and perceived brand personality in order to measure the effectiveness of competitive positioning, and 2) the measurement of engagement among consumers who share comments about brands in online communities. Our research proposes research tools that can help fashion companies meet these challenges. In particular, we present an innovative methodological approach that combines netnography and text-mining to extract and analyze data from online communities of fashion brands

Multimodality and financial communication: The case of earnings calls

Earnings calls are now the primary channel for oral financial reporting in the globalized corporate world. During these events, teams of executives present their companies’ economic results to professional financial analysts within an audio teleconference setting. The presentations are followed by Q&A sessions with the analysts allowing them to interact directly with the executives. Research on this genre thus far has focused on their linguistic features, with little attention to their prominent multimodal dimension, which incorporates a unique blend of verbal and non-verbal input. Using a case study approach, I analyse all the semiotic resources that come into play during an earnings call of a leading European telecommunications company, with particular attention to the intersemiotic complementarity of the various modes, including prosodic features of the participants’ vocal production and accompanying visual supports with numerical data, graphics, and images. The findings showed that the earnings call combined verbal and non-verbal semiotic resources which are interdependent and cannot be fully understood in isolation. Moreover, a smooth shifting between verbal and visual modes without explicit cuing suggested a consolidated and mutually understood protocol for utilizing various modes and media. The prosodic features of the participants’ speech appeared to convey pragmatic meanings linked to both authoritativeness and tentativeness, depending on the sometimes conflicting goals of analysts who request information and executives who may or may not want to provide it. The findings of the study can be used to inform financial communication courses that aim to train future company executives and financial analysts

Phrasal verbs in academic lectures. Some semantic and pragmatic insights from a corpus-assisted analysis

Phrasal verbs are notoriously challenging for L2 learners of English, especially when such composite structures are not present in their native languages. Features of phrasal verbs that can create considerable comprehension issues include varying degrees of semantic opaqueness and high levels of polysemy, as well as the dynamic nature through which new forms and meanings frequently emerge. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of phrasal verbs in academic lectures as a spoken genre that requires listeners to process complex and abstract content in real time. The transcripts of 15 multi-disciplinary lectures collected from the OpenCourseWare web sites of Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were analysed with corpus methods, including part-of-speech tagging, in order to shed light on the use of phrasal verbs in terms of forms, meanings, and patterns of usage, with a view to those that may be problematic for L2 listeners. Results showed that phrasal verbs were quite frequent, while also displaying substantial variation in form and with roughly half having figurative meanings. Further contextual analysis of figurative phrasal verbs revealed instances of pragmatic strengthening to both expand on core meanings and communicate speaker attitude. The article concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of the analysis, with attention to strategies for helping L2 learners more effectively cope with the difficulties of phrasal verbs