Formulating hypothetical talk: An action-driven approach to communicating stance in business meetings

Q3 Arts and Humanities
Helena Lohrová, Almut Koester
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The article focuses on the deployment of hypothetical talk in the CANBEC and CCI corpora of business meetings and examines its use as a discursive tool for communicating stance in encounters where participants represent (potentially) incompatible positions. Through the use of hypothetical talk, interactants signal the potential for agreement and resolution by testing the other participants’ position and their preparedness to shift their view. It is argued that although talk introduced to the meeting may be hypothetical, the stance communicated is real. The analysis provides insights into actions applied to resolve impasse or conflict situations, particularly through the rhetorical move of formulating. Formulating aims to resolve or summarize talk at a particular instance in time. The act of formulating requires an evaluative step on the part of the participants in order to consider their contributions or their opposition to the formulation. It is, therefore, of interest to examine how talk that is known to be hypothetical – hence essentially unreal, speculative, potentially untrue or even counterfactual – can be allowed to feature in meetings discourse and to influence a meeting’s outcome. Two theoretical models were applied to understand this – Du Bois’s (2007) “stance triangle” and Hunston’s (1989, 1994, 2011) three functions of evaluation. These offered a new perspective on the role of hypothetical talk in business meetings, where, as the results demonstrate, hypothetical talk is used to signal stance, test that of the other participants, and advance the speakers’ goals. By integrating the two models and applying them in order to understand how hypothetical talk is formulated in business meetings, it was possible to conceptualize the process through which meeting participants evaluate and act upon talk, by making “real life decisions” upon information which has initially been introduced to the meeting as hypothetical.
制定假设性谈话:在商务会议中沟通立场的行动驱动方法
本文重点讨论了在商务会议的CANBEC和CCI语料库中假设谈话的部署,并考察了在参与者代表(潜在)不兼容立场的情况下,假设谈话作为交流立场的话语工具的用途。通过使用假设性谈话,互动者通过测试其他参与者的立场和他们改变观点的准备情况来表明达成一致和解决问题的潜力。有人认为,尽管介绍给会议的谈话可能是假设的,但传达的立场是真实的。该分析提供了对解决僵局或冲突局势的行动的见解,特别是通过措辞的修辞手法。制定旨在及时解决或总结特定情况下的谈话。制定行为需要参与者进行评估,以考虑他们对制定的贡献或反对意见。因此,我们有兴趣研究如何让已知的假设性谈话——因此本质上是不真实的、推测性的、潜在的不真实的甚至反事实的——在会议话语中发挥作用,并影响会议的结果。应用了两个理论模型来理解这一点——杜波依斯(2007)的“立场三角”和亨斯顿(198919412011)的三种评估函数。这些为假设性谈话在商务会议中的作用提供了一个新的视角,正如结果所示,假设性谈话被用来表明立场,测试其他参与者的立场,并推进演讲者的目标。通过整合这两个模型并应用它们,以了解假设性谈话是如何在商务会议中形成的,可以通过对最初作为假设引入会议的信息做出“现实生活中的决定”,对会议参与者评估谈话并根据谈话采取行动的过程进行概念化。
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来源期刊
Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis
Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis Arts and Humanities-Language and Linguistics
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
13
期刊介绍: SLing publishes original research papers in all linguistic disciplines. The primary objective of our journal is to offer an opportunity to publish academic papers and reviews to the scholars employed by the Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, however, academics from all over the world are kindly invited to publish in our periodical as well. We accept papers both theoretically- and descriptively-oriented.
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