Shifting identities: Executives’ use of first-person pro-forms in financial Q&A sessions


Abstract


An important function of company executives is to communicate the corporate identity, or the vision, values, and defining attributes of their organizations. Yet we know that identity is often a multi-faceted phenomenon that is dynamically constructed during interaction, involving aspects of both collective identity as a member of a group and individual identity as the expression of self as a unique person. This study aims to identify the different facets of executive speakers’ identity that emerge during the Q&A sessions of earnings calls as a key oral business genre during which teams of executives interact with financial analysts who participate via teleconferencing. The dialogic Q&A sessions follow prepared monologic presentations delivered by executive teams and are relatively impromptu in nature, thus providing for a rich interactional context. The data for the study consist of the transcripts of the Q&A sessions of the quarterly earnings calls of ten major US-based companies. The analytical approach integrates both quantitative and qualitative methods to tease out the linguistic expression of identity in the form of the first person pro-forms we, us, our, ours, I, me, my and mine. Previous research on the pragmatic functions of such pro-forms has suggested that they are important indexical expressions that serve to establish roles and relationships in situated interaction, and therefore act as markers of identity. Text analysis software was used detect first person pro-forms as particularly prominent features of the Q&A sessions and then to investigate patterns of usage through cluster analysis. Follow-up qualitative analysis of the most frequently used pro-forms in their context of usage revealed a range of nuanced identities that involved both institutional and organizational identities (plural forms), as well as individual and professional identities (singular forms), which allowed the executives to effectively interact with the financial analysts, in order to respond to challenging questions and convey a message that promotes both the company and themselves as successful business leaders. The findings of the analysis can be applied in financial communication courses to help aspiring executives acquire competence in the effective use of first person pro-forms.

 


DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v39p67

Keywords: inancial discourse; earnings calls; first person pro-forms; identity; corpus methods

References


Aijmer K. 1997. I think: An English modal particle, in Swan T. and Westvik O. J. (eds.), Modality in Germanic Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 1-47.

Aktas N., De Bodt E., Bollaert H. and Roll R. 2010, CEO narcissism and the takeover process, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1638972 (20.05.2020).

Amernic J. and Craig R. 2013, Leadership discourse, culture, and corporate ethics: CEO-speak at news corporation, in “Journal of Business Ethics” 118 [2], pp. 379-394.

Amernic J., Craig R. and Tourish D. 2010, Measuring and Assessing Tone at the Top Using Annual Report CEO Letters, The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Baker P. 2006, Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis, Continuum, London.

Bargiela-Chiappini F. and Harris S.J. 1997, Managing Language: The Discourse of Corporate Meetings. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Biber D., Johansson S., Leech G., Conrad S. and Finegan E. 1999, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Longman, London.

Brown A.D. 2001, Organization studies and identity: Towards a research agenda, in “Human Relations” 54, pp. 113-121.

Bull P. and Fetzer A. 2006, Who are we and who are you? The strategic use of forms of address in political interviews, in “Text & Talk” 26 [1], pp. 3-37.

Del Lungo Camiciotti G. 1998, Financial news articles and financial information letters: A comparison, in Bondi M (ed.), Forms of Argumentative Discourse. Per un’analisi linguistica dell’argomentare, Clueb, Bologna, pp. 195-205.

Connor U.M. and Moreno A.I. 2005, Tertium Comparationis: A Vital Component in Contrastive Rhetoric Research, in Bruthiaux P., Atkinson D., Eggington W.G., Grabe W. and Ramanathan V. (eds.), Directions in Applied Linguistics Essays in Honor of Robert B. Kaplan, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, pp. 155-164.

Cornelissen J.P., Haslam S.A. and Balmer J.M.T. 2007, Social identity, organizational identity and corporate identity: Towards an integrated understanding of processes, patternings and products, in “British Journal of Management” 18, pp. S1-S16.

Crawford Camiciottoli B. 2009, “Just wondering if you could comment on that”: Indirect requests for information in corporate earnings calls, in “Text & Talk” 29 [6], pp. 661-681.

Crawford Camiciottoli B. 2011, Ethics and ethos in financial reporting: Analyzing persuasive language in earnings calls, in “Business Communication Quarterly” 74 [3], pp. 298-312.

Crawford Camciottoli B. 2019, “Let’s have that conversation on next quarter’s call”: (Dis)Engagement markers in Q&A sessions of earnings conference calls, in Sancho Guinda C. (ed.), Engagement in Professional Genres, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 137-153.

De Fina A. 2003, Identity in Narrative. A Study of Immigrant Discourse, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Den Hartog D.N. and Verburg R.M. 1997, Charisma and rhetoric: Communicative techniques of international business leaders, in “The Leadership Quarterly” 8 [4], pp. 355-397.

Fairclough N. 2003, Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research, Routledge, London/New York.

Fitzsimmons T.W., Callan V.J. and Paulsen N. 2014, Gender disparity in the C-suite: Do male and female CEOs differ in how they reached the top?, in “The Leadership Quarterly” 25 [2], pp. 245-266.

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich P. 2010, Who “We” Are: The Construction of American Corporate Identity in the Corporate Values Statement genre, in Ruiz-Garrido M.F., Palmer-Silveria J.C. and Fortanet-Gomez I. (eds.), English for Professional and Academic Purposes, Rodopi, New York, pp. 121-137.

Godfrey J.J., Holliman E.C. and McDaniel J. 1992, SWITCHBOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development, in “ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing” 1, pp. 517-520.

Harwood N. 2005, ‘We do not seem to have a theory… The theory I present here attempts to fill this gap’: Inclusive and exclusive pronouns in academic writing, in “Applied Linguistics” 26 [3], pp. 343-375.

Ho V. 2010, Constructing identities through request e-mail discourse, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 42 [8], pp. 2253-2261.

Holmes J. 2005, Story-telling at work: A complex discursive resource for integrating personal, professional and social identities, in “Discourse Studies” 7 [6], pp. 671-700.

Hyland K. 2005, Metadiscourse, Continuum, London.

Johnstone B. 2008, Discourse Analysis, Blackwell, Malden.

Kärkkäinen E. 2003, Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of Its Interactional Functions, With a Focus on I Think, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Levinson S.C. 1983, Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Martin J.R. and White P.R.R. 2005, The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Melewar T.C. and Wooldridge A. 2001, The dynamics of corporate identity, in “Journal of Communication Management: An International Journal” 5 [4], pp. 327‐340.

Mey J.L. 2001, Pragmatics. An Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford.

Miller J. 2006, Spoken and Written English. In Aarts B. and McMahon A. (eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 670-691.

Poncini G. 2004, Discursive Strategies in Multicultural Business Meetings, Peter Lang, Bern.

Rounds P.L. 1987, Multifunctional personal pronoun use in an educational setting, in “English for Specific Purposes” 6 [1], pp. 13–29.

Ruiz-Garrido M.F., Fortanet-Gómez I., and Palmer-Silveira J.C. 2010, Introducing British and Spanish Companies to Investors: Building the Corporate Image Through the Chairman’s Statement, in Aritz J. and Walker R.C. (eds.), Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communication, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, NJ, pp. 159-178.

Scollon R. and Scollon S.W. 2001, Intercultural Communication, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.

Scott M. 2010, Wordsmith Tools 5.0, Lexical Analysis Software, Liverpool.

Spencer-Oatey H. 2007, Theories of identity and the analysis of face, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 39 [4], pp. 639-656.

Thomas J. 1997, Discourse in the marketplace: The making of meaning in annual reports, in “The Journal of Business Communication” 34 [1], pp. 47-66.

Tognini-Bonelli E. 2001, Corpus Linguistics at Work, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Van De Mieroop D. 2007, The complementarity of two identities and two approaches: Quantitative and qualitative analysis of institutional and professional identity, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 39 [6], pp. 1120-1142.

Vignozzi G. 2019, Assessing the Language of TV Political Interviews: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Vladimirou D. 2007, ‘I Suggest That We Need More Research’: Personal Reference in Linguistics Journal Articles, in Gabrielatos C., Slessor R. and Unger J.W. (eds.), Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching, Volume 1, pp. 139-157. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/1934/1/LAEL_PG_2006.PDF (15.05.2020).

Wales K. 1996, Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Winter E. 1994, Clause Relations as Information Structure: Two Basic Text Structures in English, in Coulthard M. (ed.), Advances in Written Text Analysis, Routledge, London.


Full Text: pdf

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.
کاغذ a4

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.