Almut Koester

Investigating Workplace Discourse

Exploring the characteristics of different types of workplace conversations, including decision-making, training, briefing or making arrangements, this enthralling account pays particular attention to interactions with a more social focus, such as small talk or office gossip. Presenting a range of approaches to analyzing such workplace discourse, Almut Koester argues for a combination of quantitative corpus-based methods, to compare specific linguistic features in different genres and qualitative methods involving a close analysis of individual conversations, to explore such issues as politeness, power, conflict and consensus-building. A corpus of conversations recorded in a variety of office environments both in the UK and the USA is used throughout to demonstrate the interplay between speakers accomplishing tasks and maintaining relationships in the workplace.

The performance of speech acts in workplace conversations and the teaching of communicative functions

Abstract This article, based on a 34,000-word corpus of spoken discourse, argues for a discourse approach to teaching communicative functions or speech acts in spoken English. Starting with the premise that spoken corpora can provide valuable insights into the way speakers ‘do’ things through talk, I analyze the performance of speech acts in a corpus of workplace conversations. First a number of devices used to perform direct speech acts are analyzed in the corpus as a whole, and then the transcripts of two workplace conversations are examined in order to ascertain how the performance of two particular speech acts—giving advice and giving directives—is accomplished. These analyses show that speech acts are not usually performed directly and that it is necessary to look beyond the individual utterance to see how particular communicative acts unfold within a conversational sequence. The final section of the article discusses relevance of these findings for the teaching of functional language.

‘About Twelve Thousand or So’: Vagueness in North American and UK Offices

According to Drew and Heritage (1992 p. 22), workplace or institutional interaction ‘involves an orientation /…/to some core goal, task or identity /…/ conventionally associated with the institution’; that is, it is characterized by a focus of the discourse participants on accomplishing workplace tasks. Such a focus on workplace goals should result logically in a kind of discourse which is factual and precise, and does not contain too much vagueness or ambiguity. The use of vague expressions such ‘sort of’, ‘stuff like that’, ‘or something’ is usually associated with informal, casual conversation, not with work-related talk.

'It's not rocket science': metaphors and idioms in conflictual business meetings

Abstract This study examines the use of metaphors and idioms (MIDs) in two conflictual business encounters from two corpora of spoken business and workplace interactions. As overtly conflictual or aggressive forms of communication are unusual in business encounters, these meetings are anomalous within both corpora. While MIDs have been described as devices employed to develop interpersonal convergence and solidarity in face-to-face conversation (Carter, Language and creativity: The art of common talk, Routledge, 2004), this study examines their use to create the opposite effect—to mark divergence. All the MIDs in the data were identified and categorized according to type (metaphors, formulae, and anomalous collocations) and function (evaluation, intimacy, intensity, and discourse). The results showed that the two meetings contained a higher concentration of MIDs than other comparable nonconflictual encounters in the corpora. The MIDs identified performed similar functions in the two meetings and were used most frequently to express intensity. The intimacy function was used to express divergence more frequently than convergence, and often marked highly conflictual or even rude exchanges in the interaction.