The Discursive Construal of Trust in the Dynamics of Knowledge Diffusion [1 ed.] 9781443893541, 9781443843157

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The Discursive Construal of Trust in the Dynamics of Knowledge Diffusion

The Discursive Construal of Trust in the Dynamics of Knowledge Diffusion Edited by

Rita Salvi and Judith Turnbull

The Discursive Construal of Trust in the Dynamics of Knowledge Diffusion Edited by Rita Salvi and Judith Turnbull This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Rita Salvi, Judith Turnbull and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4315-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4315-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ............................................................................................ viii List of Figures.............................................................................................. x Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Marina Bondi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiv Rita Salvi and Judith Turnbull Part I: Building Trust Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 The Discursive Construction of Trust in European Political Communication Rita Salvi Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 26 The PhD Thesis Report: Building Trust in an Emerging Genre Sara Gesuato Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 46 The Appeal of Travel Blogs: The Image of Italy through American Eyes Giuliana Diani Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 62 Repositioning Museums on Children’s Agenda Federico Sabatini

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Table of Contents

Part II: A Corporate Culture of Trust Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 88 Markers of Trust: Epistemic Adverbs of Certainty and Restrictive Adverbs in CSR Reports Paola Catenaccio Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 108 Conveying Trust in a Globalized Era Franca Poppi Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 131 Building Trust through Corporate Identity: An Analysis of CSR Reports and Webpages Donatella Malavasi Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 154 Organizational Trust Creation in Peer Coaching Events: Multimodal Means and Representations Janet Bowker Part III: Maintaining and Repairing Trust Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 184 A Digital ‘Meeting Place’? A Socio-semiotic and Multimodal Analysis of the WhiteHouse.gov Social Hub Ilaria Moschini Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 206 Knowledge Transfer, Ideologies and Trust in Public Financial Reporting Chiara Prosperi Porta Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 229 Past in Present: Disseminating Credible Heritage Knowledge Online Christina Samson Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 249 Repairing Trust: A Case Study of the Volkswagen Gas Emissions Scandal Judith Turnbull

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Part IV: Trust in Medical Communication Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 272 The Construal of Trust through Relevance: Patterns of Evaluative Language in Medical Writing Renzo Mocini Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 293 Medical Knowledge Dissemination and Doctor-Patient Trust: A Multi-modal Analysis Daniele Franceschi Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 316 Spin in Health News: Levels of Trust in Knowledge Diffusion Ersilia Incelli Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 339 Informational, Promotional and Trust Building Strategies in the Web Genre of Clinical Negligence Case Studies Girolamo Tessuto Afterword on Trust .................................................................................. 362 Giuseppina Cortese Contributors ............................................................................................. 372 Index ........................................................................................................ 379

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1-1 Eliciting trust through ‘thought’ and ‘action’ Table 1-2 Lexical indexicality Table 1-3 Building trust through ‘making’ and ‘moving’ Table 2-1 Overview of the corpus Table 3-1 The first 100 keywords divided into four groups: grammar words, destinations, places and food/drink. Table 5-1 only-clusters in the CSR corpus Table 5-2 just-clusters in the CSR corpus Table 6-1 The ratings of the two countries on the basis of Hofstede’s bipolar dimensions Table 6-2 The main distinguishing features of Japan and the USA Table 6-3 Frequency of according to Table 6-4 Frequency of markers of attribution Table 6-5 Frequency of emphatics Table 6-6 Frequency of hedges Table 6-7 Frequency of first-person pronouns Table 6-8 Frequency of you Table 7-1 CSR reports and webpages: wordlists Table 7-2 Keywords of CSR webpages vs. reports with related ordinal rank and frequency of occurrences Table 10-1 Size of the corpus Table 10-2 Trust-related nouns, adjectives and verbs (ECB) Table 10-3 Trust-related nouns, adjectives and verbs (England) Table 10-4 Trust-related nouns, adjectives and verbs (Greece) Table 11-1 Online heritage guidebooks of Florence - OHGFLO Table 11-2 OHGFLO word list Table 11-3 OHGFLO key words Table 11-4 Concordances of key words: century, Medici and building Table 11-5 Most frequent 4-word cluster: century Table 11-6 Most frequent 4-word cluster: Medici Table 11-7 Most frequent 4-word cluster: building Table 11-8 Architectural nouns Table 12-1 Frequency of manipulations(s), irregularities, issue(s) and deficiencies Table 13-1 EBM corpus details

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Table 13-2 The most frequently recurring openly-evaluative items Table 13-3 The most frequently recurring right collocates for the word significant Table 13-4 Experiential and logical analysis of evaluations of relevance Table 13-5 The most frequently recurring verb collocates for the word significant, including there + be Table 13-6 Relevance in mental clauses with unexpressed Senser Table 13-7 Relevance in mental clauses with expressed Senser Table 13-8 Relevance in relational clauses of the attributive type Table 13-9 Relevance in relational clauses of the identifying type Table 13-10 Relevance in existential clauses Table 13-11 Occurrences of the most frequent focusing adjuncts Table 14-1 A multimodal transcription of a doctor-patient interaction segment – Listening to the patient Table 14-2 A multimodal transcription of a doctor-patient interaction segment – Requesting information Table 14-3 A multimodal transcription of a doctor-patient interaction segment – Explaining Table 15-1 Overview of the corpus Table 15-2 Frequency of the adjectives first, new, novel in the corpora Table 15-3 Omission of mice in headlines Table 15-4 Sample excerpts from the case study of flu Table 16-1 Overall organizational structure of the clinical negligence case study genre

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 7-1 The first ten best performers in the 6th CSR Online Awards 2014 Figure 9-1 www.whitehouse.gov, January 5, 2009, retrieved January 2016 Figure 9-2 www.whitehouse.gov, May 3, 2009, retrieved January 2016 Figure 9-3 www.barackobama.com, February 27, 2008, retrieved January 2016 Figure 9-4 On the left: www.barackobama.com, Feb. 27, 2008, retrieved January 2016. On the right: www.whitehouse.gov, May 3, 2009, retrieved January 2016 Figure 9-5 WhiteHouse.gov Social Hub Page, January 31 2016, retrieved February 2016. Figure 9-6. White House.gov Communities in Focus Page, retrieved February 2016.

PREFACE

It is a great pleasure to write a preface to this volume. First of all, it brings together two aspects of discourse that I find particularly stimulating objects of study: the notion of discursive construal of trust and that of the diffusion of knowledge. Both aspects are becoming increasingly central to professional and organizational communication, especially in its involvement with communities, but they can be seen to play a major role in more personal relationships too. Whether we are talking of political communication, corporate communication, financial reporting, promoting cultural heritage or more personal relations such as coaching events, assessment reports and – “the most critical domain” – medical communication, trust is an essential element of knowledge sharing. The volume manages to cover this wide range of communicative situations centring on how the construal of trust goes hand in hand with re-contextualizing information for the purpose. The collection of papers represents an attempt to develop both notions, but particularly to see how trust building, maintaining and repairing (Fuoli and Paradis 2014) can be seen as instrumental to the diffusion of knowledge in the various fields. Building a relation of trust and constructing one’s own image in terms of caring and expertise often become essential elements in professional communication in a knowledge-based society. If trust is clearly a dynamic interpersonal construct, typically negotiated through discourse, the speaker’s image is also constructed discursively and in different ways according to the situation. Both trust and image are easily undermined and can be repaired by modifying one’s behaviour: they are negotiated and can be renegotiated through discourse. Constructing and communicating a trustworthy discourse identity often goes together with constructing and conveying an authoritative and a caring identity. The main purpose of this volume is to improve our understanding of the discursive and pragmatic dynamics of how these identities and relations are built in discourse, keeping in mind a wide enough range of contexts that can illuminate the overarching principles. Improving our understanding means first of all keeping in mind the need to pin down how language choice can be related to the needs of re-contextualizing knowledge or to the needs of constructing, repairing and maintaining trust and image.

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Methodologically speaking, the chapters are quite diverse: the readers will not find a unitary approach to the study of trust and knowledge dissemination, but what they will find is a clear representation of the existing range of interests and fields of application. And beyond that, the chapters share a common interest in the study of language in use, in the focus on specific communicative situations and in combining qualitative and quantitative research in the study of discursive constructs. Another reason that makes me happy to write this preface is that the volume witnesses collaboration between different universities, involving scholars at different stages in their academic career. This may sound slightly unorthodox in a preface, but I think it should not pass unnoticed: personal development and innovative ideas originate from contamination, dialogue across institutions and across generations and I am proud to say that this dialogue is exactly what originated the seminar, organized by Rita Salvi at the University of Rome “Sapienza”, that then developed into the volume. With this dialogue in mind, I dare say that the volume also witnesses the growth of the CLAVIER (Corpus and Language Variation in English Research) centre into a wider, more inclusive group of researchers with a focus on corpus linguistics and language variation in a discourse perspective. CLAVIER is an interuniversity research centre currently involving the Universities of Bari, Bergamo, Florence, Milan, Modena and Reggio Emilia, “Sapienza” Rome, Siena and Trieste. Originating from collaboration between scholars in English research, CLAVIER has now extended its scope to other languages, including members working on Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian, in the belief that cross-linguistic contrast illuminates peculiarities and commonalities. It is also our belief that cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary work is increasingly needed to understand the complexity of contemporary communication. We think professional communication is an important aspect of many fields of human activity and in this area of study it is essential to be able to collaborate with all those who share an interest. CLAVIER is open to collaboration and looks forward to new challenges and new studies. Modena, September 2016 Marina Bondi Director of the CLAVIER Centre

Reference Fuoli, Matteo, and Carita Paradis. 2014. A model of trust-repair discourse. Journal of Pragmatics. 74:52-69

INTRODUCTION RITA SALVI AND JUDITH TURNBULL

I love the freedom of creativity when our ideas come together to create new ones and then spread. […] The knowledge of one becomes the knowledge of millions. But also it is important to listen to understand each other, when we do both we feel part of something much larger than ourselves, and that is cool. My name is Tim Berners-Lee – I invented the World Wide Web. (TV advert for an Italian telecommunications company)

Theoretical framework This volume stems from a workshop held at the Sapienza University of Rome on June 10, 2015 and organised by the CLAVIER centre (Corpus Linguistics and Language Variation in English Research, Director Prof. Marina Bondi). Over the last few years CLAVIER has been working on a research project called Language in Knowledge Dissemination (LINKD) which has been investigating the theoretical, descriptive and applied perspectives of Knowledge Dissemination. In 2015 the Rome unit of the research centre published the volume “The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English”, edited by Rita Salvi and Janet Bowker, which collected a series of studies on the nature of knowledge dissemination, its principles, conceptualizations and constructs. It explored the use of language in the complex processes involved in the transformation of information into knowledge in a variety of fields and for a variety of audiences. The starting point of the investigation was the linguistic devices which allow information to reach the cognitive level of knowledge, with its forms of creation, use and exchange. This process is very much based on the paradigms of continuity and advancement, connecting past and present. Therefore, the linguistic analysis took into consideration intertextual relationships as well as the channels of interdiscursivity, as delineated by Fairclough: The concept of interdiscursivity is modelled upon and closely related to intertextuality, and like intertextuality it highlights a historical view of texts as transforming the past – existing conventions, or prior texts – into

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the present. The analysis of the discursive event as social practice may refer to different levels of social organization – the context of situation, the institutional context, and the wider societal context or ‘context of culture’ […]. (Fairclough 1995: 134)

The present volume takes the research one step further by introducing the crucial, but intangible factor in everyday interrelations between human beings, namely trust, which is the second point at issue in the studies collected here. According to the Oxford Dictionary’s definition, trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth or ability of someone or something. Assuming that the achievement of credibility and legitimacy is fundamental to successful communication in a globalized and virtual world, the essential complementary aspect to knowledge dissemination is the analysis of the language that builds trust in interpersonal interactions, in different contexts and settings. As Candlin and Crichton stated in the Introduction of their book Discourses of Trust (2013): Issues surrounding trust are fundamental to people’s lives in contemporary societies, a fact not merely and sharply highlighted by the recent history of inter-relational practices associated with financial markets, international security, marketing and public relations, but even more persuasively and ever-presently in the formation and maintenance of relations among partners in the delivery, for example, of health and welfare services and in the public and private arenas of political and religious institutions. (Candlin and Crichton 2013, 1)

Trust is a buzzword, which is also problematic, as it includes the potentially disadvantageous concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ with implications for control and power. In the chapters the twofold nature of trust is linguistically described and the two-sided relationship between trustors and trustees is highlighted in their linguistic interactions. To bridge the gap between knowledge and trust, here we use the term ‘knowledge’ in the simple sense of “the state of knowing about or being familiar with something” (Cambridge English Dictionary). Knowledge is a fundamental aspect of empowerment; it will allow people to make informed decisions in every aspect of their lives and in every role they play, as workers, citizens, voters, patients, tourists, managers and investors. Easy and ready access to an ever increasing amount of information and knowledge have also heightened our awareness of society and the world, giving us greater understanding of the scope and intricacies of modern day life. On the reverse side, however, it also gives us insight into the not-sotransparent and not-so-clean borders of activities and transactions, kindling wariness, scepticism, even mistrust at times.

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In particular, in specialized and scientific domains, which are the focus of our attention, the connection between knowledge dissemination and trust building is essential and critical at the same time. Different contexts and genres can produce similar or opposite results in language behaviour and style, showing a variety of networks of practices. The enormous influence of the media nowadays, which favours the spreading of mechanisms such as “suggestion”, “persuasion” and “manipulation” derived from both cultural background and ideology, is the third field of investigation in the present book. The dialectical exchange established between sender and receiver on the net has altered the use of language, developing forms of re-writing and re-contextualization which deserve critical attention from linguists, but also from scholars of social sciences, professionals and educational institutions.

Content of the book The “language of trust” is the backbone of the four sections of the book. Through the chapters, the various principles, conceptualizations, constructs and pragmatic dynamics of knowledge dissemination are shown in a range of discourse genres. The studies, which have been double peer reviewed, reveal the multi-levels of knowledge, its varied typology and its ongoing co-construction, maintenance and updating among heterogeneous audiences, which may vary from expert to lay. Alongside this, the issue of trust has been reported constantly to be significant in the nurturing of collaborative processes which we believe are essential in any human relationship.

Part I: Building trust In the first section, the papers deal with the building of trust through different strategies in political, academic, tourist and educational contexts. The description of similarities and differences of language in four specific domains is an opportunity to compare strategies and forms of communicative behaviour. In the first chapter, The discursive construction of trust in European political communication, Rita Salvi analyses the linguistic and rhetorical features of political discourse in a corpus of texts dealing with the problem of migration taken from Angela Merkel’s official website. These texts represent a mixed genre, as they include narration of events and quotations from the Chancellor’s speeches. The language perfectly reflects the meaningful interaction in an asymmetrical situation such as the relationship

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between politicians (those who are trusted) and citizens (those who trust). Confidence and persuasion are realized by either the emphasis on apolitical qualities and personal demeanour or by the adoption of vague language to minimize cognitive dissonance in citizens. A new genre in the academic domain is described by Sara Gesuato in The PhD thesis report: Building trust in an emerging genre. PhD thesis reports represent the fundamental document in which scholars evaluate and comment on post-graduate students’ written work. The scholars explicitly manifest their presence in their reports, establishing their authority through suggestions and recommendations. But credibility is hard to achieve, especially when multiple tasks are involved: the report writer has to be honest and reliable as an assessor, helpful and supportive as a distant co-supervisor and mentor, fair and balanced as an examiner. The relevant discursive features and strategies analysed show how the report writers build a relationship of trust with their readership. Giuliana Diani presents a case study of web-mediated communication investigating a corpus of travel blogs on Italian destinations written by American travelers, The appeal of travel blogs: The image of Italy through American eyes. Adopting corpus-assisted methods, the study aims at exploring which aspects of the travel experience bloggers describe and in what terms, what cultural meanings are constructed for the image of Italy and how such meanings are represented and consequently transmitted. The data shows how evaluative expressions are repeatedly exploited by ‘tourist-writers’ not only to highlight what is memorable about a journey, but also to signal what is advisable, whilst their narrations appear to establish and demonstrate their credibility for future travellers who will use information from what they consider credible blog posts. In his contribution Repositioning Museums on Children’s Agenda, Federico Sabatini states that trust and self-confidence is what children gain from the experience of the museum, if successfully processed in its socio-cognitive and interactive components. The logogenic capacity of Museum Discourse is no longer predominantly exercised as expert discourse, but increasingly configured as educational discourse leading to the construction of knowledge through “hands-on” experience. Equally relevant, the semiosis, or meaning-making capacity, inherent in the new “museum script” is guided by an ethical imperative to serve society equitably. The chapter examines electronic materials from different sources and with different addressee(s), from blogs to scholarly reflection and museum project presentations.

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Part II: A Corporate Culture of Trust Corporate culture is expressed in a variety of texts, genres and channels; yet, as “Corporate Social Responsibility” is an inherent value in this domain, CSR reports can be considered a fundamental means of communication and reference. It is generally agreed that the concept of CSR reporting is flexible, as each company can choose how to communicate its CSR progress, in whatever way it finds suitable. This lack of uniformity and the high level of flexibility are well shown in the first three chapters in this section. In Markers of trust: Epistemic adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs in CSR reports Paola Catenaccio shows how some markers of discourse, namely epistemic adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs, contribute to both the delivery of information and the assertion of credibility. The underlying assumption is that through the investigation of interpersonal resources such as epistemic and restrictive adverbs it is possible to retrieve crucial information about the ideological underpinnings of CSR discourse, thus leading to a better understanding of this recently emerged discursive formation. Understanding the mechanisms of this communication will also give insights into how trust is built and maintained in business, at a time when large corporations are often subject to scrutiny and criticism, and intangible factors such as reputation become more and more important in determining business outcomes. Considering the difficult position of companies in a globalized market, torn between the need to address a variety of multicultural audiences and the wish to emphasize some traits of their national culture and identity to distinguish themselves from their competitors, Franca Poppi focuses on the English version of CSR reports published on the websites of two airlines with very different cultural backgrounds: Delta (USA) and JAL (Japan). This multi-cultural context requires new strategies for building and maintaining trust. The analysis carried out in Conveying trust in a globalized era aims at finding out whether or not, in our present globalized era, the two selected airlines still refer to the typical values of their respective countries to influence their stakeholders’ attitudes and build trust. Within the highly competitive scenario of the global economy, Donatella Malavasi investigates how the construction of identity and trust in some verbal resources is deployed by a sample of European leading companies in two different types of disclosures, CSR reports and websites. In particular, the author assumes that CSR reports are more technical and specialized documents, while webpages are rather ‘popularised’ disclosures targeted at a wider audience. Her analysis in Building trust through

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corporate identity: An analysis of CRS reports and webpages sets out to examine the variation in enterprises’ self-promotion as ‘impeccable’ and reliable corporate citizens in relation to the process of popularisation. The fourth and last chapter in this section looks at corporate discourse from a different perspective, namely within the business organization. In Organizational trust creation in peer coaching events: Multimodal means and representations, Janet Bowker investigates the processes of trustwork in organizational discourse through a multimodal approach. She analyses the data derived from the in-house peer coaching and employee development events within a large multinational consulting group based in North America. The data consists of a selection from ten hours of audioconferenced internal employee coaching, and the pragma-linguistic analysis is carried out primarily on the multimodal visual data which accompanied the trainers’ oral presentations, thus comparing the oral and written (PowerPoint) communication.

Part III: Maintaining and repairing trust The third section is concerned with the maintenance and repairing of trust when it needs to be reinforced or comes under threat. As the chapters deal with sensitive topics such as politics, finance, tourism and business respectively, it comes as no surprise that apologies like “I’m sorry” or “I didn’t mean to hurt you” are no longer sufficient. Some physical emotional reactions (even tears) are becoming more frequent in public and so perhaps considered acceptable to repair trust. But new layers of trust still have to be argumented and negotiated through language. In the first chapter, A digital ‘meeting place’? A socio-semiotic and multimodal analysis of the WhiteHouse.gov social hub, Ilaria Moschini deals with the ‘webridization’ of US institutional language. The study is a micro-level analysis of the “social hub” page of the White House’s website which shows how trust and participation are discursively constructed at both a linguistic/semiotic and digital level. The case study has been selected after mapping the evolution of the White House’s website since 2008 and it seems to be emblematic in highlighting President Obama’s institutional rhetoric on the relationship between sociopolitical participation and digital networks. In particular, the object of the analysis is the framework of the “social hub” page (that is the infrastructure which sets the interpretative frame) and not the various contents which are changed and updated on a regular basis. Moving across to the other side of the Atlantic, Knowledge transfer, ideologies and trust in public financial reporting by Chiara Prosperi

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Porta examines European institutional documents, namely the central banks’ Annual Reports, comparing the findings obtained from the websites of the Bank of England, the Bank of Greece and the European Central Bank. Through the analysis of specific lexicon and phraseology, she describes the relationship between discursive practices, ideology and trust in this specialized but not homogeneous genre. The thread joining institution-centred knowledge transfer and people’s trust in the European context affects both the process by which discourse comes to be formed and the way in which some institutions, such as central banks, promote an accountable identity, so as to deliver a credible performance in the community of practice. Past in present: Disseminating credible heritage knowledge online, Christina Samson’s contribution, covers the field of maintaining and disseminating trust in a cultural environment such as the guidebooks of Florence. Given the particular nature of cultural heritage, the author states that it cannot be thought of as a commodity in the conventional sense, as it has to be credible when presenting visitors with something they will consider ‘authentic’. Thus, when heritage is represented and promoted in online guidebooks, they not only provide cultural and historical representations of a destination, but they also disseminate knowledge to build trust. The results do indeed show that online guidebooks disseminate credible knowledge based on accurate information which, in turn, reinforces and bolsters a trustworthy relation with their recipients. In the last chapter of this section, Repairing trust: A case study of the Volkswagen gas emissions scandal, Judith Turnbull describes the language strategies adopted by the company in order to establish a new trustworthy relationship with consumers after the scandal. The analysis highlights Volkswagen’s initial reaction to the scandal, before trying to draw people onto its side by giving some information about what was happening. The company finally publishes a detailed explanation three months after the scandal broke. The three phases produce different results in terms of language and communication techniques. The analysis has underlined that the main strategy adopted by VW is emphasising the positive, especially the technical ability of the company.

Part IV: Trust in medical communication The fourth section presents the building/repairing trust processes in a very delicate area, the medical sector, in which specialists (researchers, doctors, journalists and even lawyers) have to establish a trustworthy relationship with the audience, very often patients.

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Assuming that the communication of scientific findings is neither impartial nor neutral, Renzo Mocini, in The construal of trust through relevance: Patterns of evaluative language in medical writing, explores the interpersonal dimension of medical writing by highlighting how writers exploit linguistic resources and discourse devices to take a stance and express judgements. Based on a corpus of medical-journal articles, the study examines how they position themselves within their scientific community as scholars capable of evaluating data as ‘relevant’ while asserting their trustworthiness and credibility. The first part of the analysis deals with patterns of evaluation directly inscribed in discourse by means of the explicitly evaluative word significant, while the second investigates more covert ways of conveying relevance, that is, by means of focusing adjuncts. In Medical knowledge dissemination and doctor-patient trust: A multimodal analysis, Daniele Franceschi introduces spoken medical English examining doctor-patient conflict in an English L1 context and how it may be resolved through the adoption of certain strategies by the doctor himself/herself. Some strategies facilitate the comprehension of medical information, whilst others manage to create empathy and rapport between the parties. The three doctor-patient dialogues examined were chosen from a pre-collected database available on-line. The approach followed is multisemiotic, since not only language but also facial expressions, hand gestures and body movements are observed and considered as contributing to meaning and trust construal. The recontextualization of information, from scientific medical journals to press releases and online newspaper articles, is the topic discussed by Ersilia Incelli in Spin in health news: Levels of trust in knowledge diffusion. This process involves the notions of newsworthiness and proximity, which tell us about how writers see their readers and how lexical choices are orchestrated to manipulate the information they want to give. The chapter describes the distinct rhetorical phenomenon referred to as ‘spin’, that is a distortion of discourse which leads to the misrepresentation of medical results. While the aim is to build readers’ trust, journalists may paradoxically employ, whether consciously or unconsciously, somewhat deceptive rhetorical strategies, which actually go against trust. In Informational, promotional and trust building strategies in the web genre of clinical negligence case studies, Girolamo Tessuto exploits online case studies that connect medical issues with legal matters. Websites provide a range of information, knowledge and data regarding individuals who have become the victims of some form of negligence at

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the hands of medical or other healthcare professionals alongside the legal procedure for making a claim. Clinical negligence case studies emerge as a new genre within law firm websites, where they create an avenue for information sharing and promotion/marketing organised around trust building strategies. Combining genre analysis with the study of language in specialized domains, the research situates trust building in the dynamic processes of hybridization and interdiscursivity, touching upon and tying in most of the aspects discussed in the previous chapters.

Final remarks In conclusion, when describing a variety of possible language features and rhetorical strategies adopted to build, maintain and repair trust, the chapters reflect different contexts of communication, interdisciplinary approaches, interest in promoting knowledge and achieving mutual understanding. Both the theoretical issues and their applications developed in each chapter are characterized by integrated methodological supports. Especially in professional domains, it is widely acknowledged that “trust building is problematic and that management of trust implies both the ability to cope in situations where trust is lacking and the ability to build trust in situations where this is possible” (Vagen and Huxham 2003, 5). We do hope that English (with its role of lingua franca) will help to facilitate trustworthiness by transmitting knowledge, understanding and ethical values, so that we feel part of something much larger than ourselves.

References Candlin, Christopher N., and Jonathan Crichton. 2013. “From ontology to methodology: exploring the discursive landscape of trust”. In Discourses of Trust, edited by Christopher N. Candlin and Jonathan Crichton, 1-18. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Salvi, Rita, and Janet Bowker (eds) 2015. The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English. Bern: Peter Lang. Vangen, Siv, and Chris Huxham. 2003. “Nurturing collaborative relations: Building trust in interorganizational collaboration”. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 39: 5-31.

PART I BUILDING TRUST

CHAPTER ONE THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF TRUST IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION RITA SALVI SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

1. Introduction Although institutional discourse in general, and political discourse in particular, adopts specific features immediately recognizable to the audience, it also shows a degree of flexibility in relation to the contingent situations it deals with, and to the medium used to transmit the message. This contribution aims to identify the features and explore the potential strength of English in the construal of trust in political discourse with reference to the topic of migration, a crucial matter of our age. The chapter has three objectives: first, to describe institutional and political discourse in terms of construction of identity and its relevant linguistic strategies (Salvi 2014) with a view to building trust; second, to confirm the validity of an integrated methodology in text analysis (Biber et al. 1998); third, to use quantitative analysis to observe the aspects of ‘keyness’ and ‘aboutness’ (Bondi and Scott eds. 2010), so connecting form and content, in a case in which language has to conform to topics strongly influenced by economic issues, as well as by social and political instances. The research also shows how particular pragmatic features of the language reveal ideology and social relationships activated to sustain trustworthiness. The study starts from the assumption that political language has widely expanded into several forms of communication, producing the hybridization of genres and new communicative styles. Although usually based on facts and figures, political language expresses the politician’s stance in her/his institutional role: identity, image and reputation are integral parts of any information delivered to the audience in order to gain legitimacy and build trust. As the first objective is persuasion, realized by either the emphasis on apolitical qualities and personal demeanour or by the adoption of vague

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language to minimize cognitive dissonance in citizens, the shaping of public opinion is the immediate consequence. In political discourse language has been progressively manipulated by adopting a rhetorical style which hinges on boosting devices to promote ideas and ideologies. In an asymmetrical situation such as the relationship between politicians (those who are trusted) and citizens (those who trust) a meaningful interaction must be established mainly through language “to infer from what is said to what is meant” (Candlin and Crichton 2013, 2). The content selected for the inquiry is related to migration, a phenomenon which has been before our eyes with tragic effects in recent times. One of the political leaders primarily involved has been Angela Markel as the German Chancellor and the most influential politician in the EU, so a representative authority in both a local and a global perspective. Needless to say, our interest lies within the limits of the communicative strategies adopted – a sort of snapshot of the language used, a picture of interactions – whatever the political judgement may be. The material collected comes from Angela Merkel’s official website. The section selected is labelled as “articles”: in actual fact, the texts do not belong to the ordinary press, rather they are written specifically for the website (probably by someone on the Chancellor’s staff). They seem to perform an informative function, but they are evidently Merkel-centred: for example, no mention is made of the Chancellor’s sentence “Politics is sometimes hard” pronounced after a Palestinian teenager burst into tears over deportation fears during a televised debate. The articles, anyway, represent a very interesting object for linguistic analysis, because they are a new mixed genre which I would define as a “personal journal” or “a selfstory webpage” (see Appendix); they include narration of events (although they cannot be considered as press releases or reports) and a lot of quotations from the Chancellor’s speeches. In this sense, the material analysed is new and, to the best of my knowledge, has never been collected in a corpus; moreover, some interesting hints come from the relationship between content and genre to investigate the construction of messages at multiple levels of textual organization, thus reflecting the dynamic relationship between trustors and trustees.

2. Corpus and methodology For this analysis a corpus has been built with a number of reports published on the German Chancellor’s website. The observation of the data allows us to identify words and phraseology used in the specific topic, but it also supports a critical discourse analysis of the texts.

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The corpus has been constructed as follows: connecting to the German Chancellor’s website (www.bundeskanzlerin.de, accessed in September 2015) and selecting the English version, it is possible to retrieve the news section in which a large number of “articles” are reported (more than 600). To define the “aboutness” of the research, I restricted the selection to articles containing the item “refugee(s)”. The choice produced 72 results in the time span from December 15, 2006 and September 3, 2015 (due to the sensitivity of the topic, the number of articles has exponentially increased in more recent times). The period examined starts from the first mandate of Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany (November 22, 2005) and covers ten years. It is worthwhile noting that 35 articles were produced between January and August 2015 (sometimes even two articles a day), 14 articles in 2014, 7 articles in 2013, the remaining spread over the years 2006-2012. All in all, the corpus consists of almost 80,000 words (tokens) and 6,000 unique words (types). The quantitative analysis was carried out using the ConcApp concordance software (Greaves 2005) to draw up frequency lists and WMatrix (Rayson 2007) to detect specific features of the language (e.g. verbs and phraseology in concordance lines). The contribution of corpus linguistics to the present research refers to the wide current literature: Sinclair (1991, 1996, 2003, 2004), Biber et al. (1998), Tognini Bonelli (2001), Hunston (2002, 2008), Baker (2006), Cheng et al. (2006, 2009), Bondi and Scott (2010) for their views and insights into corpora interpretation. As a matter of fact, as Stubbs (2010) points out, semantic and social analysis are inseparable for work on key-words and phraseology which do not necessarily occur frequently in a text at a statistical significance, but contribute to the construal of discourse. Therefore, the research is very much based on discourse analysis, adopting a multi-level and multilayered, context-dependent methodology. Indeed, the corpus could be read in a number of different ways. It would have been possible, for example, to focus on strategies of re-writing, or on the features of language related to intertextuality and interdiscursivity, as in previous studies (Salvi 2015). Instead, the research here is carried out to elicit the features of language which contribute to the construction of trust through the building of identity in political discourse (Sarangi 2004; Benwell and Stokoe 2010; Salvi 2014). Thus the focus is on expressions of boosting and hedging, phrases which express subjectivity and deliver evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Martin and White 2005), “languaging” meant as “a process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” (Swain 2006, 98) and also phraseology that produces social effects by forms of affective communication (Salvi 2016). In the

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specific discourse of migration, which implies a high level of emotions and ethical commitment (Jensen 2014), languaging is a predominant linguistic process as “a domain of consensual coordinations of consensually coordinated interactions” (Kravchenko 2012, digital edition). In this perspective the analysis offers a presentation of speech, writing and thought in political discourse. According to Fairclough, political discourse is “mediated by institutions which, in turn, position readers and writers, speakers and listeners in different positions of power and knowledge” (1989, 36). As communication is a crucial matter in political discourse, it can be asserted that textual rhetorical features should be analyzed in-depth in order to detect different levels of information and persuasion within an ideological framework (Wilson 2003). Moreover, following Bhatia’s studies on genre evolution and hybridization (2008), the research points to a relationship between genre change and societal change. Discursive hybridity is also dealt with by Fairclough (2011, 11) who states that “… changes in discourse [are] operationalized (‘put into operation’, ‘put into practice’) in social practices, relations, identities and changes in the physical world”. Therefore, he argues, “genres, discourses and styles are socially significant entities as well as linguistically significant entities” (2011, 25). Pursuing a holistic approach to texts and observing language as both a social and an individual expression, the study examines the persuasive strategies of the texts and their ideological components as fundamental aspects of political discourse to earn credibility and build trust.

3. Corpus analysis A corpus-based approach to text analysis leads us to detect first of all the most frequent content/topic words in the list; in our case, they are Chancellor, Merkel and Germany (430, 420 and 402 occurrences respectively). This confirms my introductory assumption: the texts collected in the Chancellor’s official website inevitably thrust the politician and her country into the limelight. Also Europe has a predominant position in the articles, as expected: EU (145), Europe (203) European (254) are extensively used and they all determine the geopolitical setting. The topic is well defined by the content-words refugee (91), refugees (194), migrants (7), and migration (43) which mark the distinction between people who deserve asylum from those considered “economic migrants” and do not have the right to be hosted. Some short phrases can help to indicate the context in which these words are used: “registration centres for refugees”; “Angela Merkel advocates binding quotas for refugees”;

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“The German Basic Law, or constitution, lays down ‘clear principles’ for dealing with refugees, said Merkel at the summer press conference in Berlin”; “Migrants who are not granted the right to stay should be returned to their home countries, said Angela Merkel”; “Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the migration situation to be tackled ‘in line with the European spirit’ ”. These examples define the domain, and also the type of text we are dealing with. As previously mentioned, the texts include a lot of the Chancellor’s opinions (Angela Merkel advocates; said Angela Merkel) in either the form of narration or in quotations. The data confirms this text structure, indicating said as the most frequent verb (358 occurrences, e.g. “In spite of everything, she said, Germany is a good country and is in a good state of health”) together with other reporting verbs, such as stressed (69), declared (68), pointed to/out (45), underscored (20), emphasised (12), described and noted (9), underlined (8). Angela Merkel’s opinion and position is expressed by phrases, such as: (1) The Chancellor made the issue of refugees the focus of her press conference. (2) The Chancellor took a clear stance on every form of xenophobia.

but also (3) I am furious and stunned by the fact that many people suffocate because criminal traffickers exploit the desperation of these people to make money. (4) “I am absolutely convinced that we are facing one of the greatest challenges the European Union has seen”, declared Angela Merkel, referring to the refugee problem.

The personal and the institutional identities overlap in these sentences, which can be categorized in a specific field of action, that is shaping public opinion by earning confidence and winning trust. Scanning the frequency list, however, it is useful to observe how lexis connects the topic discussed and the construction of the relevant discourse, as “lexical choice is a significant way through which speakers evoke and orient to the institutional context of their talk” (Drew and Heritage 1992, 29). The insistent use of the word security (142 occurrences) perfectly proves the institutional context as it appears in the name of agencies, organizations and events, such as UN Security Council, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Security Conference. They are all Western/European-oriented, mentioned to remind the intensive

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security work carried out at an international level to gain the trust of Europeans and, possibly, Americans. Other collocations, however, account for the discursive realisation of trust entwining peoples and places: stability, security and prosperity; a comprehensive security concept; freedom, security and human dignity seem to transmit a message of larger inclusion, implying the “changes in the physical world” that Fairclough (2011, 11) connects to discursivity, as mentioned in paragraph 2. Yet, the word security mostly appears in collocations which show patterns of language closely related to the context, with reference to the expectations of the European audience: with terrorism (54 occurrences) as the main concern of our times, lack of security (see the negative connotation in n. 13 below) is naturally one of the topics often dealt with in the articles, with reference to the area of border security, security across the country, our common security and protection and security (almost a fixed collocation in the texts), with the purpose of agreeing on a security and defence policy. Some collocations of the word security are shown below: 3 principles which state that security and cooperation can ultimately 6 we see European Union security and defence policy as being closely 10 too, in our efforts. Security and development must go hand-in-hand 13 that wars, a lack of security and economic hardship play a role 17 between upholding security and safety of our people and our country 20 prosperity, social security and stability: an educated population 27 opportunities and prospects. Peace and security, but also education 59 we consider training security forces to be very important. 67 conviction that development and security have to go hand in hand 70 very important for us to be able to defend our security. 72 risk posed by international terrorism to security in Europe, said 74 strengthening the instruments of cooperative security in Europe 77 people on the way to seek protection and security, instead of which 80 risk that our security interests will be compromised also increases 83 instead reconstruction and security must be guaranteed. To achieve 84 fight against terrorism and in the area of border security 90 depends on our ability to sustain both the security of our societies 96 alliance is the foundation of global security. Our trade and our 97 how we can guarantee basic security. People need security to thrive 98 dimensions of European security policy are rationally dovetailed 103 the extent to which foreign and security policy impacts matters 105 that the EU will produce a new foreign and security policy strategy 112 means building peace and security, second, achieving prosperity and 114 is the ability of their respective security services to function. 116 convincing answers to the radical changes in the security situation 119 ensure the long-term security, stability and well-being of their 123 The EU’s current security strategy dates back to 2003 138 People need security to thrive. States need security to foster

From the lines above, we can observe how temporal deictics contribute to the construal of discourse: for example, n. 105 delineates future perspectives, whilst in n. 123 the date recalls the recent history of the EU

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in a narrative mode, representing a change of direction which needs adjustments to life in the new circumstances. Although at a lower grade in the frequency list, the word asylum (122 occurrences) gains the position of a topic word in this context because of its collocations which depict a new political and social scenario, as the following strings show: 1 common European asylum and refugee policy: France and Germany aim to 8 share responsibility for refugees seeking asylum. Angela Merkel spoke 9 supporting them in processing asylum applications and registering 10 Asylum applications must also be processed more rapidly 21 number of requests for asylum between federal and state levels 23 protests of radical right-wingers in front of an asylum centre 25 the member state responsible for examining an asylum claim in Europe 29 applying for asylum have practically no chance of being granted 30 who is fleeing civil war is entitled to request asylum in Germany 33 though in fact many EU states already have common asylum law 40 prospects of being granted asylum or protected status in Germany 42 the EU needs a common asylum policy according to Angela Merkel 46 ensure that all EU states comply with the agreed asylum policy terms, said Angela Merkel 50 the need for a common asylum policy within the EU 55 asylum procedures are to be accelerated 57 rapid asylum procedures are especially important, Angela Merkel 58 integration of refugees and the implementation of asylum procedures 67 particular urgency is the need to speed up asylum procedures 75 EU states should implement asylum provisions 79 are needed to cope with rising numbers of asylum seekers 82 protesters are said to have threatened asylum-seekers and attacked 84 attacks on asylum seekers and refugee shelters are unworthy of our 85 number of asylum seekers and refugees poses a formidable challenge 86 the increasing burden that rising numbers of asylum seekers and 94 rising numbers of asylum seekers must be discussed seriously 109 economic hardship is not a reason for granting asylum, she 113 implement and apply the common European asylum system. We need 118 we cannot grant asylum to everyone who believes they would have a 120 that more than 400,000 requests for asylum will be received 121 those whose application for asylum will very probably be approved

The use of the word asylum should imply a connotation of openness towards refugees in order to gain their trust. Yet, in these collocations we can note how asylum introduces different layers of discourse: first of all asylum policy, which is considered the main concern in the EU; then asylum applications/procedures/provisions, all collocations related to European and national political choices (the political scenario) and addressed to asylum seekers (the social scenario). These collocations fit well into Hoey’s theory of “priming” (2005), because these associations make the construction of mental concordances possible, that is to say that certain words prime each other in three types of association: logical associations (asylum seekers), negative evaluation (we cannot grant asylum to everyone who, 118) and seriousness/unexpectedness of

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consequences (asylum policy). Once again, although the messages want to express a balance between opposite needs and expectations, they are delivered more to EU citizens than to the in-coming people. Evaluative language is rather explicit: the increasing burden of refugees is a challenge for the EU, which needs to activate a common policy. This seems perfectly in line with the point stated by Sarangi, when he claims for “the inseparability of thought/cognition and feeling/emotion” (2003, 166). Having explored the political dualism between the need for “security” and the urgency of “asylum”, we can move on towards critical discourse observation of the features of the ideological dichotomy between reason and trust.

4. The role of identity and ideology in the discursive practices of trust The construction of identity through language has been a central topic in describing institutional discourse in recent years (Salvi 2013). In political language, in particular, identity is shown and negotiated in communicative contexts, involving macro-social categories and supranational environments, with the purpose of building a bridge between self (individual/institutional) and society. Stubbs maintains that “[…] institutions are abstract structures […] the professionals in such institutions are people with the communicative competence to utter the appropriate speech acts in the conventional way in the required speech events” (2010, 38). The texts we are examining correspond to this definition, with the German Chancellor as a representative who has the task of guaranteeing the realization of specific objectives in her institutional field. The meaning of the texts depends on her official status within the institution, which has an international, global influence with a close link to territorial localization (Germany and the EU). The 4-grams detected by WMatrix enlighten the intertwining between thought and action in the texts, a powerful device to construe identity and develop ideology.

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Chapter One 4-grams i would like to on the agenda of with a view to that is why we for migration and refugees it is important to and this is what we are going to

frequency 17 15 14 14 13 9 7 7

Table 1-1. Eliciting trust through ‘thought’ and ‘action’. One the most frequent 4-grams is “I would like to”, so reaffirming the Merkel-centred type of texts. “That is why we” and “and this is what” are also used, supporting the informative, explanatory and, at the same time, promotional nature of the texts. “For migration and refugees” is a phrase which defines the content and context, whereas “we are going to”, “it is important to”, “on the agenda of” and “with a view to” communicate the active involvement in concrete initiatives. All in all, the 4-grams help us identify the patterns used to construct identity, the ways in which information and knowledge are shared to spread ideology, and the interactions activated to maintain and/or repair credibility and trust. These elements are dynamically and reflexively situated within diverse scales of discourse. Aptly, Candlin and Crichton describe “discourses of trust” not only in different domains, but also as “trajectories of trust” within a specific domain: This methodological interest in trust foregrounds the question of how knowledge about trust and the pre-requisite procedures of its production are conceptualised in terms of ‘ontology’ (the nature of reality and the object of study: objective vs. subjective), ‘epistemology’ (the relation between the knower and the known: outsider vs. insider), and the ‘methodology’ (the translation of ontological and epistemological perspectives into tangible methods and techniques of data collection and analysis). (Candlin and Crichton, 2013, 6-7)

The ontological perspective is here represented by the couple of 4grams “for migration and refugees” and “I would like to”; epistemology is shown in the comparison between “it is important” and “this is what”; they all flow into tangible methods and techniques (“we are going to”, “on the agenda of”). In this perspective the 4-grams are a litmus test to verify if and to what extent the assumptions of the study are consistent.

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In view of this, we can now focus on some language features which typify the texts in terms of building trust.

5. Language features 5.1. Pronominal use constructing identity It is not by chance that the use of the personal pronouns we and I (1,019 occurrences and 337 respectively) far exceeds the frequency of you (139) and they (126). It is widely recognized (Drew and Heritage 1992; Stubbs 2001; Schiffrin 2009; Salvi 2012, 2013) that personal pronouns – among other markers of person indexicality – play a crucial role in the construction of discursive identities, as they establish the point of view of discourse and the positioning of the writer/speaker with reference to the audience. In particular, Benwell and Stokoe (2010, 94) maintain that “participants may display their orientation to their acting as incumbents of an institutional role […] by using a personal pronoun which indexes their institutional identity rather than their personal identity”. Among the numerous concordances, we can here see some of them related to “institutional we” in both the European context 390 391 594 603

more in the future. For we Europeans are currently working my firm belief that we Europeans can contribute even more together with our partners, we in Europe will always stand looking to Europe, to see how we in the euro zone deal

and in Germany 418 419 421 597 598

we Germans will never forget the hand of reconciliation We Germans will never forget that freedom and democracy this resolve that we Germany owe the unity of our country in peace political stability. We in Germany and in the European Union could need in order to preserve our prosperity. We in Germany are engaged

as well as in larger contexts 604

we in the G7 share common values - human rights.

As Spolsky argues (1999, 181), language is not only a means for us to present our own notion of “who we are,” but it is also a way for others to project onto us their own suppositions of the way “we must be”. The Chancellor’s website reflects the ‘outer’ self, revealed in the domain of public discourse, matched and integrated with the ‘private’ aspect of cognition and experience (the inner self, according to Benwell and Stokoe 2010).

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Observing the use of I, it is appropriate to look at the right collocates of the pronoun, which show a high frequency of verbs of thinking (think 52 occurrences, believe 16, together with hope, agree, appreciate, felt and thought) and verbs of saying (said, described, say, explained). What is more interesting in terms of evaluation is the collocation I am in phrases such as I am (absolutely/deeply/firmly) convinced, I am fervently asking for, I am positive, I am furious and stunned, I am grateful, I am very glad, I am very keen to, and so many others derived from direct quotations of the Chancellor’s speeches. Also the pattern I + adverb confirms the authoritative stance: I firmly, I greatly, I personally. These forms of evaluation fall into AFFECT in Martin and White’s terms (2005, 56) as they establish the system to evaluate processes according to their impact on human feelings. So, pronouns define a first layer of discourse in establishing the speaker’s stance, showing a personal commitment in the issues at stake to provoke a positive emotional adherence and response from the audience. Similarly, the use of the possessive adjective our (450) far exceeds the frequency of my (37), as the texts match more the institutional rather than the individual identity. Indeed, in both cases, the expressions of identity also convey ideology (as, for example, in the sentence “We provide them protection in our country”, or in line 391 above, “It is my firm belief”). The narrative supports the speaker’s stance; for example, the sentence (5) Chancellor Angela Merkel was deeply shocked to hear of the latest refugee disaster.

shows the Chancellor’s empathy, as it attracts a great deal of attention and arouses emotions amongst the European citizens on the one hand, and at the same time it tries to win the refugees’ confidence.

5.2. Modality expressing ideology The importance of understanding ideologies concerning language use has been highlighted by the work of several linguistic anthropologists. Irvine (1989, 5) defines language ideology as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests”, and Kroskrity (2000, 8) emphasizes that it is “constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group”. The texts examined reveal a high level of involvement in cultural, social and political matters. With reference to political discourse, ideology is mainly expressed by the use of modals which also introduce a second layer of discourse, that is the key-concept of legislation (the need to give

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norms and regulations) on the one hand (as we have underlined in the use of the word security), and the moral obligation on the other (in connection with the word asylum). Must (244 occurrences), have to (103) and should (63), together with can (275), need (102) and may (in a marginal position with only 12 occurrences) reveal a high semantic-grammatical potential for the expression of speaker stance, positioning and attitudes to issues, events and phenomena. Some examples can aptly explain the different faces of modality: i. Asylum procedures must, of course, comply with the rule of law. ii. Binding quotas for refugees must be introduced in the European Union. iii. Many of the refugees who come to Germany will stay. We have to welcome and integrate them. iv. Germany would have to reckon with increasing numbers of asylum seekers. v. [Asylum procedures] should be completed in a shorter space of time and should result in clarity. vi. EU states such as Sweden, Austria and Germany cannot be left alone with the problem. vii. Angela Merkel declared her conviction that Germany can resolve the problem it faces. viii. [the need to speed up asylum procedures]. And Germany needs more initial reception centres. ix. EU needs a common asylum policy. x. Also today, the yearning for freedom may well make totalitarian regimes tremble and fall.

The examples show how the representation of ideology through the use of modality expresses a difficult balance between rules and humanitarian feelings. The sentences seem to be deliberately constructed to gain the trust of the German people, and especially of the Chancellor’s political party. From these examples we also see how the overlapping of personal and institutional identities aligns the speaker’s position with the expectations of a multifaceted audience, realizing what Sarangi describes as the “dialogicity and reciprocal relationship between addresser and addressee” (2003, 166). Opinions and points of view show the use of evaluative language, especially APPRECIATION, in its categories of ‘reaction’ (positive or negative impact), ‘composition’ (balance and complexity) and ‘valuation’ which indicates what is worthwhile doing (Martin and White 2005, 56). From the corpus we know that deontic modality prevails, expressing degrees of obligation and necessity, at the same time in equilibrium with epistemic modality, expressing what is possible and desirable. Incidentally,

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modal verbs are usually followed by action verbs which, in turn, endorse ideology. Therefore, we can confirm that the orders of discourse are fully developed at a grammatical and pragmatic level. Nonetheless, for the purposes of trust building, the combination of words is also significant.

5.3. Lexical salience As a matter of fact, a large part of political discourse is based on the counterpoint between optimism and confidence in contrast with the harsh reality and gloomy facts which speak for themselves. The representation of reality and the consequent textual production rely on linguistic resources. Indeed, considering the data on lexical choices, we can detect a balance between the use of words with a clear positive meaning and those with a definitely negative connotation: + support (87) development(s) (82+13) peace (73) integration (29) dialogue (27) solidarity (26) tolerance (19)

war (82) weapons (56) conflict(s) (54+21) terrorism (50) threat(s) (26+12) sanctions (26) violence (25)

Table 1-2. Lexical indexicality. Each word expresses “the value of things” depending on an institutional focus (Martin and White 2005, 57) and indexes different aspects of representation, in relation to both the text and the audience, which gives a view of the world in the most favourable way for political goals and achievements. Therefore, whereas solidarity is an issue at stake in order to shape public opinion, (6) It is important to act accurately, correctly and on the basis of solidarity.

it is also necessary for politicians not to be considered soft on crime in order to raise consensus: (7) Merkel and Key called upon the international community to address the threat arising from terrorism in a comprehensive and coordinated manner.

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The crossroads of these two objectives generate ‘languaging’ as a linguistic process of interaction, and they are realized through language, which can be better analysed in terms of semantic prosody (Hunston 2007) and contextualization rather than only in view of individual lexical items (Sinclair 2003). The construction of a “positive environment”, the fundamental element of Vygotskij’s theory (1987) applied to languaging, is expressed in a type of language which mediates thinking, cognition and the perception of reality, determining what is defined as a “win-win situation” in the texts (notably, this is the only colloquial phrase found in the corpus, with 3 occurrences). Indeed, the idiomatic expressions are limited to these two sentences: “nipping extremism and terrorism in the bud” and “terrorists are wreaking havoc”. Some other words, with a very low frequency rate, allow us to identify the few metaphorical expressions: “your role as bridge-builders and door-openers is more important now than ever before” (3 occurrences); “the civil war has also left emotional and psychological scars” (2 occurrences); “we face mammoth tasks” (once). “Stand shoulderto-shoulder” and “go hand-in hand” appear twice in the corpus. Togetherness produces the inclusion/exclusion effect, a fundamental principle which I will discuss in more detail below, but elicited only twice in the corpus as a metaphor, in the sentences (8) There is no point in every country trying to seal itself off from the others. (9) She welcomed the fact that Denmark has decided to hold a referendum on replacing the country’s opt-out model on EU justice and home affairs with an opt-in model.

The restricted use of metaphorical and figurative language contributes to trust building in the European setting, as it reflects the directives of the European Commission (2015) concerning the style of language to be adopted within the EU: “[…] bearing in mind that a considerable proportion of the target readership may be made up of non-native speakers, very colloquial British usage should also be avoided”. Having considered some pragmatic and lexical features of the texts, we can examine now how they are organized in key concepts and semantic domains.

5.4. Key concepts and semantic domains The top key concepts elicited through WMatrix indicate “actions/making” as one of the most frequent, which confirms the analysis

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of the modal verbs as discussed in paragraph 5.2. “Actions/making” is followed by “moving”, a key concept proved by the observation of the 4grams shown in Table 1-1. But the real strength of the texts, in view of shaping public opinion and obtaining consensus, is in the forms of languaging which activate positive responses. This can be perceived in the reading of the texts, and also “measured” through electronic analysis, because “belonging to a group” is the first of the semantic domains shown by WMatrix, as we can see in the table below. “Belonging to a group” is also supported by the domain of “inclusion” which leads to actions (making), such as “helping” and “participating” in “government” and “politics”. The domains of “cause&effect” and “change” represent the broad spectrum of moving. Top semantic domains

Belonging_to_a_group Cause&Effect/Connection Change Difficult Geographical names Government Helping Inclusion

Law_and_order

Participating Politics Quantities:_many/much Strong_obligation_or_necessity Table 1-3. Building trust through ‘making’ and ‘moving’. Togetherness is an essential feature of this kind of political discourse; the feeling of “belonging to a group” is expressed by a variety of linguistic devices. Here are some of the 99 sentences in which together is used: i. The refugee problem also has a European dimension, she continued, and stressed, Europe as a whole must get its act together. ii. To master the challenges, said the Chancellor, federal, state and local governments must work together effectively. iii. We are facing a huge challenge which we can only master if we share the will to break new ground together. iv. Within only a few days this initial reception centre has been established. There is a will here to improve the conditions and to process applications swiftly, and that is what we must all work together to achieve.

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v. As Chancellor I would like to see the entire government, the federal states and the local authorities together tackling and managing this enormous task although it will require exceptional efforts from all of us. vi. The challenge is enormous, but we will master it in a carefully considered, confident manner – and above all together.

The ideological perception of an incumbent risk (migration and the problem of refugees) urges everyone to take common, unanimous decisions and it also calls for specific action programmes. Therefore, together is inserted into a phraseology (Europe as a whole, we must all work, from all of us) which is not only a customary practice in politics to build trust, but is particularly fitting in this case to emphatically curb fears and negative reactions. Actually there is no need to use the word xenophobia (which has only 8 occurrences, e.g. “At the same time the Chancellor took a clear stance on every form of xenophobia”) or use words which recall past mistakes (for example, nazis occurs only twice, to negatively evaluate the present right-wing extremists’ behaviour). For trust building it is better, instead, to insist on a positive shared attitude, voiced through phrases which can be inscribed in the APPRECIATION framework (Martin and White 2005, 57), particularly suitable for evaluating plans and policies in texts. Considering “reaction” as the type of APPRECIATION related to emotion and affection, we can find sentences such as “we, all of us, reject terrorist forces”, whereas ENGAGEMENT in the form of authorial stance is evident in “we agree that the common European asylum policy must be enforced”; assuming that “composition” is related to our perception and view of order, we can focus on sentences such as “we also have a common responsibility” and “we can change things for the better”; and, finally, cognition and the relevant considered opinions, included in the category of “valuation”, are manifest in sentences like “this is a process that we are going to tackle together” and “we are working together to build our European house”. All the sentences depict an active in-group scenario, where “making” and “moving” together can highlight positive perspectives: (10) Today we have the strength to overcome the walls of the 21st century, walls in our minds, walls of short-sighted self-interest, walls between the present and the future.

Here, trust is constructed applying repetition as a rhetorical strategy and recalling historical events (the wall) which belong to the collective memory, particularly poignant in Germany and in the personal memory of the Chancellor.

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6. Final remarks While this study was being carried out, Angela Merkel was endorsed by The Economist (Nov 7th 2015) as “The indispensable European” because, in contrast with other politicians in Europe, “[…] in her ten years in office, Mrs. Merkel has grown taller with every upheaval. […] over migration she has boldly upheld European values, almost alone in her commitment to welcoming refugees”. The briefing of the same issue is dedicated to “The chancellor’s crucible” with reference to the refugee crisis. Moreover, the German Chancellor, “whose leadership has helped preserve and promote an open, borderless Europe in the face of economic turmoil and an ongoing refugee crisis” was TIME’s 2015 Person of the Year. In the following months, instead, she was subject to mounting criticism within and outside Germany. Whatever the political judgment and the unpredictable development of the emergency, this chapter has analyzed the communicative approach adopted by a politician, the German Chancellor, in order to achieve consensus and raise trust. It has been shown that these objectives can be reached affirming both personal and institutional identities, and asserting ideological claims. The website is helpful to show also images, photos and videos of relevant events, accurately selected to support Mrs Merkel’s image. In contrast with other official websites, which offer different pages for press releases, reports, speeches and statements, the Chancellor’s website consists of a mixed genre collecting both narration of events and oral communications. What we have considered in this research are the mechanisms by which language performs its functions in a specific political discourse. The research has been supported by a number of theoretical approaches and carried out through the use of text analysers. In particular, we have described linguistic elements such as vocabulary (wording, metaphors) and grammar patterns (pronouns, modality, types of verbs), as well as the text structure emerging from the dualism and contrast between facts and beliefs. If the texts underline “sympathy for the victims”, they also communicate the firm resolution of the government to strengthen expulsion law: (11) Migrants who are not granted the right to stay should be returned to their home countries, said Angela Merkel.

The bi-polarity between humanity and legislation, compassion and regulation, is always maintained through shared opinions

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(12) There is agreement that refugees fleeing wars should be allocated fairly to the various EU member states on the basis of the economic strength and performance of each member state. This is a shared position, she said.

and common actions to face a challenge: (13) The world, she said, is looking to Europe. Europe can fairly share the burden imposed by the refugee crisis, but not by playing one nation off against another – only by acting together.

Following the criteria of political rhetoric from Julius Caesar onwards, the greater the challenge, the lower the profile: (14) Germany, said the Chancellor, is doing what is morally and legally right – no more and no less.

It is also part of political rhetoric to show a high level of intentionality meant, in Speaks’s terms (2007), as aboutness which includes content, meaning, sense, connotation and intension. They all reinforce the sense of belonging and activate languaging, so prompting a positive affective response from the audience. Legitimacy is achieved by involving European citizens in a balance of “joint problematisation” (Roberts and Sarangi 1999, 473); the communication technique is then based on the activation of shared knowledge and common motivation in the immediate context. “Future” is very much present in the texts, in the form of future-oriented projects and further structural reforms, but also in terms of educational perspectives: (15) We have to back those who take an active stand against the ideology of intolerance and hatred. (16) Here in Europe we have to ensure that young people do not fall victim to radical ideologies.

Finally, we have shown how the interaction elicits agreement, participation, shared attitudes and a co-construction of strategies to achieve greater social cohesion and cultural inclusion. The strategy in this case consists in adopting narrative discourse (flashbacks reporting sequences of past events or earlier points in present situations) and argumentation (flash-forwards to support future initiatives on the basis of ideological assumptions). Hovering between narration and argumentation, as well as between “telling” and “quoting”, the texts select and distribute

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information, explain facts, justify positions. The relationship between bias and objectivity is another matter altogether. Far from being exhaustive, this study provides some discourse indicators as to how identity and ideology contribute to the construal of trust in international settings, in situations where deep changes in social environments are occurring.

References Baker, Paul. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. Benwell, Bethan, and Elizabeth Stokoe. 2010. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bhatia, Vijay K. 2008. “Towards critical genre analysis.” In Advances in Discourse Studies, edited by Vijay K. Bhatia, John Flowerdew, and Rodney H. Jones, 166-177. London: Routledge. Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Randi Reppen. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bondi, Marina, and Mike Scott (eds). 2010. Keyness in Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Candlin, Christopher N., and Jonathan Crichton. 2013. “From ontology to methodology: exploring the discursive landscape of trust”. In Discourses of Trust, edited by Christopher N. Candlin, and Jonathan Crichton, 1-18. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Cheng, Winnie, Chris Greaves, and Martin Warren. 2006. “From n-gram to skipgram to concgram.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11 (4): 411-433. Cheng, Winnie, Chris Greaves, John Sinclair, and Martin Warren. 2009. “Uncovering the extent of the phraseological tendency: towards a systematic analysis of Concgrams.” Applied Linguistics 30 (2): 236252. Drew, Paul, and John Heritage (eds). 1992. Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. European Commission Directorate-General for Translation. 2015. English Style Guide. A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission. ec.europa.eu/translation/english/guidelines/documents/ Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. New York: Longman. —. 2011. “Discourse hybridity and social change in critical discourse analysis.” In Genre(s) on the Move. Hybridization and Discourse Change in Specialized Communication, edited by Srikant Sarangi,

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Vanda Polese, and Giuditta Caliendo, 11-26. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Greaves, Chris. 2005. ConcApp 5 software tool. http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/concordance. Hoey, Michael. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge. Hunston, Susan. 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2007. “Semantic prosody revisited.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12 (2): 249-268. —. 2008. “Starting with the small words: Patterns, lexis and semantic sequences.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(3): 271295. Hunston, Susan, and Geoff Thompson (eds). 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irvine, Judith T. 1989. “When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy.” American Ethnologist 16: 248-267. Jensen, Thomas W. 2014. “Emotion in languaging: languaging as affective, adaptive, and flexible behavior in social interaction.” Frontiers in Psychology. journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00720. Kravchenko, Alexander V. 2012. “Languaging as a consensual domain of coordinated interactions.” www.academia.edu/1241923. Kroskrity, Paul V. 2000. “Regimenting languages: Language ideology perspectives.” In Regimes of Language, edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 134. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Martin, Jim R., and Peter R.R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rayson, Paul. 2007. WMatrix. A web-based corpus processing environment. Lancaster: Computing Department Lancaster University. Roberts, Celia, and Srikant Sarangi. 1999. “Hibridity in gatekeeping discourse: Issues of practical relevance for the researcher.” In Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, edited by Srikant Sarangi and Celia Roberts, 473-504. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Salvi, Rita. 2012. “Transfer of knowledge and academic discourse: Lectures on economics.” In La Trasmissione del Sapere nelle Diverse Comunità Accademiche: Una Prospettiva Plurilingue, edited by Giuliana Diani, and Chiara Preite, 75-100. Rome: Officina Edizioni.

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—. 2013. “Space and time in the construction of identity in institutional discourse.” In Space, Time and the Construction of Identity. Discursive Indexicality in Cultural, Institutional and Professional Fields, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 21-45. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2014. “Exploring political and banking language for institutional purposes”. In Corpus Analysis for Descriptive and Pedagogical Purposes, edited by Maurizio Gotti, and Davide S. Giannoni, 241-261. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2015. “Re-contextualizing specialized English: from legislation to business.” In The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 19-46. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2016. “Languaging in corporate discourse.” In ‘Languaging’ In and Across Communities: New Voices, New Identities, edited by Sandra Campagna, Elana Ochse, Virginia Pulcini, and Martin Solly, 385-406. Bern: Peter Lang. Sarangi, Srikant. 2003. “Evaluating evaluative language.” Text 23(2): 165170. —. 2004. “Language/activity: Observing and interpreting ritualistic institutional discourse.” Cahiers de Linguistique Française 26: 135150. Schiffrin, Deborah. 2009. “Crossing boundaries: the nexus of time, space, person, and place in narrative.” Language in Society 38: 421-445. Sinclair, John M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1996. “The search for units of meaning”. Textus 9(1): 75-106. —. 2003. Reading Concordances. London: Longman. —. 2004. Trust the Text. Language, Corpus and Discourse. London: Routledge. Speaks, Jeff. 2007. “Intentionality”. In Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/papers/intentionality.pdf. Spolsky, Bernard. 1999. “Second-language learning.” In Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, edited by Joshua A. Fishman, and Ofelia Garcia, 181-192. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stubbs, Michael. 2001. Words and Phrases. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2010. “Three concepts of keywords.” In Keyness in Texts, edited by Marina Bondi, and Mike Scott, 21-42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Swain, Merrill. 2006. “Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency”. In Advanced Language Learning: The

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Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, edited by Heidi Byrnes, 95108. London: Continuum. Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vygotskij, Lev Semënoviþ. 1987. “Thinking and speech.” In The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Problems of General Psychology (Vol. 1), edited by Robert W. Rieber, and Aaron S. Carton, 39-285. New York: Plenum. Wilson, John. 2003. “Political discourse”. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton, Blackwell Publishing. Blackwell Reference Online. 24 October 2015. http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode. html?id=g9780631205968_chunk_g 97806 3120596821.

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Appendix A “personal journal” webpage A sample from www.bundeskanzlerin.de For a common European policy on asylum and refugees The Chancellor and the Spanish Prime Minister have agreed on the need for a common European policy on asylum. At the subsequent German-Spanish business forum the Chancellor praised Spain’s successful economic reforms.

Important and worthwhile - Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to the Federal Chancellery for talks - Photo: Bundesregierung/ Gebhardt

The talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy also looked at the current situation in the European Union. And they discussed the situation in Ukraine, Libya and Syria. Much of their talks was dedicated to European policy on asylumseekers. A common policy on asylum must be enforced, said the Chancellor. Member states and the European Commission have a responsibility here. Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed the importance of a common European asylum policy. "We agree that the common European asylum

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policy must be enforced." The Commission should identify safe countries of origin and set up joint registration centres in Greece and Italy. Migrants who are not granted the right to stay should be returned to their home countries, said Angela Merkel. There is agreement that, "refugees fleeing wars should be allocated fairly to the various EU member states on the basis of the economic strength and performance of each member state". This is a shared position, she said. Chancellor Angela Merkel initially welcomed the Spanish Prime Minister to Schloss Meseberg on Monday (31 August), where they had the opportunity to talk in an informal setting at the guesthouse of the German government. Angela Merkel described their discussions as "very worthwhile, very important".

CHAPTER TWO THE PHD THESIS REPORT: BUILDING TRUST IN AN EMERGING GENRE SARA GESUATO UNIVERSITY OF PADUA

1. Introduction Genres come about when new communicative needs emerge in a community of practice and its members have to devise efficient discursive ways to meet them. This is the case of the emerging academic genre of PhD thesis reports. PhD thesis reports are international scholars’ written assessments of the import and value of the semi-final versions of European students’ PhD theses, which, if positive, lead to the conferment of the Doctor Europaeus certificate. The reports are therefore official documents, having important consequences for the parties concerned. However, they are not public documents, since each of them is meant for only a few addressees: the PhD thesis supervisor, the PhD thesis committee, the PhD candidate and the administration of the university the PhD candidate will be graduating from. Indeed, these reports fit the profile of occluded genres (Swales 1996, 46): while they play a crucial role “in the administrative and evaluative functioning of the research worlds” (Swales 2004, 18), they are kept out of sight not only of outsiders and apprentices, but also of the larger group of expert practitioners. In this paper I examine two aspects of the PhD thesis report genre: the rhetorical strategies implemented to fulfil its main communicative purpose, and the discursive patterns adopted to build trust with its varied readership. More specifically, I first outline the context in which PhD thesis reports are produced and trace their communicative profile, briefly referring to the literature on teacher feedback provided on university students’ written work, and on the academic role and goals of thesis writing (paragraph 2). Then I present the data considered for the study (paragraph 3). Next, I describe how the report writers assess theses

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(paragraph 4) and manifest their presence in the reports (paragraph 5), pointing out how these complementary communicative tasks converge in the final recommendations regarding the theses (paragraph 6). By analysing the content of the texts, I offer an account of the discursive features and strategies through which the report writers build a relationship of trust with their multiple addressees (paragraph 7). Finally, I draw some preliminary conclusions from the study (paragraph 8).

2. Background The European University Association (EUA) “is the representative organisation of universities and national rectors’ conferences in 47 European countries” (http://www.eua.be/Home.aspx). Its missions include “[p]romoting European policies that will strengthen universities’ role in the development of Europe’s knowledge society” and “[e]nhancing the international dimension of universities through improved cooperation among its members and in particular by establishing dialogue with partner organisations in other world regions” (http://www.eua.be/about/what-wedo). One way of fostering and strengthening European research collaboration and mobility is an initiative which is supposed to bring “added value” to a research doctorate awarded at the university level, namely, allowing eligible PhD candidates to apply for a Doctor Europaeus Certificate.1 This is an unofficial title acknowledged by the EUA, which acts as a quality guarantee because it certifies that the PhD thesis is reviewed by at least two referees from two higher education institutions of two European countries, other than the one where the thesis is defended. The fulfilment of this requirement, among others, leads to the writing of PhD thesis reports. The content of a PhD thesis report may be heterogeneous because it is meant for a varied, although restricted, readership. First, the report writer is implicitly called upon to assume multiple academic roles (e.g. proofreader, facilitator, gatekeeper, evaluator; Hyland and Hyland 2001, 188) on a work in progress, which is, however, in its final stages. This may lead to the provision of both developmental observations on specific

1

As is explained in the “Doctoral Programmes for the European Knowledge Society Project Report”, the idea of a European Doctorate (European PhD or Doctor Europaeus/Europaea) originated from an informal initiative of the former Confederation of European Union Rectors’ Conferences in 1991. (http://www.eua.be/eua/jsp/en/upload/Doctoral_Programmes_Project_Report.1129 285328581.pdf)

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aspects of the thesis and holistic assessment of its more general features.2 The former type of feedback consists of critical comments such as indications of flaws and suggestions on how to remedy them, which the PhD writer and the supervisor may decide to take into consideration. The latter feedback involves giving a summative overview of the thesis, which forms the basis for expressing a recommendation regarding the conferment of the title of Doctor Europaeus, and which may later help the PhD thesis committee express an informed opinion on the final version of the thesis. Second, being aware of their semi-private readership, the report writer may feel relaxed about the communicative nature of the report, incorporating private intentions within its publicly shared norms (cf. Bhatia 1995), for example by providing personal, subjective comments on the thesis and/or by pursuing additional communicative goals beyond those specific to the report. To what extent a report writer takes liberties with his/her text may be subject to discipline-specific norms. While there is a vast literature on students’ academic writing, and in particular MA and PhD theses, fewer publications have considered the input that students, especially as writers, receive in the form of advice, supervision, suggestions or corrections. Current literature shows that advice on thesis writing is available, but does not accurately reflect thesis writing practice (Paltridge 2002); that EFL supervisors provide guidance on content and form, but not on the socio-rhetorical aspects of the genre (Mattison 2014); that written feedback on thesis drafts balances support with quality control (Augustsson and Jaldemark 2014) and is similar in content and goals across disciplines (Bitchener and Basturkmen 2010); that different local cultures (e.g. departments, labs) may have different ideas about the goals of their communicative practices (Thompson 1999); that collaborative revisions positively correlate with good writing practice (Castelló et al. 2012); but that, more generally, while stimulating critical reflection (Kumar and Stracke 2007), written feedback on student writing is fraught with the danger of miscommunication (Hyland 1998; Hyland and Hyland 2001). It is not known, however, what impact the final or semi-final product of the thesis writer has on its intended readership or how these may express their views on it. This study considers the written comments provided by external referees on the semi-final versions of PhD candidates’ theses. Such comments are not dealing with blind reviews, as the referees know who the candidates are and vice versa: the time and 2

I have chosen to refer to the texts under examination as PhD thesis reports, rather than PhD thesis reviews, precisely because they serve as progress reports on yetto-be-completed academic requirements rather than assessments of finished research projects.

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opportunities of their interactions can influence the construction of a profitable relationship based on the credibility and authority of the referees and their acceptance on the part of the candidates.

3. Data The data considered for this paper consist of 16 PhD thesis reports (about 12,000 words), dated 2013-2015. These texts, kindly made available to me by the University of Padua Doctoral Degrees Office, make up a small, but balanced corpus: each report, which is written in English, is relevant to both a different thesis and a different discipline (i.e. doctoral programme). Report ID TR01

TR02

TR03

TR04 TR05 TR06 TR07 TR08 TR09 TR10 TR11 TR12

TR13

Doctoral programme Archaeology and Architecture Linguistics, philology and literature Fine Arts, Music, and Performing arts Philosophy Statistics Industrial Engineering Astronomy Civil Engineering Medicine Pharmacy Veterinary Science Animal and AgroAlimentary Sciences Bioscience and Biotechnology

Date

Words

2015

561

2014

Paragraphs

Title(s)

3

Text components 1

1,567

12

1

1

2013

273

1

1

0

2013 2015 2015

2,094 911 762

10 8 10

1 1 1

1 1 1

2015 2015

326 446

5 5

1 1

1 1

2015 2014 2014

377 420 490

8 7 7

1 1 2

1 1 1

2015

2,015

15

1

3

2015

628

7

1

1

1

Chapter Two

30 TR14 TR15 TR16 Total

Mechanical Engineering Biomedicine Engineering Management

2015

181

8

1

1

2014 2013

752 663

5 12

1 1

1 1

12,466

123

17

17

Table 2-1. Overview of the corpus. The longest text is 2,094 words long, the shortest is 181 words long, while their average length is 780 words. The number of paragraphs making up a report roughly3 ranges from 1 to 15, with 7 or 8 being the preferred choice in six cases. Most texts include only one component, namely the report, but one (TR11) comprises two (i.e. a cover letter and the report proper). A large majority of the reports, namely 14, have a title, but one (TR03) has none, while another one (TR12) has three. Table 2-1 specifies these information details about each report.

4. The thesis The PhD thesis report generally summarizes the content of the thesis and expresses a value judgement on it. The summary traces a profile of the thesis, and sets the context for the evaluation, which in turn motivates the explicit or implicit recommendation to confer the Doctor Europaeus 3

The number of paragraphs is not always easy to determine. In TR06, each sentence forms a typographic paragraph (total: 61). I counted as distinct paragraphs A) the introductory section, called “GENERAL REMARKS” (original emphasis; sub-total: 1), and B) each sentence or group of sentences relevant to a specific thesis component, whose title was underlined in the text, and which was listed under the heading “DETAILS OF THE LECTURE” (original emphasis; sub-total: 9) in the latter component. In TR12, I counted as distinct paragraphs: A) the five sub-sections listed under the heading “External referee approval” (original emphasis), each with a highlighted sub-heading (sub-total: 5); B) the table occurring under the heading “Thesis evaluation” (original emphasis; sub-total: 1); C) each of the eight typographic paragraphs listed under the heading “General comments” (original emphasis; sub-total: 8); and D) the 103 typographic ones listed under “Remarks” (original emphasis; sub-total: 1). In TR15, I counted as distinct paragraphs, A) each typographic paragraph (sub-total: 4) and the five numbered typographic sub-paragraphs listed under the second paragraph (subtotal: 1). In TR16, I counted as distinct paragraphs: A) each typographic paragraph (sub-total: 11) and the two numbered typographic sub-paragraphs listed under the second paragraph (sub-total: 7).

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award. The report writers’ comments include descriptive and evaluative feedback, which may be presented in distinct text segments or be intertwined in the same sentences. This pattern, found in 12 texts, may involve qualifying the characteristics attributed to the thesis and/or the actions performed by the thesis writer – or metonymically credited to the thesis – by means of explicit evaluative lexis, as in (1), or mentioning the thesis writer’s accomplishments as a budding academic: pointing out their success beyond their current endeavour is an indirect form of praise, that is, motivation for a positive judgement of their work as scholars (2): (1) These experiments were built properly on each other to examine different aspects of group housing of growing rabbits. (TR12) (2) This work has been published. (TR09)

The object of evaluation in a PhD thesis report is, naturally, the thesis it comments on. This is evaluated directly when its qualities and accomplishments are highlighted, which is a very common choice in the texts: (3) It is a careful and comprehensive, though also concise, survey. (TR04)

However, the thesis may also be evaluated indirectly. This happens when attention is drawn to the topic or issue chosen as its object of investigation, or alternatively, to the PhD candidate. When the object of evaluation is the thesis topic, this is qualified as interesting and/or important, that is, central to the discipline (4). Instead, when evaluation focuses on the PhD candidate, it highlights their academic qualities (i.e. virtues and merits), top-notch performance (i.e. efforts and intellectual achievements) and/or potential for success (e.g. envisaged long-term career prospects). This option is instantiated in six texts (5): (4) The topic is interesting, relevant and original, specifically in what concerns the examination of service recovery issues in servitized manufacturers. (TR16) (5) In particular, the author has shown that he masters the literature on the subject well, that he is able to build a case, select his case studies and make a significant contribution to scholarship on ceramic studies and (post) excavation strategies and analyses. (TR01)

While most comments positively evaluate the theses, some point out their weaknesses; such negative observations occur in nine texts, and make

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up a small part of them. Although infrequent and unobtrusive, they are formulated in various ways: first, explicit indications may be given of omissions or drawbacks (6). At other times, remarks are offered which are understood to be detrimental because juxtaposed to, and thus compared with, positive comments in the immediate co-text; in (7) the first comment, which identifies a gap in the thesis, qualifies the second text segment as a limited, and thus inadequate, achievement; in (8) the presupposition implicit in “admits” triggers a negative interpretation of the embedded declarative; and in (9) the exclamation mark and the positioning of the comment – under the heading “Remarks”, in a section specifically devoted to local problems – signal an oversight. Alternatively, norms are indirectly evoked that were not adhered to, as a way of signalling a failure to meet appropriate standards (10). Finally, reference may be made to background disciplinary knowledge that is relevant to the thesis topic, but which the thesis writer is apparently unaware of, suggesting that something important was not taken into consideration (11): (6) There are only a few typing errors and grammatically incorrect sentences. (TR15) (7) In this paper there is not any new methodological contribution […]. The main attractiveness of this paper is that the effect of explanatory variables is incorporated nonlinearly on the transition probabilities so that it is possible to obtain more appropriate estimates of these probabilities. (TR05) (8) […] even though the author himself admits that his bibliography heavily draws upon Italian and Anglo-Saxon literature. (TR01) (9) The pens and the rabbits are the same! (TR12) (10) Because the experiments were described separately, sometimes there are some overlapping [sic] in the introduction and in the discussion. (TR12) (11) Related to the CDK2 project it must be pointed out that synthetic routes to obtain pyrimidine-based irreversible CDK2 inhibitors have been proposed. (TR10)

As a face-threatening act, a criticism might not be taken nicely by the addressee. The report writers therefore sometimes go to the trouble of warning the addressee about, or compensating them for, their “offensive” act. For example, they may preface their negative comment with a remark

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hinting at “trouble to come”, a strategy employed in three texts (12); alternatively, they may mitigate their criticisms with positive comments, a strategy employed in two texts (13) or motivating explanations, a solution adopted in three texts (14): (12) As a suggestion, studying two contingencies using four cases may be too ambitious. (TR16) (13) In the document, the candidate is able to adequately compare the data with what is known in the literature. Nevertheless, the thesis work lacks extensive functional studies. (TR11) (14) However, using an average to extract the seasonal component seems to be too simplistic. Obviously, the extraction of the components affects the estimation of the stochastic component which is finally modelled using the Markov regime switching models with time-varying probabilities. (TR05)

When the report writers point out flaws or shortcomings in the theses under review, they may provide suggestions as to how to remedy them. The phrasing of these suggestions for improvement, attested in eight texts, is quite varied: x

the use of modality and/or the expression of stance are common choices:

(15) […] should, though, include a few sentences to anticipate and respond to this criticism. (TR04) (16) It could be important to check whether they are present when using alternative procedures but have no effects when implementing the proposed methodology. (TR05)

x

imperatives are used only in one text, albeit frequently:

(17) Please, use past tense. (TR12)

x questions are employed in two reports; they count as a hybrid between expressions of criticisms and indications of remedial steps: in requesting clarification about a given encoding option and/or corrective action on a methodological choice, they also point out problem spots:

34

Chapter Two (18) l m, what is the difference between logaritmmean and logarithmic mean? (TR06)

x other suggestions for improvement hide their directive force, in that they are presented as announcements of courses of action that are taken for granted, rather than being formulated as explicit attempts to influence the addressee’s behavior: (19) […] further work will consist in functionalising the benzimidazole scaffold with internalising peptides. (TR10)

x an unusually phrased corrective suggestion is the “warning” that indicates a possible problem to be avoided, which suggests that precautions can be taken so that remedial action is no longer necessary: (20) I trust that this will not bring in any unsuspected new elements or conclusions that have not been foreshadowed in the preceding four parts. (TR01)

x some corrective feedback is encoded by means of counterfactuals, which highlight problems that are too late to fix: (21) It would have been good to get a more precise idea of what and how the candidate sees the future. (TR11)

Finally, one report writer directly provides the needed corrections (e.g. alternative views) him-/herself, by means of explanatory observations about some problem spots (e.g. inaccurately worded text segments): (22) Page 37: “The burrows are mostly created by females as the reproductive period approaches…” - Remark: The burrows are ready, they are not built (dug) each year. Females may increase their size, they may dig new holes and entrances, and nests are made at the end of the ‘private hole’ for kindling.” (TR12)

Such evaluative comments reveal what the report writers understand and appreciate of the theses and how these can be improved upon in view of their final versions. They therefore provide feedback accompanied by guidance and advice. While strongly focused on the theses and their authors, however, the PhD thesis reports also allow their writers to manifest their presence in the text.

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5. The report writer Although the PhD thesis report is about the thesis being reviewed and its author, it occasionally reveals the presence of the report writer him/herself. This may surface in the text as a prominent interactional participant or at least a relevant academic ‘stakeholder’. A sign of the report writers’ presence is found in the subjectivisers that preface their comments, explicitly signalling their attitude towards the theses. In six texts, they act as hedges, qualifying the comments as subjective and debatable, thus toning down their assertiveness (I trust, TR01), while in two texts they serve to emphasise the report writer’s point of view (I have no doubt, TR04). The presence of the writer also comes to the fore when the phatic and conative functions of the reports are under focus. This occurs: in the three reports in which the report writers directly address their peers with questions (23) or offers of help (24); in the two reports in which the writers address questions and imperatives to the PhD candidates, (25) and (26), and in the one in which the writer appears to be addressing a “generic” reader (27): (23) Is the report confidential or not? (TR06) (24) Please find below my report. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have further questions or need additional information. (TR11) (25) What does 8 x 8 cm mean? (TR12) (26) Please, write also tonic immobility test and open field test in the subtitles. (TR12) (27) Does the thesis have weaknesses? (TR04)

Although less directly, the presence of the report writer can be perceived when he/she argues his/her views as if directly interacting with the addressee, by negotiating contrasting opinions about the theses. This may involve two complementary strategies: showing understanding and conceding a point. The former consists in acknowledging that something is wrong with the thesis, but countering that with an indication of the positive aspects of the work done so as to defend it as adequate (28); the latter, exemplified in one text, involves expressing a preliminary agreement on what is asserted in the thesis before introducing a counterargument (29):

36

Chapter Two (28) […] but appreciate that this maybe [sic] difficult as the thesis is composed of two disparate parts. (TR09) (29) I understand but you have to weigh the feed (feed intake). (TR12)

The report writer’s role as a reviewer is further highlighted when comments are offered on, or reference is made to, the evaluation process itself; such meta-evaluative reflections or signposts, which announce or qualify the evaluation process and/or guide the reader through the text, may be conveyed through first-person subject statements or impersonal constructions, and are exemplified in (30) and (31). Alternatively, or in addition, the reviewer may directly indicate how he/she carried out or experienced the review process, that is, how he/she acted on and/or reacted to the thesis. This strategy foregrounds the report writer’s type and degree of involvement in the review process, which is usually left unmentioned in more standard, and publicly accessible, reviews (32) and (33): (30) Next, I will comment on each of these papers in particular. (TR05) (31) All these aspects make the reviewer’s task easy to precisely evaluate the novelty and significance of the work. (TR16) (32) I could not find any significant omissions. (TR01) (33) Reading this PhD thesis has been one of the most pleasant tasks of this academic semester, especially since it gave me ample food for thought; I was also enlightened […]. (TR02)

Finally, the report writer may choose to assume the role of a co-mentor for the doctoral student, by expressing suggestions on the latter’s postthesis projects. This strategy, instantiated in four texts, involves providing advice on how to use the thesis as a springboard for future academic achievements, and serves both to praise the PhD candidate for their present and imminent accomplishments and to sanction their admission to academia: (34) There is certainly enough substance and quality here to encourage the candidate to consider adapting the research for publication in monograph form, though it would also be appropriate to contemplate turning parts into articles. (TR02)

The report writers, therefore, highlight the interpersonal dimension of their relationship with the addressees: besides delivering a report as a

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finished product, they also engage their addressees in the evaluation process as if this were a component of a multi-stage interaction.

6. The thesis and the report writer The most crucial point of contact in the PhD thesis report between the thesis and the reviewer occurs when the latter unambiguously commits to a judgement of the former, that is, when he/she expresses their recommendation to confer, or not to confer, the title of Doctor Europaeus to the thesis writer. This communicative goal is carried out in 14 of the 16 texts considered. All but one of the texts present the recommendation as the motivated conclusion of the preceding evaluative comments. In the other case, the recommendation is found in the cover letter prefacing the report, and although it occurs in interaction-initial position, it is, conceptually, a conclusion drawn from the evaluation detailed in the enclosed report. The recommendation is expressed in different ways across the texts. An explicit indication that the title in question is to be awarded is found in four texts (35). Alternatively, a slightly less direct form of recommendation is found in the 10 texts whose writers openly declare what the theses deserve: the more general title of Doctor, the right to be discussed in a viva examination and/or a good grade (36). Of the two texts with no overt (i.e. formally marked) recommendation, one contains a conclusive positive comment that acts as a recommendation substitute, that is, a supporting move of the implied recommendation that it evokes (37): (35) In my view this thesis is definitely deserving of the award of the certificate of Doctor Europaeus. (TR02) (36) […] this work is most definitely sufficient in The Netherlands for the candidate to be awarded her PhD title. (TR09) (37) Despite many remarks and comments, [...] wrote an excellent thesis. (TR12, original emphasis)

The recommendation is the textual move that rounds off the PhD thesis report. Since it fulfils the main communicative purpose of the report, it is not surprising that it is the most common component of the texts analysed.

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7. A relationship of trust Although the PhD thesis writer carries most of the burden of the work involved, a PhD thesis project is the result of a collaborative effort, which is necessarily based on (a presumption of) trust. The PhD candidate trusts that their supervisor has the knowledge and willingness to provide the right type and amount of guidance, and that he/she has the candidate’s best interests at heart, channelling their work in the right direction. On the other hand, the supervisor trusts that the PhD candidate is serious about their research project and its write-up, and thus that they want to do their best, within reason, to produce a valid piece of work. The supervisor expects the graduate student to follow directions and be ready to face the challenges that the whole enterprise may involve. Their prolonged interaction is apparently based on some understanding of the Gricean cooperative principle. Trust is also invoked in the procedure that leads to the assessment of the thesis by external referees. When the supervisor advises or allows the thesis writer to apply for the Doctor Europaeus certificate, the former trusts that his/her international peers have the ability and expertise to provide accurate, honest and useful feedback on the work submitted for consideration, recognising and appreciating its magnitude, solidity, and validity. The PhD candidate similarly trusts their supervisor who in turn honestly believes that the candidate’s work has what it takes to stand external scrutiny. The external referees, on their part, trust the thesis draft they have to examine is good enough to earn its writer a doctoral degree, and thus worth their time and effort. The university administration and especially the committee, who will examine the candidate during the oral defence, trust that the reports they receive on the thesis drafts are relevant, reliable and informative so that they can contribute to an overall, correct assessment of the candidate’s work. In this wider, multi-party interactional context, therefore, it is assumed that everyone’s goals converge toward doing the right thing, for the common good – leading the deserving candidate to the conclusion of their academic education. Trust may be merely presumed – in the absence of proof to the contrary – or generously given – in good faith – and it may be won or lost in an instant, but most of the time, trust is gained or established over a period of time, as a result of prolonged commitment – for the one who wants to earn it – and “cumulative evidence” – for the one who wants to place it in someone. That is, it is a feeling or attitude that develops gradually, and on a rational basis. The PhD thesis report writers adopt

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several strategies to argue for the credibility of their reports and claim credibility for themselves.

7.1. The credibility of the report One trust-building strategy, quite obviously, is the provision of comments on the thesis, in addition to the global, succinct judgement on it, which accompanies or replaces the recommendation on the conferment of the title of Doctor Europaeus. These comments show that the report writer has read, understood and critically examined the thesis, and can thus plausibly motivate his/her recommendation. At the same time, they reveal that the writer does not take it for granted that his/her recommendations and/or global assessment of the thesis would be considered adequate, and thus worthy of trust, if not supported by relevant “data”. These comments are the most prominent part of the reports (e.g. they make up 78.8% and 58.5% of the text in TR03 and TR14, respectively). The second strategy involves writing extensive, rather than succinct, comments. Clearly, the richer in content and/or the more well-argued the feedback provided is, the more convincing it sounds: each descriptive and/or evaluative information unit sustains the overall judgement and/or recommendation on the thesis. All the report writers provide detailed information about the theses: most reports are several hundred words long, and three are over a thousand words long (see Table 2-1). These extensive analyses point out many aspects of the theses, and enable the readers to gradually form a well-grounded opinion on the theses. Another strategy consists in reporting on the content of the thesis, besides evaluating it. An evaluative comment merely tells the reader how a thesis is to be assessed, and implicitly asks the reader to take the writer’s word for it, independently of whether the evaluation is presupposed, and thus to be taken for granted, or stated, and thus subject to contradiction (38). A descriptive comment, instead, shows what the thesis is like, comprises and/or accomplishes. It is evidence that the thesis has indeed been carefully read, and it gives food for thought to the reader, who can consider given details of the thesis and choose whether to interpret them in the same way as they are assessed by the report writer. All the reports contain information about the content and the value of the theses, whether in distinct text segments (39) or in text segments that also include evaluative comments (40): (38) The thesis represents a significant contribution to knowledge in the humanitarian supply chain management field. (TR14)

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Chapter Two (39) The candidate in the Thesis (150 pages + an Appendix of Publications and Conferences) reports on the identification of G-quadruplexes in the HIV-I genome, and on the study of the possible utilization as new targets of anti HIV-therapy. (TR15) (40) Its literary presentation and succinctness is good. (TR14)

As work in progress of budding academics, PhD thesis drafts, however commendable, are unlikely to be flawless. Accurate report writers, therefore, are to extol their virtues, but also point out their faults. This is a sign of intellectual balance, comprehensiveness and honesty, which confers plausibility on the reports. Twelve reports out of 16 make reference to the problematic, or at least less than ideal, aspects of the theses, sometimes in general terms, and sometimes in detail: (41) The negative data, even if frustrating, can be considered as helpful since they indicate the elements to improve in order to make this system a friendly-working tool. (TR13)

The strategies that lend credibility to the reports are thus based on the provision of factual information about the theses.

7.2. The credibility of the report writer The report writers claim credibility as reviewers indirectly, by offering convincing reports (as shown in the previous paragraph), which reveal their knowledge and expertise, and directly, by referring to their scholarly achievements. Indirect evidence of the report writers’ expertise is found whenever their familiarity with the state of the art, practices and standards of their disciplinary background is highlighted; this occurs when: x the thesis is placed in its relevant context, which signals its novelty and usefulness (42) and (43); x the methodological validity of the thesis is pointed out (44); x revealing explanations are offered as to what is actually involved in the carrying out of a given type of research project (45); x a comparative assessment is provided of the thesis against other works in the same field (in six texts) as a way to extol the virtues of the PhD candidate’s endeavor, as in (46) and (47):

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(42) […] which will become a standard point of reference for those working on this writer. (TR04) (43) The thesis thus offers a new synthesis of the history of the building complex. (TR03) (44) Data collection and analysis are competently done and follow the established guidelines of case research. (TR16) (45) It may be difficult for those who are unfamiliar with this material to understand how difficult this task is, or to appreciate what taxing work lies behind the lucid expositions given here. (TR04) (46) This combination of critical and fair evaluation of the theoretical framework […] is […] unfortunately not encountered that often in modern scholarship. (TR01) (47) […] the candidate’s English compares favourably to the standard in many doctoral theses written by native speakers. (TR02)

A report writer may also directly refer to him-/herself as a prestigious scholar well-established in the field so as to gain status in the eyes of his/her readers. By openly declaring his/her academic expertise, he/she signals his/her reliability as an authoritative reviewer, whose judgement on the thesis can thus be considered absolutely valid. This strategy is repeatedly exemplified in one text: (48) […] the several publication projects for which I hold responsibility or in which I am currently involved. (TR01)

Finally, the report writers further stress their authoritativeness when they act as knowledge disseminators, that is, when they remind readers of the research and disciplinary background to the thesis topics. Outlining the state of the art of the fields the theses are relevant to sets the context for, and further motivates, the evaluation of the theses. This strategy is employed in five texts, as in the following example: (49) Many studies in the past were based on the extension of numerical techniques adopted in solving fluid mechanics problems, which limited the usage of a more realistic constitutive model of soils. Several academic and research institutions are now developing geotechnical engineering based MPM codes. (TR08)

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7.3. Gaining the thesis writer’s trust The external referee has multiple roles to play with regard to the PhD candidate: that of a thesis supervisor “from afar” who can appreciate the work already done; that of an examiner (and possible gate-keeper) who provides suggestions on how to improve on the research work; and that of a co-mentor/advisor, willing to provide supportive encouragement for the work still to be done. By showing that he/she meets the requirements of all these roles, the report writer can build a relationship of trust with the thesis writer. By recognising and appreciating the effort the candidate put into the research project, the report writer projects the image of person who takes the latter’s work seriously and is attentive and sensitive to the contribution being made to the field. This occurs when the writer provides evidence in support of his/her positive evaluation of the thesis, as in (50) and (51), and when he/she points out how carefully he/she has read the thesis and what strong impact it has made on him/her as in (52): (50) Two papers were published in a high level scientific journal, in Livestock Science, and one is accepted by Animal Journal. (TR12) (51) The collaboration with a team undertaking a geophysical survey has also contributed important new information on the choir screen. (TR03) (52) Perhaps my best way of indicating my admiration for this aspect of the thesis (and indeed for the thesis as a whole) is to say that, having read it, I now need to go back and re-think my own understanding of Abelard’s theory of universals. (TR04)

By pointing out problematic aspects of the thesis and offering suggestions on how to remedy them – a choice instantiated in seven reports – the report writer shows that he/she has at heart both the standards of the discipline and the development of the PhD candidate into a mature scholar. The reference to problems may be in the form of general summative comments, specific indications on local defects or quotations from the text. The remedial work suggested may be relevant to the form of the thesis (53), or its content and rationale (54): (53) A conclusion of chapter is wished. (TR06) (54) From a theoretical perspective, I offer two suggestions regarding the choice of the two contingency variables that were studied. (TR16)

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Furthermore, the report writer may act as a mentor, by recommending suitable courses of action to the candidate for their post-dissertation future. This shows that he/she cares about the PhD candidate, and wants to spur them on to continue with their academic work (55). Finally, the report writer may signal that he/she places his/her professional trust in the PhD candidate as a future colleague, by predicting their future success. This choice is instantiated in six texts (56): (55) The three papers could be eventually published in econometric or statistics academic journals. (TR05) (56) […] can open new avenues of research in the near future. (TR10)

8. Discussion and conclusion The PhD thesis reports considered are elaborate texts. Their multifacetedness is due to their complementary, though interrelated, communicative purposes (e.g. evaluation, sanction, advice and recommendation) and their relevance to a varied, though limited, readership (i.e. PhD committee members, PhD thesis supervisors, PhD thesis writers and university administrations). This leads their authors to implement multiple rhetorical strategies in them. The report writers both summarize and evaluate the theses, and occasionally compare them to related works. This way, they help committee members to form an educated opinion on the theses. They also point out flaws and oversights, and suggest remedial action. In so doing, they act in a supportive and prescribing mode, giving judgement but also guidance to the PhD candidates (Grant 2008, 18) so as to encourage them to “reach the level of performance expected by their academic communities” (Bitchener and Basturkmen 2010, 95). This type of feedback reveals that the theses are conceptualized as unfinished communicative products that are still subject to change and thus liable to improvement. The evaluation paves the way for and motivates the recommendation, and acts as a symbolic “pat on the shoulder” for both the thesis writer and the supervisor. The report writers also occasionally comment on the review process, themselves, and the fields they operate in, thus making their presence palpable in the text. The reference to oneself and one’s field is a way to affirm one’s relevant role in the academic community at large and one’s authoritativeness in the review process at hand. The report writer is one of the last links in the chain of quality control of the PhD thesis project. He/she has a great responsibility: his/her judgement will affect the PhD candidate’s future, determine how the latter

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will be perceived by their colleagues, and possibly influence the future of the academic community at large in the long term. It is important for the report writer to be regarded as trustworthy. But building trust is a tricky job, especially when multiple tasks have to be juggled: the report writer has to be honest and reliable as an assessor, helpful and supportive as a distant co-supervisor and mentor, fair and balanced as an examiner. This complex goal is achieved in a step-wise fashion: as if in a narrative context, the report writer’s background qualifications – suggesting that he/she is to be trusted as an authoritative, accredited source of information – provides the setting of the report; the reference to and the comments on specific components and aspects of the thesis project are the episodes making up the complicating evaluative action; the overall stance expressed towards the quality of the thesis, that is, the recommendation, is the climax of the evaluation process; finally, the envisaged projection into a later development is the coda. The present small-scale case study has revealed that the PhD thesis report writers are aware of the multiple academic roles they are asked to play when evaluating thesis drafts and, consequently, implement multiple strategies to efficiently and reliably fulfil their communicative purpose. Through these strategies, they appeal to their target readership’s reason so as to make their evaluations sound plausible, credible and professional. Clearly, though, only the examination of a much larger number of texts, with a balanced representation of academic fields, would make it possible to more systematically compare and contrast communicative practices across disciplines – rather than merely across individual authors – and to trace a more accurate profile of the trust-building patterns of the genre.

References Augustsson, Gunnar, and Jimmy Jaldemark. 2014. “Online Supervision: A Theory of Supervisors’ Strategic Communicative Inuence on Student Dissertations.” Higher Education 67 (1): 19-33. Bhatia, Vijay K. 1995. “Genre-mixing in Professional Communication: The Case of ‘Private Intentions’ v. ‘Socially Recognised Purposes’.” In Explorations in English for Professional Communication, edited by Paul Bruthiaux, Tim Boswood, and Bertha Du-Babcock, 1-19. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. Bitchener, John, and Helen Basturkmen. 2010. “The Focus of Supervisor Written Feedback to Thesis/Dissertation Students.” International Journal of English Studies 10 (2): 79-97.

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Castelló, Montserrat, Anna Iñesta, Marta Pardo, Eva Liesa, and Reinaldo Martínez-Fernández. 2012. “Tutoring the End-of-studies Dissertation: Helping Psychology Students Find their Academic Voice when Revising Academic Texts.” Higher Education 63 (1): 97-115. Doctoral Programmes for the European Knowledge Society Project Report. Final report. 2005. http://www.eua.be/eua/jsp/en/upload/Doctoral_Programmes_Project_R eport.1129285328581.pdf; p. 39 (last access: 18 February 2016). European University Association. http://www.eua.be/Home.aspx (last access: 18 February 2016). —. http://www.eua.be/about/what-we-do (last access: 18 February 2016). Grant, Barbara M. 2008. “Agonistic Struggle. Master-slave Dialogues in Humanities Supervision.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 7 (1): 9-27. Hyland, Fiona. 1998. “The Impact of Teacher Written Feedback on Individual Writers.” Journal of Second Language Writing 7: 255-286. Hyland, Fiona, and Ken Hyland. 2001. “Sugaring the Pill. Praise and Criticism in Written Feedback.” Journal of Second Language Writing 10: 185-212. Kumar, Vijay, and Elcke Stracke. 2007. “An Analysis of Written Feedback on a PhD Thesis.” Teaching in Higher Education 12 (4): 461-470. Mattisson, Jane. 2014. “Supervising in English: The Doctoral Thesis, Professor/Student Discourse, and Social Practice.” Respectus Philologicus 25 (30): 105-117. Paltridge, Brian. 2002. “Thesis and Dissertation Writing: An Examination of Published Advice and Actual Practice.” English for Specific Purposes 21: 125-143. Swales, John. 1996. “Occluded Genres in the Academy: The Case of the Submission Letter.” In Academic Writing: Intercultural and Textual Issues, edited by Eija Ventola, and Anna Mauranen, 45-58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. —. 2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Paul. 1999. “Exploring the Contexts of Writing: Interviews with PhD Supervisors”. In Issues in EAP Writing Research and Instruction, edited by Paul Thompson, 37-54. Reading: Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Reading.

CHAPTER THREE THE APPEAL OF TRAVEL BLOGS: THE IMAGE OF ITALY THROUGH AMERICAN EYES GIULIANA DIANI UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA

1. Introduction In recent years, Internet usage has influenced people’s lives, changing the way in which they search for information. In particular, in the field of tourism, Internet has changed the features of tourism promotion, offering new opportunities and, at the same time, increasing the quality of the services which are offered to customers. As Mack et al. rightly observe (2008, 133), the online tourism space is vast and contains information ranging from hotels, airlines, destination marketing organizations to consumers themselves, such as customer-to-customer exchanges, online forums, and blogs. Among these sources, blogs have become increasingly popular both as a form of “digital story-telling” (Pudliner 2007, 46) about travellers’ experiences, and as a source of information on selected places, providing a market potential in the tourism industry (Choi et al. 2007; Pan et al. 2007; Wenger 2008; Akehurst 2009). In her book on tourism discourse Francesconi (2012) reported that in 2006 travel blogs accounted for 20% of the total blogosphere, and ranked 8th in the Technorati’s (2006) list of top twenty-two monitored topics. The fact that travel blogs have gained increased popularity among tourist information consumers has been attributed to consumers’ perceptions of Internet credibility. As research has evidenced (Gretzel et al. 2007; Akehurst 2009), travel blogs are viewed as more credible and even trustworthy than traditional tourist information sources (e.g. written guides) which “lack the direct experience with a tourism product” (Schmallegger and Carson 2008, 100). Such a view is supported by the study of Zehrer et al. (2011) who find that travellers are concerned about

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the credibility of travel blogs because any information they collect is used as referential material in order to improve the quality of their purchases. As pointed out by Tan and Chang (2012), credibility is allied closely with the concept of trust (Flanagin and Metzger 2008), and acts as a mediator between information quality and information usage (Kelton et al. 2008). Different definitions of trust have been provided in the literature (Tan and Chang 2012; Candlin and Crichton 2013 for a review). This study adopts the concept of trust as developed by Flanagin and Metzger (2008, 8) who refer to it as the trustworthiness dimension of credibility as “the believability of a source or message”. Landmark works focusing on travel blogs have been produced mainly within tourism marketing studies. As research has shown, they play a crucial role in the tourism consumption and marketing processes (Gretzel et al. 2007; Wenger 2008; Bosangit et al. 2009), having thus important implications for tourism development (Litvin et al. 2008; Volo 2010). Within this field of study, research has mostly focused on the influence of blogs on purchasing behaviour, destination image and satisfaction (Carson 2008; Crotts et al. 2009; Huang et al. 2010; Law and Cheung 2010). Travel blogs have also drawn the attention of researchers in applied linguistics research (Gerbig and Shek 2007; Dann and Liebman Parrinello 2007; Cappelli 2008, 2013; Gerbig 2008; Orlando 2009; Francesconi 2012; Cacchiani 2014; D’Egidio 2014; Denti 2015; Goethals 2015). These studies have emphasized the role of language helping convey the desired image of tourism, evoking attributes such as authenticity or playfulness. This view reinforces the idea that tourism discourse is an ideal territory for an analysis of the role of language to convey specific images of the destination and to transmit cultural meanings (Urry 1990; Dann 1996). As Urry rightly remarks (1990, 3), “the language is used to inform the tourist about what must be seen and to direct his/her gaze through an anticipation of intense pleasures”. The present chapter intends to contribute to this line of research by exploring how the image of Italy is represented by American travel bloggers. The focus is that of identifying the cultural-specific aspects that better represent the Italianità to American travellers through an analysis of the lexis that is employed to construct and transmit Italian culture. The choice to focus on Italy is influenced by the fact that, as pointed out by Vestito (2006, 6), “Italy has always attracted visitors from all over the world; throughout history, it has been a place of pilgrimage, a main stop in the Grand Tour”. This is also sustained by Salvi and Turnbull (2010) in their study on the fascination of Rome as the “Eternal City”, a favourite tourist destination for British travellers for centuries.

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This chapter is organized as follows: paragraph 2 provides a brief description of the travel blog as genre. The corpus and methodology used in the present study are outlined in paragraph 3. Paragraph 4 presents the results of the analysis. The chapter concludes with a summary of the findings (paragraph 5).

2. Travel blogs as a new digital form of tourist communication Travel blogs pertain to what Dann (1996, 143) calls the “on-trip stage” of the tourist cycle: they are web-based travel diary-like accounts written and shared by travellers while they are still on the road and made freely available online (Cappelli 2006; Dann and Liebman Parrinello 2007). They consist of textual units called posts, archived inside the blog in reverse chronological order. Most blogs are based on text, but they can also contain photos or other multimodal materials like videos, maps, chart trips. These on-the-road online travel accounts are written in a colloquial and immediate style (Antelmi and Santulli 2012), making them closer to word-of-mouth. Because they are highly accessible and constantly updated, the information they offer is taken as credible and reliable. This explains the fact that they are increasingly being consulted by future travellers in planning their holidays (Francesconi 2012). The use of colloquial style in travel blogs may also have benefits beyond enhanced readability. It may contribute to build trust, as evidenced by a study carried out by Fogg et al. (2002, 43) who show that the “the writing tone” is among the top 10 factors that users mentioned when describing a website’s trustworthiness. They report that “people generally said that sensationalism or slang hurt a site’s credibility, while a straightforward, friendly writing style boosted credibility”. Based on the analysis of the 100 travel blogs I collected for this study, a number of common features have emerged that may contribute to define the genre. In the following I approach each of them in turn: x All the blog posts contained a title, minimally mentioning the relevant destination (e.g. In Italy: The Florence meanderings; Venice in Winter) or adding relevant detail (e.g. on the must-do’s: Letter from Italy: hiking Cinque Terre away from the crowds). x Most posts showed time and date: Aug 31st 2010 at 11:03AM; Sep 17th 2010 at 3:30PM.

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x Visual aids (e.g. maps) and pictures (plus optional link to photobook) were also present, but there were no links to/comments on other websites. x None of the posts were signed. However, writers/travellers regularly used first-person pronouns (My first night in Florence, I sauntered by a dimly lit restaurant on my way back from the gym), and fellow-travellers’ names were often mentioned in the text (Alison and I tripped across the echoing stone streets of La Spezia’s old town and crossed the so-called “Gulf of Poets” in half an hour on a ferry to Portovenere). x Most blogs referred to a potential reader as tourist/traveller, often addressed with the pronoun you, as illustrated in the following example: (1) If you’re still brave enough to walk the entire Trail (one way): Bring your most comfortable, sturdy walking shoes and a bottle of water for each of you; Know that it will take you about 6 hours, not including time spent in the villages themselves […].

x Some posts (37 out of 100) kept a daily record of the traveller’s experiences, as shown below: (2) In two days (and using this handy map for reference) here’s what we did in Florence: […] We wandered through the sculpture heaven of the Bargello Museum and the political grandeur of the Palazzo Vecchio. […] We breezed into the Uffizi Gallery at about 5pm to enjoy the last hour-anda-half of the day without major crowds or a need to book tickets in advance. […] We went for a stroll through the quiet Piazza della Passera, ending with a beautiful dinner at Trattoria Quattro Leoni […] The next day we started the morning in the Piazza Signoria, standing at a caffé bar with frothy cappuccinos, the air full of cigarette smoke and lilting Italian […]

while most posts (63 out of 100) only gave selected highlights and memorable experiences, as illustrated in the following example: (3) And so my first afternoon in Venice began. I made my way down narrow alleys, up and down steps, pausing to look into shop windows, and I felt like I’d been there before. Not déjà vu, but déjà merchandise. This was the exact same stuff I’d seen in my grandparents’ home as a child, things they’d picked up on their travels here: gilt trays of gold, red, and green, blown glass birds, “paintings” made of tiny stones. Suddenly those things that had seemed precious and unique, some of which I now owned, seemed like very expensive knick-knacks, souvenirs Venice had been foisting off on tourists for decades. As I walked along the canals, lined

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Chapter Three with picturesque businesses and homes, watching the water lap against the buildings, I noticed that mildew was growing up the sides of some. The place was soggy at its roots, decaying, but putting up a good front. I visited Saint Mark’s Square, had my picture taken amidst the pigeons that have overrun the place, and paused for a rest.

as against not particularly memorable as in the following: (4) The Canal view was lovely, but I was unmoved. I walked further and further but a feeling that this was a fake place, like Las Vegas or Disneyland, was growing.

x Information on parking, expenses for meals or museums is given in different ways, as shown in the following examples: (5) Monterosso al Mare, the only village with a sandy beach, was our home base (see Cinque Terre: Part One). If you’re holding onto a rental car while you visit the area, the parking lots here make this an ideal place to set up camp. It’s the main hub for train travel, and home to the area’s tourist office. (6) Bistecca alla Fiorentina is a famous Tuscan indulgence, and is quite easy to find around Florence. To be sure you are getting the real thing, find a local place that appears to be busy. I happened upon Perseus, and they slapped me silly with their decadent beef, fresh baked bread, and nutritious greens. I left that place with a smile and not a care in the world. A good cut of Bistecca starts at around 45 Euros, but don't expect to finish it alone. (7) Michelangelo’s David is housed in the Galleria dell’Accademia north of the Duomo. If you are visiting during peak season, then purchase tickets ahead of time online to avoid wasting time in line. Entry is €6.50, and fees are added with online purchase. Open 8:15am-6:50pm Tuesday through Sunday.

3. Corpus and methodology The analysis is based on a pilot study of 100 travel blogs written by American travellers describing Italian destinations that were posted on virtual travel community websites between September 2009 and September 2010. As regards Italian places, the choice falls on the most popular tourist destinations like Florence, Cinque Terre, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Parma, Rome, Sardinia, Venice. The collection amounts overall to 200,000 running words.

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From a methodological point of view, the study adopts a position which shows the need to integrate corpus and discourse perspectives in the analysis of textual data. This allows for an integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, of text and corpus work. The analytical procedure adopted can be seen as a two-step sequence: ¾ starting from the corpus, in order to investigate lexical items used to construct and transmit a representation of Italian culture. Using Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2008), a keyword list was generated by comparing the corpus with a reference corpus of general English, the British National Corpus. From such a keyword list, attention was paid to word-forms that were potentially related to Italian culture featuring among the highest scoring keywords in the list within the first 100 positions. For each keyword, a random sample of 50 concordance lines were extracted in order to investigate it in its extended context; ¾ moving on to the texts in order to evaluate the textual and discursive functions of the features highlighted by the corpus.

4. Results and discussion The list of 7,161 keywords as automatically generated by the WordSmith Tools software has been reduced to the top 100 word-forms. Starting from a general overview of the list, the first 100 keywords were divided into four groups according to general criteria as follows. A first group includes grammar words that feature among the highest scoring keywords in the list, occupying the top twenty places: personal pronouns (I, you, we), ranking respectively at the 1st, 2nd and 3th positions in the list; possessive adjectives/pronouns (my, me, our) rank 4th, 9th, 14th respectively. The group is particularly noticeable because the high incidence of these keywords may be regarded as a reflection of bloggers’ propensity for subjectivity and self-expression, their common need to make their own voices heard and their personal ways of viewing things known: a propensity which is discussed in the literature (Herring et al. 2004; Baron 2008; Myers 2010) and is confirmed here. A second group of keywords are the names indicating the blogger’s destination (Venice, Rome, Tuscany, Genoa, Florence, Naples). A third group are nouns that are related to physical places visited by the bloggers (museum, palazzo, palace, church). A fourth and last group of keywords are nouns that fall within the category of food and drink (wine, olive, gelato, pizza, pasta, pesto). Table 3-1 below includes all the relevant items in the groups together with their respective rankings and raw frequencies.

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52 Grammar words I you we my me our

Rank

Physical places museum palazzo palace church

Rank

1 2 3 4 9 14

31 35 57 62

Raw frequencies 2,420 1,068 1,656 812 472 628 Raw frequencies 116 132 88 140

Destinations Venice Rome Tuscany Genoa Florence Naples Food Drink wine olive gelato pizza pasta pesto

Rank 7 10 12 37 49 100 Rank 11 23 52 59 67 80

Raw frequencies 272 352 188 100 140 56 Raw frequencies 196 128 76 68 64 56

Table 3-1. The first 100 keywords divided into four groups: grammar words, destinations, places and food/drink. The analysis takes as its starting point the nouns reflecting Italian gastronomy as it is traditionally the most representative expression of national culture. Italian cuisine is so famous around the world that its food has long become a mark of Italianità. The corpus analysis of those nouns, conducted on a random sample of 50 concordance lines, reveals (albeit predictably) that Italian food and drink are mentioned by American bloggers to celebrate them. Indeed, they are described through positive evaluative adjectives (finest, distinctive, big, best, most, delicious) or hyperbolic language, as shown in the following concordance lines: Florence boasts some of Italy’s finest vineyards. Chianti flows like the Arno River in this part tion, with aromas and finishes distinctive as any wine. After dozens of tiny portions, I have estate’s 2003 brunello. This is a big wine, explained Ms. Frullanti. It’s best there. Osteria del Sostegno, We found the best pasta dish of the trip at this place in eat. This was splendid -- candlelight, delicious pasta with clam sauce, red Italian table wine, Gilbert. But good food is transcendent. And pizza, a dish that may be the most the western suburbs. The focaccia, ravioli and

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pesto - the holy trinity of Genoese cooking sheltering hills- also produces the region’s best olive oil. We are called into a tasting room

Quite interestingly, American bloggers also refer to the Italian cuisine to provide informative comments, as a way to accompany travellers’ encounters with Italian gastronomy, as is shown in the following examples: (8) It’s impossible to be in this town of nearly a million people and not eat pizza. Naples credits itself as being the birthplace of the pizza--the first recorded evidence of which is from the 16th century. (9) A great place to sample wine is at an enoteca. These are wine shops that cater to all classes and tastes. (10) “Food in Emilia-Romagna is not a joke,” our guide declares as we sit down to our first dinner in Parma. She’s dead serious. This is where tortellini was created, modeled after the navel of Venus; where the width of a tagliatelli pasta ribbon was decreed to be exactly 1/1,270th the height of Bologna’s Asinelli Tower; where pork rumps are aged in dungeons. And this was where a 19th-century silk merchant named Pellegrino Artusi, abandoning the family trade, created the concept of “Italian cooking.” Food in Emilia-Romagna is a religion - and to visit is to worship.

Alongside the culinary tradition, American travel bloggers seem to construct and transmit cultural meanings by describing Italian cities for their unique attractions. Here is a list of nouns related to the artistic heritage of the cities visited, together with the indication of their respective rankings in the keyword list: museum (31st), palazzo (35th), palace (57th), church (62nd). What emerges from the analysis of a random sample of 50 concordance lines for each attraction was that a vast portion (56.4%) of them testify an act of evaluation, thus contributing to the construction of their positive (endearing, best, magnificent, glorious, opulent, surprising) or negative (dusty, overwhelming) image, as exemplified in the following concordance lines: aldi, memorialized in a dusty but endearing housemuseum. The two Giuseppes paved the n a shaded terrace, or an unexpectedly satisfying museum visit to the Van Dyck salon of The Galleria Degli Uffizi is the top art museum in Florence. Once the base of

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Chapter Three may well be the best 20th-century house museum in the world. Inside the unassuming, no intention to wait for hours in a line to see a museum no matter how excellent the art may like the Uffizi, not because it isn’t an exemplary museum, but it tends to be overwhelming We’d emerged just beside the magnificent Palazzo Santa Sofia, or Ca D’Oro, one of nd. Fully understandable that while gaping at the Palazzo’s royally opulent interior, we fell into g e Palazzo Strozzi and the Palazzo Davanzanti. The Palazzo Davanzati was a particular hit with my que and Baroque churches, and the sprawling Ducal Palace, one of the country’s biggest and most and raised, a 10-minute walk from the Ducal Palace, is worth a visit even though it has nd silver jewelry) and explored the opulent Pitti Palace and its sprawling-yet-manicured Boboli Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, a 12th-century church with a stunningly ornate interior. glory of the buildings. Every Renaissance church in Rome is filled with these masterpieces Portovenere’s San Pietro church turned out to be a surprising Romanesque

As shown in the concordances, attractions are highly praised, accounting overall for 53% of all positive comments in the whole corpus. Negative remarks are attested for only 3% of the total and mainly concern the state or overcrowding of the monument. The results here echo those of Francesconi (2012) who found that American travel bloggers tend to enthusiastically celebrate the Italian attractions visited. Turning to discuss positive and negative evaluation in relation to perceived credibility of and trust in travel blogs, in the literature there are empirical studies that investigated its effect on the formation of consumer perception of travel review credibility and trust. For example Kusumasondjaja et al. (2012, 191) in their study on online travel reviews find that a negative review is deemed more credible than a positive review, when the reviewer’s identity is disclosed. More specifically, they claim that a negative review with an identified source has a greater impact on consumer perception of review credibility. But they also find that a positive review with an identified source is considered more influential on consumers’ initial trust formation in travel services. Regardless of whether the review is positive or negative, their study seems to imply that it is the presence of source identity that enhances the perceived credibility of the

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review and leads to higher consumer initial trust development. In the light of this, considering that in my corpus the blogger’s identity is disclosed through the use of personal pronouns I/we, it can be tentatively concluded that both positive and negative comments may have a great effect either in terms of perceived credibility or impact on traveller trust. Moving on to examine the attractions visited, it is worth noticing how they are also associated with informative comments rich in historical details, as exemplified by the following examples: (11) The new Museum of the Sea (Galata, Museo del Mare) sheds light on Genoa’s surprising past: it was the richest, most powerful maritime city-state of the Middle Ages. La Superba had colonies and trading posts scattered across the Mediterranean. The crusaders embarked here on swift galleys for their multi-purpose missions: to battle miscreants, preach, loot and create fortified outposts. (12) We started at the Palazzo della Ragione, a Romanesque structure that dates from the 12th century; it is said to be the oldest existing town hall in northern Italy, though it ceased operating as one in the 17th century. We then saw Romanesque fused with Gothic at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, a 12th-century church with a stunningly ornate interior. (13) Pitti Palace boasts 7 different galleries, and was the original home of the Medici. The Palatine gallery houses the Renaissance stuff, and they also have a silver museum, carriage museum, royal apartment museum, a costume gallery, porcelain museum, and a museum of modern art.

Those informative comments not only recall guidebook descriptions (Vestito 2006, 82) by providing readers/travellers “with more information about a destination and its attractions either before or during their journey”, but also show the ‘expertise’ and knowledge of the blogger, thus adding credibility to her/his writing. S/he is not just a casual tourist, but seriously interested in travelling, as well exemplified by the following examples, where s/he uses a very refined, almost poetic, language to describe sections of the building visited. Her/his style of writing resembles that of an ‘expert’ travel blogger, thus contributing to build trust in future travellers. The examples highlight space-based descriptions realized in a highly subjective and evaluative narration. The blogger describes sections of the building visited as regions of space, including the building as a whole as well as directing the reader to that space by a virtual eye.

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Chapter Three (14) We found the oddly unimposing portal at the rear of the palace, darted through rooms devoted to an archaeological museum, and finally emerged in the miraculous interior courtyard called the Cortile d’Onore, or Court of Honor. After the gorgeous chaos of the surrounding countryside and the crabbed medieval cityscape, the cortile is like the single crystalline equation emerging from a chalkboard of squiggles. White Corinthian columns joined by arches define a rectangle of noble proportions; Latin text inscribed in the stone proclaims the “justice, clemency and liberalism” of the palace’s builder, Duke Federico da Montefeltro, Duchess Elisabetta’s father-in-law. Tall, dark windows centered above the arches draw the eye upward and the mind inward to muse on the ideal beauty of the place. Here, distilled in stone, brick and geometry, is the quintessence of the Italian Renaissance. (15) The Galleria Degli Uffizi is the top art museum in Florence. Once the base of operations for the vast Medici empire, Uffizi translates to offices. The Uffizi has an extremely simple U shaped layout, and floating from room to room is effortless and awe-inspiring. From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Da Vinci’s Annunciation, the Uffizi impresses with over 1500 master Renaissance works. The frescoed corridors lined with statues lend a divine aesthetic to the experience.

As shown by the examples discussed so far, American bloggers share an image of Italy as a repository of historical and artistic heritage. Alongside that representation, Italy is also a destination of natural beauty, where life has remained untouched by modernity (another stretch of divinely unspoiled country). This is a suggestive picture to illustrate the representation of some corners of Italy as unique and undiscovered places: (16) Letter from Italy: hiking Cinque Terre away from the crowds. In those last moments, I know I’ll think of one special part of the world: The Cinque Terre, in Northern Italy. Truly, it’s that beautiful. […] Was this the land of dreamy dreams? No. Try the Cinque Terre. This jewel-toned slice of heaven as “fantasy-fulfilling”; it’s beauty enough for a lifetime. […] The area has been thoroughly denatured, luckily without destroying its physical beauty. The Cinque Terre are simply stupendously gorgeous. But this brave new eat-and-run world comes complete with body-to-body outsiders on beaches, and iffy trattorias with menus in English, German and Chinese. Tourism has revolutionized what was the Riviera’s most sublimely isolated stretch. (17) Off Sardinia, an island with wilder shores. It was half an hour after sunset in Sant’Antioco, one of the most underdeveloped corners of Sardinia […] a speck of an island connected to Sardinia’s southwestern corner by a milelong causeway. […] Sant’Antioco is a tranquil

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backwater, with two quaint ports, a smattering of ruins dating back to preRoman times, sweeping Mediterranean savannah, the region’s most unspoiled beaches, and little else. Its spotty cellphone coverage and absence of English – even the staff at the tourist information center in the main village, also named Sant’Antioco, could barely utter a word – impart a pleasant feeling of detachment from our increasingly interconnected, homogenized and globalized world.

Words such as isolated, wild, unspoiled, undeveloped, and detachment are a few examples of the way in which American bloggers emphasize exciting discovery experiences in places still unknown to mass tourism. This is also highlighted by the use of evaluative adjectives and lexical items like simply stupendously gorgeous; most sublimely; this jewel-toned slice of heaven as “fantasy-fulfilling that render the descriptions highly vivid. Although the style of language may sound a little ‘over the top’, I think that it has a great impact on traveller perception of blog credibility as it conveys the blogger’s emotional load.

5. Conclusions This chapter has tried to shed light on the representation of Italy from the viewpoint of American travellers describing Italian destinations in travel blogs. Their subjective narrations rich in evaluation make the particular or the event memorable (or not particularly memorable) (e.g. the day was wonderfully lazy and soul-refreshing; Sweet Serendipity!; “Daunting” was the first word that came to mind; the second was amazing). In their narrations, the domains of experience that American travellers most frequently focused upon include physical entities concerning the attractions visited (e.g. museums, churches, palaces) and Italian gastronomy, thus confirming Dann’s (1996) statement that food is always celebrated in online travel diaries. Particulars are attested in the texts as recurrently employed in evaluative expressions, frequently in conjunction with descriptive and evaluative adjectives (e.g. Overall, a nice place to sit and watch the street scene; Smaller and more intimate than Vernazza, it’s the ideal place to stop for a late lunch). Evaluation, therefore, emerges as one of the key features of this web-based genre. Notably, evaluative expressions recursively exploited by ‘tourist-writers’ are used not only to highlight what is memorable about a journey, but also to signal what is advisable, and therefore potentially desirable for other tourists. Their narrations appear to establish and demonstrate their credibility for future travellers who will use information from what they consider credible blog posts thanks to their spontaneous writing.

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Because of the small corpus used in this study, there are of course limitations to the generalisability of the results. However, it would be interesting to compare the findings obtained from this specific discourse community (American bloggers) with data from other communities (e.g. Italian bloggers) to shed more light on the trends that have emerged from the present study as well as on other tendencies within and beyond those found above. In fact, one such study of travel blogs written by Americans and Italians travelling in Italy (D’Egidio 2014, 158) suggests that “the way the insider and outsider tourists behave, perceive and represent a tourist destination or an attraction is often different”. Research should be broadened to include international comparisons of travel blogs, the type of studies Denti (2015) has embarked upon. It is clear, since tourism is now a global enterprise, that the travel blog is used by many communities, but it is less clear whether the language used differs according to the language and culture of the writers.

References Akehurst, Gary. 2009. “User generated content: The use of blogs for tourism organizations and tourism consumers.” Service Business 3 (1): 51-61. Antelmi, Donella, and Francesca Santulli. 2012. “Travellers’ memories: The image of places from literature to blog chatter.” PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural 10 (4): 13-24. Baron, Naomi Susan. 2008. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bosangit, Carmela, Scott McCabe, and Sally Hibbert. 2009. “What is told in travel blogs. Exploring travel blogs for consumer narrative analysis.” In Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2009, edited by Wolfram Höpken, Ulrike Gretzel, and Rob Law, 6171. New York: Springer. Cacchiani, Silvia. 2014. “Tourist gaze, tourist destination images and extended tourist destination experiences: Description and point of view in community travelogs.” In Space, Place and the Discursive Construction of Identity, edited by Julia Bamford, Franca Poppi, and Davide Mazzi, 195-216. Bern: Peter Lang. Candlin, Christopher N., and Jonathan Crichton. 2013. “From ontology to methodology: Exploring the discursive landscape of trust.” In Discourses of Trust, edited by Christopher N. Candlin, and Jonathan Crichton, 1-20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cappelli, Gloria. 2006. Sun, Sea, Sex and the Unspoilt Countryside. How the English Language Makes Tourists out of Readers. Pari: Pari Publishing. —. 2008. “Expats’ talk: humour and irony in an expatriate’s travel blog.” Textus 21 (1): 9-26. —. 2013. “‘A perfect Tuscan experience’: Destination image and cultural expectations in positive travel reviews in English and Italian.” RILA (Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata) 1: 59-86. Carson, Dean. 2008. “The ‘blogosphere’ as a market research tool for tourism destination: A case study of Australia’s Northern Territory.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 14 (2): 111-119. Choi, Soojin, Xinran Y. Lehto, and Alastair M. Morrison. 2007. “Destination image representation on the web: Content analysis of Macau travel related websites.” Tourism Management 28: 118-129. Crotts, John, Peyton R. Mason, and Boyd Davis. 2009. “Measuring guest satisfaction and competitive position in the hospitality and tourism industry: An application of stance-shift analysis to travel blog narratives.” Journal of Travel Research 48 (2): 139-151. Dann, Graham M.S. 1996. The Language of Tourism. A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Wallingford: CAB International. Dann, Graham M.S., and Giuli Liebman Parrinello. 2007. “From travelogue to travelblog: (Re)-negotiating tourist identity.” Acta Turistica 19 (1): 829. D’Egidio, Angela. 2014. “The language of tourists in English and Italian travel blogs and trip reports: A corpus-based analysis.” Lingue Culture Mediazioni / Languages Cultures Mediation 1 (1-2): 145-161. Denti, Olga. 2015. “Gazing at Italy from the East: A multimodal analysis of Malaysian tourist blogs.” Lingue, Culture, Mediazioni / Languages, Cultures, Mediation 2 (1): 47-68. Flanagin, Andrew J., and Miriam J. Metzger. 2008. “Digital media and youth: Unparalleled opportunity and unprecedented responsibility.” In Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility, edited by Miriam J. Metzger, and Andrew Flanigan, 5-28. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fogg, B. J., Cathy Soohoo, David Danielson, Leslie Marable, Julianne Stanford, and Ellen R. Tauber. 2002. “How do people evaluate a web site’s credibility? Results from a large study.” Consumer Reports Webwatch. http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/web-credibilityreports-evaluate-abstract.cfm. [Last visited: 2/7/2016] Francesconi, Sabrina. 2012. Generic Integrity and Innovation in Tourism Texts in English. Trento: Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche.

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Gerbig, Andrea. 2008. “Travelogues in time and space: A diachronic and intercultural genre study.” Language and Computers 64: 157-175. Gerbig, Andrea, and Angela Shek. 2007. “The phraseology of tourism: A central lexical field and its cultural construction.” In Phraseology and Culture in English, edited by Paul Skandera, 303-322. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Goethals, Patrick. 2015. “Traveling through languages: Reports on language experiences in tourists’ travel blogs.” Multilingua. Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 34 (3): 347-372. Gretzel, Ulrike, Kyung Hyan Yoo, and Melanie Purifoy. 2007. “Online travel review study: Role and impact of online travel reviews.” Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism, Texas A&M University. http://www.tripadvisor.com/pdfs/OnlineTravelReviewReport.pdf. [Last visited: 10/04/2016] Herring, Susan C., Lois A. Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus, and Elijah Wright. 2004. “Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs.” Proceedings of the 37thHawaii International Conference on System Sciences: 1-11. Huang, Ching-Yuan, Chia-Jung Chou, and Pei-Ching Lin. 2010. “Involvement theory in constructing bloggers’ intention to purchase travel products.” Tourism Management 31 (4): 513-526. Kelton, Kari, Kenneth R. Fleischmann, and William A. Wallace. 2008. “Trust in digital information.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59 (3): 363-374. Kusumasondjaja, Sony, Tekle Shanka, and Christopher Marchegiani. 2012. “Credibility of online reviews and initial trust: The roles of reviewer’s identity and review valence.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 18 (3): 185-195. Law, Rob, and Shannon Cheung. 2010. “The perceived destination image of Hong Kong as revealed in the travel blogs of mainland Chinese tourists.” International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration 11 (4): 303-327. Litvin, Stephen W., Ronald E. Goldsmith, and Bing Pan. 2008. “Electronic word-of-mouth in hospitality and tourism management.” Tourism Management 29 (3): 458-468. Mack, Rhonda W., Julia E. Blose, and Bing Pan. 2008. “Believe it or not: Credibility of blogs in tourism.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 14 (2): 133-144. Myers, Greg. 2010. The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum.

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Orlando, Cinzia. 2009. “Blogging about London: Comparing the Italian and Anglo-American tourist gaze.” Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione / International Journal of Translation 11: 189-199. Pan, Bing, Tanya MacClaurin, and John Crotts. 2007. “Travel blogs and the implications for destination marketing.” Journal of Travel Research 46 (1): 35-45. Pudliner, Betsey A. 2007. “Alternative literature and tourist experience: Travel and tourist weblogs.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 5 (1): 46-59. Salvi, Rita, and Judith Turnbull. 2010. “London-Rome: A most exciting journey.” Annali del Dipartimento di Studi Geoeconomici, Linguistici, Statistici, Storici per l’Analisi Regionale, 185-209. Bologna: Pàtron. Schmallegger, Doris, and Dean Carson. 2008. “Blogs in tourism: Changing approaches to information exchange.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 14 (2): 99-110. Scott, Mike. 2008. WordSmith Tools (Version 5.0). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tan, Wee-Kheng, and Yu-Chung Chang. 2012. “Improving users’ credibility perception of travel expert blogs: Useful lessons from television travel shows.” Information Research 18 (2): paper 579. http://InformationR.net/ir/18-2/paper579.html. [Last visited: 10/4/2016] Technorati 2006. http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/ Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Vestito, Caterina. 2006. Tourism Discourse and the Representation of Italy: A Critical Analysis of English Guidebooks. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Naples “Federico II”. Volo, Serena. 2010. “Bloggers’ reported tourist experiences: Their utility as a tourism data source and their effect on prospective tourists.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 16 (4): 297-311. Wenger, Anita. 2008. “Analysis of travel bloggers’ characteristics and their communication about Austria as a tourism destination.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 14 (2): 169-176. Zehrer, Anita, John C. Crotts, and Vincent P. Magnini. 2011. “The perceived usefulness of blog postings: An extension of the expectancy disconfirmation paradigm.” Tourism Management 32 (1): 106-113.

CHAPTER FOUR REPOSITIONING MUSEUMS ON CHILDREN’S AGENDA FEDERICO SABATINI UNIVERSITY OF TURIN

1. Background and aims Beginning in the late 20th century museums, the custodians of memoria rerum treasuring and perpetuating their unique heritage, have been developing a different profile. The new course, more in tune with a globalized, knowledge-based and knowledge-sharing society, is keen on networking, partnering and involvement with communities. The museum as traditional repository of knowledge, evoking Adorno’s well-known association with the mausoleum (1997, 175), has gradually been transformed into an active cultural organization whose primary mission no longer is to “hand down”, but rather to produce and co-construct learning through interaction with local and distant visitors. The new policy, in other words, is audience-centred and audience-caring, culturally and socially proactive, innovatively concerned with catering to the needs and expectations of highly differentiated social groups. A significant feature in this dynamic is the prominence of Education Departments within museums, liaising with educational institutions and foundations. Hence, the logogenic capacity of Museum Discourse (henceforth MD) is no longer predominantly exercised as expert discourse, but increasingly configured as educational discourse leading to the construction of knowledge through “hands-on” experience. Equally relevant, the semiosis, or meaning-making capacity, inherent in the new “museum script” is guided by an ethical imperative to serve society equitably. In the light of these innovative policies, the main concern of this study is how MD orients to human rights discourse, notably to children’s rights as universally set in the 1989 United Nations Convention on Children’s

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Rights (henceforth CRC). Concentrating on the rights spelled out by the CRC in terms of culture, development, education, leisure and participation,1 this study investigates how MD addresses children and adolescents. Since the language of human rights, particularly of children’s rights, has been quite influential in promoting the notion of inclusive society, the study first looks at the efforts to position, or rather re-position, the museum2 on children’s agenda and then more closely examines MD with regard to children and youth with special needs, investigating the imbrication of MD with human rights discourse, pedagogic discourse and promotional discourse. Focussing on a constructivist notion of knowledge and knowledge dissemination as a process guided by hands-on experience and by meaning-making through interaction, the chapter examines electronic materials from different sources and with different addressee/s, from blogs to scholarly reflection and museum project presentations.3 The materials refer to English-speaking contexts; however, some attention is devoted to Italian museums, since the August 2014 reform inaugurated a “national museum system” in line with the definition set forth by the International Council of Museums.4 1

The CRC has enormously contributed to implementing “special consideration” for the “full and harmonious development of the child”. Remarkable efforts have been made worldwide towards the application of its central notion, the best interest of the child, in child care, protection and empowerment. For my present purposes, a pre-requisite is to locate the specific provisions which involve cultural agencies such as museums in support of children’s personal development. These provisions, from Part I of the Convention, are reported in the following articles: art. 12 (right to express their own views); art. 13 (freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas; art. 17 (access to information); art. 23 (full and decent life for disabled children); art. 28 (right to education); art. 29 (development of the child’s personality); art. 31 (right to rest and leisure and to participate in cultural life and the arts); art. 39 (physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of any form of neglect, exploitation, or abuse); art. 40 (dignity of the child who is alleged as, accused of, or recognized as having infringed the penal law). (https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src= IND&mtdsg_no=IV-11&chapter=4&lang=en, accessed 18/12/2016) 2 I envisage here museum institutions which provide resources, activities and services for children of different age brackets. 3 In a previous textual analysis of museum materials, findings reveal how best practice MD usually deploys rhetorical strategies encouraging participation and social interaction, within a symmetrical and pluri-discursive construction and exchange of knowledge (Sabatini 2015). 4 See Jalla 2015.

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Trust and self-confidence is what children gain from the experience of the museum, if successfully processed in its socio-cognitive and interactive components. It remains to be seen how successful the move from the traditional school outing and field-trip to the implementation of projects involving genuine participation has been for the children’s agenda. Museum educators are developing opportunities for personal discovery and social enjoyment, for learning-how-to-learn in ways different from those of the classroom. Undeniably, museums have a marketing interest and are competing to reach families with children.

2. MD by Museum Mums Families constitute the relevant audience in this study, since they take the initiative in accessing museums with children and evaluate their visits. Using blogs to describe family visits, mothers are developing a MD which provides information both on children’s reactions and on the family approach to the Museum experience. Below, Example 1 includes a selection of posts from a dedicated blog by professional “Museum Mum + Curator”, exclusively devoted to narrating museum visits. This blogger has set herself the “challenge of reviewing museums or their activities” and gained increasing popularity on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Her writing describes her children’s leisure/learning opportunities with sophisticated professional expertise, providing lively posts on British museums, with appreciative as well as critical remarks. Photographs are well-crafted, showing children-in-action. (1) Irrelevant choices, playing with perception – and of course, those slides! Fun but forgettable. [...] Amazingly full-on Victorian diaromas – think animals falling off cliffs – and a hands-on exploration room. [...] Yes, this had spectacular grounds with free roaming deer. Inside, it was stuffed with Tudor relics from the courts of Henry VIII. The toddler spotted animals throughout [...]. But, more memorably for us it was the best activity we have undertaken as a family, ever. Like, we actually all produced something we were proud of. And they even let my toddler join in. Awesome. [...] Spectacular sea views and excellent art exhibitions in this small, friendly gallery. We bashed cymbals in a group participative piece, and showed the kids Grayson Perry’s work. All next to a sandy beach – a good family day out. [...] Wow! A spectacular place that engaged the whole family. The teenager was inspired by the video on the conservation of this Tudor warship, informing me knowledgeably about its treatment. We played period games

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in their event space, which even had a special play spot for babies [...] The use of dark and light in the displays was magical, with brilliant interactives. [...] Fear not, London dwellers. You probably live only a short walk, bus or tube ride away from an amazing museum offering brilliant crafts, activities, and events FOR FREE. In fact, there are well over 1,000 free events for families in London’s museums this August. No entry fees, no charges – all the more to spend in the gift shop on the way out! [...] Inspired by the toddler’s love of nature, we made the voyage south of the river to Plantastic – an exhibition dedicated to plants at the Horniman Museum. [...] As soon as we stepped inside I knew it would be a hit – the combination of bright colours and oversized plants just shout ‘FUN SPACE’! [...] The large, hands-on interactives meant the toddler was straight in there – crawling through giant plant root systems, turning handles and pressing buttons. [...] Puffing, sniffing, drawing, puzzling – this exhibition really needs ‘doing words’, as I was taught to call verbs, to describe it! [...] It is learning through doing. (WS2, retrieved 29.02. 2016, my emphasis)

Apart from the first comment, to which I shall return later, the lexis constantly deploys over-emphatic words and locutions belonging to the semantic field of the marvelous and the spectacular. The writer often couches her expertise in a colloquial register (like, wow!, awesome) inspiring feelings of friendliness and family warmth. In addition, her markedly proximal deictic centre (we, think, ironic use of solemn/literary fear not) is consonant with the positioning of innovative museum institutions (Sabatini 2015). Likewise, the stress on the participatory mission echoes the promotional strategies of museum texts. The metalinguistic remarks list “action words”, (see puzzling in the sense of “doing puzzles”), using child-like onomatopoeia (puffing, sniffing) to convey the quick pace of children experiencing the museum. Her “rounding up” remarks, again combining family mother and museum expert roles in addressing families and encouraging participation, reinforce the museums’ current strategies of involvement with an additional touch of authenticity through lived experience. Speaking “from both sides of the fence”, she animates a lively dialogic post, alternating her two personae (I, we) in responding to her public (You tell me) and highlighting the social profile of the museum as a meeting place: (2) I had tens of thousands of you read my mutterings [...] I’ve loved your comments and tweets and finding new like-minded people on and off line. I got involved with Kids in Museums, and spoke at their Family Friendly Welcome workshop [...] I know I’ve definitely encouraged more families

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Chapter Four into museums – well, that’s what you tell me – and have made a few museums try even harder to get their family offer right. [...] We’ve been spell bound by stories, dressed up [...], marvelled at 3D cinema and been impressed by digital theatre. We’ve been moved to tears by an eyewitness account from the holocaust. [...] There have been countless ice-creams, cakes, coffees and picnics – a requisite of any museum visit. And we’ve done it with dozens of friends and family, proving museums are a fantastic, social place for those with kids. (WS2, retrieved 29.02. 2016, my emphasis)

The excerpts below, from an electronic journal, are perhaps more “realistic” representations of the generality of mothers with no specific expertise on museums. The blogger posted two pages in 2013, presenting 10 outstanding international museums and 10 Italian museums respectively. Her voice can be assumed to be fairly typical of uninformed mothers who base their expectations on their own experience as kids and are therefore surprised with the “participatory model” but unable to describe in detail, let alone evaluate, the quality of the activities offered, nor interested in narrating the reactions of the young visitors. (3) Dimenticati di […] iniziare a dire cose del tipo: “state zitti!, state fermi!, non toccate!, non correte!, non gridate! ….non…. non….non….”. Nei “Childrens’ Museums”, fare chiasso è consentito e toccare è d’obbligo. [Forget about starting to say things like: “be quiet!, don’t move!, don’t touch!, don’t shout!, don’t do this and don’t do that”. In “Children’s Museums”, being loud is permitted and touching is expected] [...] Nemo Museo della Scienza di Amsterdam. Qui [...] i piccoli visitatori possono capire i misteri della scienza senza alcuna difficoltà grazie ad attività interattive e a veri e propri esperimenti scientifici in camice bianco. Un vero e proprio paradiso per ogni piccolo apprendista scienziato [...] Vi segnalo la doccia spaziale cosmica e la mostra in programma [...] The Invention Factory. [Nemo, the Amsterdam Museum of Science. Here [...] the young visitors can grasp the mysteries of science without any problem through interactive activities and actual science experiments, wearing white overalls. A true paradise for small apprentice scientists [...] Let me point out the cosmic space shower and the forthcoming [...] The Invention Factory. (WS3, retrieved 29.02. 2016)

Unlike the blogger in (1) and (2), who chose deictic center “we” for her narrative format to stress the family “togetherness” and then differentiated the mode of involvement of each child (toddler and adolescent, respectively), this writer is informally addressing mothers with

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vague and brief presentations. But the title of this page mentions museums “da sperimentare con i tuoi bambini” (literally, “to experiment with your children”, my italics) significantly replacing the traditional mindset of the museum visit, where children are assumed to be passive, with the notion of the museum as a place to be experienced. There is genuine surprise, since children are now allowed to be (noisy) children instead of small-sized adults. Using evaluative lexis, on the verge of hyperbole, to evoke the enchanting nature of museums, the voices in the previous examples share the notion of a museum as a place for “doing” and “performing”, where gratification lies with personal discovery through experience. Therefore, trust is constructed through words suggesting actions.

3. Interactive technology in MD The notion of targeting differentiated publics and designing strategic models accordingly has been at the heart of the renovation of museums. In 2009 Fondazione Fitzcarraldo, the winner of the European tender for a project on audience development, investigated regional museum policies and the missing audiences on the museum attendance map in Piedmont, Italy, highlighting the international trends in: mediation, to make collections and activities more comprehensible; involvement of specific audiences such as children; outreach activities. Predictably, foreign models emphasized partnerships, community involvement, facilities increasing comfort and social interaction, a welcoming attitude. The study highlights multicultural needs and issues of disability and marginalization, spelling out social responsibility as the path to be pursued (Fondazione Fitzcarraldo 2009, 32). The main problematic is the transition from the notion of museum as valuable for its holdings to the idea of a museum that is valuable for its activities and its readiness to democratically share its “goods”, through social media and partnering with community groups. Of consequence, for my present objectives, is the configuration of MD as a hybrid discourse “bridging” several domains and their respective special languages, from progressivist education and therapy to social inclusion and social responsibility – requiring a range of “best practices” and “best narratives” for an equal opportunities mission addressing children. Within this discursive framework, the current museum paradigm enhances a developmental and constructivist approach to meaning-making experience and learning: not quite escaping “the adult’s regime” (Borodo 2011), but relying on personal perception and elaboration to increase self-

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confidence and the construal of trust in one’s own, independent capabilities. Approaching the museum experience in terms of developmental psychology, Jensen observed: […] Interaction is the most powerful mode of learning. Interaction is the opposite of passivity. […] Learning involves conflict between a person’s conception of reality and new encounters with the real. […] Children (and adults also) are constantly restructuring their ideas about the world as new information is received. This dynamic process between the learner and his or her experiences is basic to what happens in museums. […] Learning moves from the concrete to the abstract more slowly than many educators care to admit. Because their thinking is so concrete, children often are confused about what is real and what is representational. (1999, 111)

This seems in line with the current emphasis on hands-on experience. But what is the actual “take” of the entertainment approach on children? Correlation with past experience is reported to be more effective than multi-sensory museum experience in terms of lasting impressions and memories: […] children’s visual recall and verbal descriptions of their previous museum experiences were remarkable for their accuracy in depicting actual exhibits and architectural features of museum settings. Selfgenerated drawings on set topics are seen to be a reliable method for provoking children to translate their thoughts to pictures [...] Sometimes graphic representations provide children with an opportunity to go beyond what they could explain [...] On the surface, this finding seems counterintuitive, since much of the literature on visitors’ experiences suggests that exhibits which are hands-on, interactive, and multi-sensory in character enhance visitors enjoyment and increase the memorability of museumsbased experiences. (Piscitelli and Anderson 2007, 278-279, my emphasis)

Even more critical is the voice of researchers who investigated the effectiveness of hands-on and activity centres in the field of science. Hughes speaks of brand-building strategies serving the image of science as “family fun” and finds that science is (dangerously) equated with entertainment via the “fetish” of interactive technology: [interactivity is used] to cover almost any activity, from just touching things, through actively disassembling and reassembling things, to initiating computer programs. Secondly, each museum’s promotional material conferred on interactive exhibits the ‘magical’ quality of exciting people’s interests in science - if it’s interactive, people will learn from it.

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However [...] many of the museums’ ‘interactive’ exhibits were little more than buttons, switches or touch screens through which to activate parts of a display - which in some instances meant little more than turning light bulbs on and off. Interaction implies some form of reciprocity or mutuality between two elements (for example, a person and a machine), in which the action or behaviour of one has an effect on the other. Turning a light bulb on and off does not create a reciprocal or mutual relationship with it! Further, each museum presented technologies in general as embodiments of ‘magical’ qualities [...]. Inventions seemed to emerge from nowhere - as if by magic - rather than from specific social and material circumstances. (Hughes 2001, 178-179)

As for teenagers who are attracted by an ample range of entertainment opportunities, the Tate gallery found ways of appealing to them by combining art with music events (Briggs 2007). But the critical issue concerning the inclusion of young people in museums, everywhere, was the quality of programs and the need to focus research on participatory action (Tzibazi 2013). The heart of the matter, however, was the control vs democracy dilemma, for the digital age meant young publics ready to share and contribute via the social media and this would endanger hierarchies, besides involving a new politics of representation.5 While expanding “children’s corners” into “children’s museums”, reflection and debate were concerned with new pedagogies and new methodologies in communication that would continue to foster trust in the museum (Lynch 2013). The claims concerning risks of loss of control inherent in connecting museums with social media was countered by inquiries, e.g. by Gronemann et al. (2015), into social media and their communicative modes, arguing that mutual co-construction of museums and audiences through new modes of interaction would not necessarily perturb the institutional authority of museums.

4. The voice of the Museum: informative/promotional MD Children’s museums are present on the web with their own portals, and indirectly through tourist guides reporting “top” museums or museum sections for children, entertainment guides (e.g. “Time Out” in London) and hypertexts such as KAT (WS4, Italian and English version, retrieved

5

For the democracy vs. control issue and the complexities of networking with the new media, see Marstine et al. 2011.

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23.04.2016), which also has a Newsletter and a constantly updated calendar on museum and gallery events by age range. These websites usually feature flashy colours, which will please parents with plentiful drawings and images “through children’s eyes” and photographs of children having active fun. Playgroups are encouraged to share discovery and learn by doing, from 0-36 months activities for “little sprouts” (WS5, retrieved 24.04.2016), sensory pads and discovery tunnels for toddlers, on to science experiments, maths tournaments and 3D printing (WS6, retrieved 02.03.2016). The recurrent keywords are participative, interactive, creative, touching, doing, feeling, experimenting/improvising with, connect, power of play. The risk in mishandling such surfeit is identified here in (1) fun but forgettable. Another feature of these “brain-powering”, discovery-based museums is their commercialisation of fun space: the amenities of toy stores and children’s parties, with “the possibility of personalised cakes”.6 The stress on fun is encoded in colloquially inviting, promotional language conveying proximity (my italics): (4) Let’s explore, adults and kids together […] We celebrate […] (WS7, retrieved 02.03.2016) (5) We run many activities and events for kids and families at Tate Modern. There are lots of things to see and do at Tate! Learn more about our facilities at Tate Modern. (WS 8, retrieved 02.03.2016) (6) Come and join us [...]. Get creative [...] Design incredible inventions to share with the world, create your own [...], enjoy our artist designed interactives [...] All the activities [...] are supported by our friendly team who will show you how to realise your creative visions whatever your age. [...] you will find special activities [...], letting you try your hand at 3D printing, green screen photography and more! (WS 9, retrieved 02.03.2016)

Other institutions maintain more distance, using nonetheless a register that is within easy reach (my italics): (7) Families are invited to experiment with [...] participants will complete […] (WS10, retrieved 02.03.2016) 6

On the commercialization of children’s leisure spaces see McKendrick et al. 2000.

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(8) The Met has so much to offer kids and their families. Have fun together in the Museum and online! [...] How well do you know the Met? To find out, download [...] (WS11, retrieved 02.03.2016)

Dedicated web pages for children by large museums tend to be different from those of children’s museums. Vignettes are reduced to a minimum; photographs are chosen judiciously rather than profusely, with close-ups on young groups or learner/mentor, learner/carer relationship. This goes hand in hand with the choice of register: the community feeling is sought and highlighted in sober rather than emphatic, over-stimulating language. The arrangement of verbal information makes it highly readable, with larger lettering, neatly separated paragraphs and easy-to-navigate hyperlinks, banners and menus. In brief, the world-known institutions approach younger audiences by avoiding visual and verbal oversaturation. The language is not unabashedly promotional, focussing on the quality of the opportunities while avoiding abstract words. Sentences are short and instructions accessible to children who are capable of navigating on their own.

5. Disability in MD A study by the Boston Children’s Museum, published in a paediatric journal, extols play and the virtues of museum partnerships with health agencies to stimulate its benefits: (9) The play experiences that spaces such as children’s museums provide “prompt parents and caregivers to explore, pose questions, make connections, exchange information and ideas, and instil in young children not only a love of learning, but also the skills for learning” [...] (WS12, retrieved 01.03.2016).

The museum context can be a psycho-educational healing resource for socially anxious children who fear criticism or negative evaluation and need to be gradually exposed to situations which can be a source of embarrassment (Friedberg et al. 2009). The power of play is experienced routinely in partnering with hospitals or therapy services: (10) Kohl Children’s Museum was specifically designed to be inclusive of all children and adults regardless of ability. The Museum’s 17 exhibits and 2 acres of outdoor explorations are designed for play with a purpose and encourage linguistic, cognitive, motor, and social skills for children ages birth through 8. The Museum works collaboratively with community

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The notion of accessibility to all children is much more extensive than the mere elimination of barriers: it requires an imbrication of MD with discourses of health and therapeutic pedagogy through partnerships with hospitals and the complete transformation of the place into a dedicated space at specific hours, with special programmes and adequately trained staff. These services, initially beginning with special museum programmes for Alzheimer and dementia and then extending to individuals of all ages with learning and developmental disabilities, are becoming more and more available with particular regard to the problems of autism, which require close cooperation of art therapists and museum educators.7 (11) Each year, the Queens Museum provides unique programs for thousands of children and adults with varying physical, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive abilities [...]. ArtAccess also provides outreach services to members of our community [...] in special situations, [...] homebound, suffering from [...] illness, incarcerated, or in foster care. Piloted in 1983 as Please Touch to provide art education for people with visual impairments, ArtAccess has grown into a nationally replicated model designed to allow audiences of all abilities to enjoy a personal connection to art and cultural institutions [...] providing layers of multisensory experiences and support for differentiated learning. [...] These programs emphasize the role of parents as learning partners with their children. [...] we support families of children with special needs to advocate for their children. [...] ArtAccess Autism Initiatives. Art therapists invite families with children affected by autism to explore the culture of museums [...] looking at and making art together. Socialization and play help bridge connections to artwork and build literacy. [...] local parent leaders collaborate with museum staff in order to make visits [...] educational, accessible and engaging for families with young children from diverse backgrounds and abilities. (WS14, retrieved 01.03.2016, bold in original)

Accessibility and inclusion, emphasized in the CRC as components of the dignity of each child, are being implemented in museums across the world, with programmes envisaged to empower minors with special needs 7

On art therapy and art in healthcare, the positive effects of art on the human brain and the quality of cooperation between art therapists and educators in a museum setting, see Sloan 2013.

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in terms of motor, sensory, language, literacy and socio-cognitive skills and, increasingly, those with neurological disorders.8 From the museum homepage, families may be directed to dedicated brochures and pages. The New York Met, for instance, has pages for families of young visitors with special learner needs and one for visitors on an autism spectrum, providing several verbal-visual tools to plan and prepare the visit in detail. The Social narrative for an independent visit to the Museums for teens and adults on the autism spectrum (my italics) for example, is a step-by-step description of every action on the part of the visitor, starting with access from a quieter side entrance, with explanations accompanied by photographs showing how one relates to others in the specific situation and zooming in with close shots of specific objects: (12) The person at the Admissions Desk will give me a sticker that shows I have paid to enter the Museum. I will peel it from the backing and put it on my clothing in a visible place. [details of the sticker being peeled off and applied to garments follow] (WS16, retrieved 01.03.2016)

The page listing the specific resources offered uses we as a deictic centre in the presentation (We welcome families with children and adults on the autism spectrum), while the specific “social narrative” page is told in the first person, to facilitate the visitor’s identification with each action s/he will have to perform at the entrance, admission etc. Thus, there is a deictic move from the homepage presentations of these museums, usually including a factual description of the Museum’s main features and achievements in an institutional, “distal” third person, purposefully avoiding any bombastic promotional language, to sector pages where the institution “speaks” collectively (we) and finally identifies with the visitor (I). The Boston Children’s Museum site features a blog addressing the issue of authentic inclusion (my italics), written in highly comprehensible language, about supporting children who are developmentally different, entitled “Autism in the Museum”. It is linked with prominent national and regional organizations dealing with autism and it includes both a research section and a section entitled “Marketing to the Autism Community”. (WS17, last consulted 01.03.2016)

8

Special arrangements accommodating autistic families include dedicated schedules, specially trained staff, dimming of lights and turning down loud sounds to create a soft atmosphere and enhance a sense of security. (WS15, retrieved 01.03.2016)

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Guggenheim (New York) offers mainstream children a program called First Impressions: Stories and Art at the Guggenheim, that (13) […] links the visual and literary arts for children in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade. [...] Sackler Educators use picture books as a bridge to discuss images in the museum that do not have related text, allowing children to create their own narratives and make connections to art objects while fostering language, visual literacy, and critical thinking skills. (https://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/sackler-center/ design-it-shelter/vote-for-shelters/project/288, retrieved 16/06/2016, my italics)

Guggenheim’s Mind’s Eye programs for hard-of-hearing, deaf, partially sighted, and blind adults (14) […] offer the opportunity [...] to explore the museum’s exhibitions, collections, and architecture by means of linguistic and visual tools particular to their experience. Tours are conducted in American Sign Language, and through verbal imaging (detailed physical descriptions of artworks) and touch. (WS18, retrieved 01.03.2016)

Most museums with programmes for youth with special needs train their educators. Most prominent is the Guggenheim Sackler Center for Arts Education, an 8,200-square-foot education facility comprising art and multimedia resource centres and a theatre: (15) […] a dynamic 21st-century education hub and learning laboratory that offers innovative public programs in the visual as well as performing and literary arts. Exploration and experimentation with new technologies is the center’s hallmark, which broadens and enriches programs for youth, adults, and families. Artists as well as cultural and academic institutions are valued collaborative partners. (https://www.guggenheim.org/newyork/education/sackler-center/design-it-shelter/vote-for-shelters/project/ 288, retrieved 16/06/2016)

This is perhaps the first international museum page bearing connotations of pride; most pages visited and excerpted so far are couched in matter-offact, sober diction. The photographs, when referring to the autism spectrum or developmental disorders, respectfully portray the children from behind. In Italy, newspapers often highlight the situation of autistic families, more or less left to their own devices. In art training for youth with developmental problems, one programme is mentioned in Florence, amounting to 8 hours for 20 Museum “operators” (WS19, retrieved

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01.03.2016), in collaboration with the Education Department of Palazzo Strozzi, which runs programs for Alzheimer groups as well as young people with learning, cognitive or motor disability (WS20, visited 01.03.2016). An established tradition exists for the visually impaired, e.g. the tactile visits which the Turin Egyptian museum started in 1984 (WS21, last visited 01.03.2016); the “tactile experience” is available in many regional museums. Museum educators (didattica museale) are now espousing the “access to all” approach started by “Scienzabile – inclusione e gioco tra scienza e disabilità” in 2014 and recently developed on a larger scale by “Museo per tutti” (WS22 visited retrieved 16/06/2016.), linking a number of Italian museums. This experimental project runs its own blog (WS23, last visited 03.03.2016) with articles conveying “social narrative” and specific communicative approaches after the advanced museum pedagogy exemplified above. The need to make Italian museums accessible to the differently enabled, “invisible” children has been in the air for years, with scholars advocating for the training of “cultural mediators” (Cetorelli Schivo 2007). Indeed, one area which would benefit from faster and more pervasive innovation is the liaising with hospitals. Two instances are the programmes of the MAXXI Modern Art Museum in cooperation with two Mental Health Departments in Rome, and the art events at the Gaslini in Genoa (WS24, last visited 02.03.2016).

6. Social responsibility in MD The notion of special needs does not solely coincide with disabilities. It also covers the issues related to children whose social background is problematic or may have led to criminal offences. Article 39 of the CRC has been crucial in countries where, for instance, child offenders used to be jailed in adult prisons. Further, it has promoted the legal provisions now known as “restorative justice”, with special rehabilitation for delinquent youth. How useful can museums be in preventing juvenile crime? How effective is MD’s imbrication with the discourse of activism in social prevention and restorative justice9 (see Sirhall 2015)? 9

“Restorative justice is a process whereby all the parties with a stake in a particular offense come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offense and its implications for the future” (Marshall 1996); “La giustizia riparativa è un processo in cui tutte le parti interessate da un particolare reato si incontrano per decidere insieme come affrontare le conseguenze del reato stesso e le implicazioni per il futuro che potranno derivare dalla commissione di questo” (Translated by Mannozzi 2003). Retrieved 03.03.2016 (WS25) from slides

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Museums offer more than protection from street gangs, bullying, the circulation of toxic substances, and social risk in general. Thus, a remarkable project is underway in the Bronx (1.3 million inhabitants, now developing into a residential area) and is to open in 2017: (16) [...] The Museum is one of few cultural institutions in the Bronx geared toward young children, especially those children and families who cannot afford - or would not normally visit - a museum. [...] Kids’ Powerhouse will serve nearly 75,000 children each year and will feature [...] age-appropriate permanent and temporary interactive exhibits exploring the richness of the Bronx in the arts, culture, community, natural resources KIDS’ POWERHOUSE will use the overall theme of POWER as a unifying thread to tie all its interactive exhibits and programs together. What theme can better celebrate and explore the magnificence and power of the Bronx? Its fascinating and powerful history. Its multicultural and powerful people. Its future powered by its children. [...]

(WS26, retrieved 03.03.2016, my italics)

The single most important lexical synergy in this presentation is perhaps the one between power and confidence, highlighting cultural pride, pride of place and the positive construal of self-confidence, the key result of valuable pedagogy and the affective and moral prerequisite, not only to shield, but to liberate the talents of youth at risk, inscribing them in generational and cultural cohesion firstly by stimulating positive interaction. The cultivation of pride through multi-disciplinary approaches is crucial in particular for juvenile offenders, e.g. Maryland Department of Juvenile Services partnering with artists and artisans at the American Visionary Art Museum (WS27, last visited 03.03.2016). Central to offender education is the notion of restorative justice, where communication is paramount. The model program SHADES (Stop Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students), focusing on bullying, prejudice and bias, provides juror training centred on “respectful communicative styles”:

for volunteers explaining legislation in retributive and restorative justice, prepared by the Centro Servizi Volontariato.

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(17) Teen Court is an intervention program which provides selected juvenile offenders with the opportunity to be questioned, judged, and sentenced by a jury of their peers. The program [...] promotes restorative justice through innovative sentencing. The Los Angeles Superior Court’s Teen Court program [...] is the largest and fastest growing network of teen juror justice in the country. [...] the student jurors and their adult partners promote understanding of the negative impact of bias on the community, and advance hate crime and incident prevention. (WS28, retrieved 03.03.2016, my italics)

The role of Museum collections in coping with marginalization, social maladjustment and crime from a multicultural perspective was researched in New South Wales (Australia) by academics, juvenile courts and the Australian Museum, leading to the “Pacific Youth Reconnection Project”: (18) [...] in 2006, young people from Pacific backgrounds made up 1.1% of the NSW population but constituted 7% of juvenile offenders [...] this project will continue to utilize the Pacific cultural collections to help reconnect marginalized Pacific young people with their cultural heritage. [...] exposure to cultural collections is intended to help address the symptoms of cultural dislocation including Juvenile Justice issues. (WS29, retrieved 03.03.2016, my italics)

Museums are responding to the challenges of “inclusive justice” (Cortese 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2011)10 through partnerships with juvenile courts and detention centres, with programmes focussed on self-esteem, pride and respect.

7. Discussion and conclusions: museums as responsible agents on children’s agenda The study intended to investigate how, in the paradigmatic shift of museums from being “goods”-oriented to being context- and audienceoriented, MD interprets and actualizes human rights discourse, notably the rights of children set in the CRC. The changing paradigm, notably in bestpractice museums, enhances policies aimed at engaging children and young people: “if museums are to create a participatory culture in which young people are co-creators of museum experiences they have to trust the participants’ abilities” (Tzibazi 2013, 167). Mutual trust must be established 10

I wish to thank Professor Giuseppina Cortese for her generous support and advice and for the inspiring conversations we had while I was conducting my research.

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between young people and museums to actively respond to the rights of children as stated in the CRC (see note 1). At the heart of such discursive practices lies the ideology of inclusiveness, for “ideologies are acquired, confirmed, changed and perpetuated through discourse” (Van Dijk 2006, 115), and the imbrications of MD with the shared set of beliefs on children’s rights may lose precisely this “ideological nature”: Sometimes, ideologies become shared so widely that they seem to have become part of the generally accepted attitudes of an entire community, as obvious beliefs or opinions, or common sense. [...] In that sense, and by definition, these beliefs thus lose their ideological nature as soon as they become part of the Common Ground. (Van Dijk 2006, 116)

What is at stake here is the risk that museum ideology of children’s inclusion - often part of a markedly profit-oriented promotional strategy may turn into one of the countless “ideologies” saturating the contemporary world and thus fall short of its promises. Despite the numerous learning activities that do respond to the rights of children, museum ethics must pay attention to the vast number of children who are literally excluded, or whose voices are excluded, from museum practices. Similar to Tzibazi’s focus on “Participatory Action Research” (Tzibazi 2013, 166), Sowton views museums as bodies that should “include young people’s voices in the research process” (Sowton 2014, my emphasis) and, in doing so, one could further argue, museums should also include voiceless children. Undeniably, despite the remarkable efforts carried out by several contemporary museums, the children whose voices are included in MD are far too often mainstream children. Thus, the social responsibility of the museum in terms of children’s rights is to reposition by offering not only “interactive” entertainment, but rather genuine inclusive participation encompassing several spheres of the “social and cultural benefit of the child” (CRC, art. 17). In addition, many current practices, as shown by the cases above, are still constructed and disclosed mainly by adults. As stated by Smith (2008, 15), children have long been regarded as “the passive recipients of adults’ teaching, protection and care, as objects to be shaped and socialized, as the properties of their families” and of their educators. Therefore, the museum should “reveal” children’s voices and do so resisting all manipulations. Drawing on Lury (1995, 216), Chouliaraki (2003, 303) maintains that one should not investigate how young people “create subcultures by making themselves a spectacle” but rather “the ways in which they [young people] operate within a society which is in itself a spectacle or hyper-reality”.

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Digital “democratization” seems to amplify the risk of manipulation, firstly in a consumer-oriented direction: “the distinctions between expert and non-specialist audiences, public and private communication domains, are becoming blurred [...] the demands, rights and obligations of the general public in the global knowledge-sphere are changing” and “informative texts [strategic texts] are increasingly being drafted with interested ‘consumers’ in mind” (Salvi and Bowker 2015, 12). Further, the dissemination of expert knowledge originally posited in the museum institution undergoes precisely the processes of “(re)contextualization”, “re-concenceptualization” and “trans-mediation and en-textualization” pointed out by Salvi and Bowker: co-construction of knowledge through children’s engagement can be dazzling but, at the same time, boil down to “fun but forgettable”. In fact, mothers’ blogs, for example, and some web pages from children’s museums, seem to indulge in hyperbole and to long for / offer marvels, coming close to show-business and advertising discourse, where children are often used as “actors” in a kind of spectacularization.11 The risk here is to turn museums’ ethics of inclusion into a trivialization of knowledge, as Hughes (2001) eloquently shows (see Paragraph 4). Indeed, in their discussion of globalization and of the subsequent homogenizing tendencies in youth culture, Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, quoting Fornäs (1995, 2), argue that “to depict the popular cultural activities of the young as merely jolly games which provide them with necessary skills in their search for adult identities is to trivialize and disarm young cultures” (Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou 2003, 3). It is relevant, then, to refer to the manipulative “regime of the adult”. Borodo (2011) focuses on manipulated translations of books for children, notably translation as an ideological phenomenon involving mitigation, moralization, amplification, focalization and/or simplification, but the notion could apply to the broader textuality in museums’ participatory practices. This may easily lead both to (over)simplification of knowledge and to (over)amplification of the 11 The reference to the exploitation of children in show-business is not implausible: many promotional videos on kid activities in museums superficially represent them as playful and joyful. A key example is a video for the Eureka Museum for Children. A child is followed during his visit; finally, he is simply asked whether he thinks “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” about the museum and he predictably answers “thumbs up” (WS30, last visited 23.04.2016). Another video corroborating this hypothesis deals with children in comic situations, including a visit to a science museum. The children not only perform “fun but forgettable” activities, they are manipulated for the entertainment of adults and become (literally) mute actors for “the show”. (WS31, retrieved 23.04.2016)

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spectacular aspects of knowledge itself. Duszak’s pragmatic perspective on the “regime of the adult” (2011, 304) takes the argument even further, pointing to the necessity of “inclusive” and interconnected discourses: Intertextuality (or interdiscursivity) could offer a major contribution to our understanding of how meaning is created socially at ideational, interpersonal, and textual levels. Most insightful are [...] the approaches that adopt a dialogic perspective on communication, deriving from Bakhtin’s conceptions of heteroglossia or polyphony, and attending to voices, viewpoints and social positionings of actors on topics and stances. (Duszak 2011, 305, my emphasis)

Duszak’s insightful analysis on “young discourses” is particularly congruent with my present argument, for it brings to mind the ethical obligation to “attend” to children’s voices and enhance their “right to be heard” as stated in art. 12 of the CRC. Best-practice MD should include in “visitor research” strategies also the positioning of children, and their stances. Baum, Hein and Solvay noted the long-term benefits for young people who had been led to approach the museum adequately. Using interviews, the authors analyzed autobiographical narratives: For many, it was a life changing experience. They were introduced to new, previously unimagined possibilities, to a new way of perceiving the world, to exciting opportunities that have transformed their perception of themselves and their place in the world. For the most part, what they learned and how the experience transformed their lives is the result of the relationships they formed with the museum staff, who are described warmly as mentors and as new "family." Participation [...] allowed the students to enjoy opportunities that other students might take for granted: going to museums, traveling to new places, and meeting new people. As a result of their activities, the YouthALIVE participants have made and are carrying out ambitious life plans. They are putting their experiences to good use as they move toward active participation in society. Finally, there is considerable evidence that the museum environment provides a unique and rich venue for these young people. (Baum et al. 2000, 9, my emphasis)

The stories stress learning (“I realized a steady increase in my knowledge over the last three years, and my grades can prove that for a fact”, ibid., 9); social awareness, since “working at the museums enabled them to mix with people from a wider variety of backgrounds, to expand their own knowledge of others, and therefore to understand better both social and political issues and themselves” (ibid., 10); life changes; relationships and, especially, self-confidence and trust in their own

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possibilities (“I was very nervous because I had never presented in front of a group of people. Day after day, the staff in the Hall kept encouraging me to learn more demonstrations, and I now feel more comfortable to do them. The explainers also helped me correct my English when it was wrong; I really appreciated that”, ibid., 11). On the downside, a coeval article by a 15-year-old in L.A. Youth (WS32, retrieved 23.04.2016) raised a controversial debate amongst museums operators. Entitled “Why Museums Suck”, this was a blunt firstperson narrative: (19) Most museums suck. Really they do. Museums always have that cold feeling. Very adultish and professional, it makes you uncomfortable. And museums are filled with old people. I don’t have anything against old people, but I’ve noticed that when there are old people around, it’s usually boring. (WS33, retrieved 23.04.2016)

The boy stressed the negative (“boring”) aspects of museum visits, e.g. tour guides speaking like “answering machines”, and the need to make museums more “hands-on and interactive”. Thus, although many young people were grasping the potential of museums to increase their own trust and self-confidence by enhancing their knowledge in participatory ways, others were put off by the less than appealing nature of museums visits. Interestingly, however, the young boy was interviewed again in 2012, after 11 years, when he was 26. In this interview, he stated that his “entire perception of museums” [was now] “completely different”. As an adult, he regularly visits museums and appreciates the staff that interact with the public as they “increase the attractiveness of museums” (WS34, retrieved 23.02.2016). Exemplifying teenagers’ reactions to museums, this case reveals how well-balanced museum practices should aim for inclusive participation and respond to children’s rights to learn and become responsible adults, by offering more than fun and games. Indeed, both “experience” and “reflection on experience” are crucial to professional education, which “is inherently connected with values and ethical norms and as such goes beyond technical skills” (Hemelsoet 2012, 537-538). Gone are the days of little feet shuffling down the halls, little silent people thinking of the museum visit report to be handed in tomorrow. But if museums are to provide a genuine contribution to a fair and equitable society, their paramount educational role can only be attained through a bond of mutual trust with tomorrow’s adult generation. Interdiscursivity is key to a MD wherein awareness of children’s rights, needs and wishes goes hand in hand with appreciation of, and advocacy for, their

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capabilities. What has been done, as well as what has not been done so far – the strengths and the shortcomings, the research, the experiments and debates briefly illustrated here – show that worldly concerns such as promotion and marketing are not the whole story in MD. Care, respect and the avoidance of manipulation are very much part of the picture – the part that wins children’s trust and makes for memorable meaning.

References Achiam, Marianne, Michael May, and Martha Marandino, “Affordances and distributed cognition in museum exhibitions.” Museum Management and Curatorship 29 (5): 461-481. Adorno, Theodor. 1997. “Valéry Proust Museum.” In Prisms, translated by Samuel and Sherry Weber, 173–86. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K., and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.). 2003. Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Baum, Lynn, George E. Hein, and Marylin Solvay. 2000. “In their own words: voices of teens in museums.” Journal of Museum Education 25 (3): 9-14. Borodo, Michal. 2011. “‘The regime of the adult’: Textual manipulations in translated, hybrid and glocal texts for young readers.” In Language, Culture and the Dynamics of Age, edited by Anna Duszak, and Urszula Okulska, 329-347. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Briggs, Sarah. 2007. “Fresh Eyes: attracting and sustaining young visitors to Tate.” Museum Management and Curatorship 22 (1): 5-9. Cetorelli Schivo, Gabriella. 2007. “Museo e mediazione culturale. La pedagogia del patrimonio e i ‘cittadini invisibili’.” http://www.auditorium.info/gabriella-cetorelli-schivo-museo-emediazione-culturale-la-pedagogia-del-patrimonio-e-i-cittadiniinvisibili-2/ Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2003. “Mediated experience and youth identities in a post-traditional order.” In Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities, edited by Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, 303-331. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Convention on the Rights of the Child. United Nations Treaty Collection, Ch. IV, Human Rights; section 11. https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=I V-11&chapter=4&lang=en.

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Cortese, Giuseppina. 2005. “Indeterminacy in ‘rainbow’ legislation: The Convention on the Rights of the Child.” In Vagueness in Normative Texts, edited by Vijay Bhatia et al., 255-285. Bern: Peter Lang. Cortese, Giuseppina. 2007a. “The right to be just other children: Protectionist and liberationist ideologies in the discourse of children’s rights”. In Discourse and Ideology in Specialized Communication, edited by Giuliana Garzone and Srikant Sarangi, 73-100. Bern: Peter Lang —. 2007b. “Human rights ratification as perspectivation: The Convention on the Rights of the Child”. In Discourse Analysis and Contemporary Social Change, edited by Norman Fairclough, Giuseppina Cortese and Patrizia Ardizzone, 355-380. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2011. Reflections on Children’s Rights: Marginalized Identities in the Discourse(s) of Justice. Monza: Polimetrica. Duszak, Anna. 2011. “Old and young in discourses of Polish transformations.” In Language, Culture and the Dynamics of Age, edited by Anna Duszak, and Urszula Okulska, 301-328. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Fornäs, Johan. 1995. “Youth, culture and modernity.” In Youth Culture in Late Modernity, edited by Johan Fornäs and Bolin Göran, 1-11. London: Sage Publications. Friedberg, Robert D., Jessica M. McClure, and Jolene Hillwig Garcia. 2009. Cognitive Therapy Techniques for Children and Adolescents: Tools for Enhancing Practice. New York: The Guildford Press. Fondazione Fitzcarraldo. 2009. “Quali politiche per un pubblico nuovo. Un percorso di ricerca e di azione per i musei di Torino e del Piemonte.” http://www.fitzcarraldo.it/ricerca/pdf/nuovipubblici_report.pdf Gronemann, Sigurd Trolle, Erik Kristiansen, and Kirsten Drotner. 2015. “Mediated co-construction of museums and audiences on Facebook.” Museum Management and Curatorship 30 (3): 174–190. Hemelsoet, Elias. 2012. “A right to education for all: the meaning of equal educational opportunities.” International Journal of Children’s Rights 20 (4): 523-540. Hughes, Patrick. 2001. “Making science ‘family fun’: the fetish of the interactive exhibit.” Museum Management and Curatorship 19 (2): 175-185. Jalla, Daniele Lupo. 2015. “Una riforma per decreto”. La riforma dei musei italiani. Il giornale delle Fondazioni, 15.04.2015, http://museumsnewspaper.blogspot.it/2015/05/come-si-salva-unmuseo.html?spref=tw, retrieved 29.02.2016

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Jensen, Nina. 1999. “Children, teenagers and adults in museums: a developmental perspective.” In The Educational Role of the Museum, edited by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, 110-117. London/New York: Routledge. Lury, Celia. 1995. Consumer Culture. London: Routledge. Lynch, Bernadette. 2013. “Reflective debate, radical transparency and trust in the museum.” Museum Management and Curatorship 28 (1): 1-13. Mannozzi, Grazia. 2003. La giustizia senza spada. Uno studio comparato su giustizia riparativa e mediazione penale. Milano: Giuffrè. Marshall, Tony F. 1996. “The evolution of restorative justice in Britain.” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 4 (4): 21-43. Marstine, Janet, Alexander A. Bauer, and Chelsea Haines. 2011. “New directions in museum ethics.” Museum Management and Curatorship 26 (2): 91-95. McKendrick, John H., Michael G. Bradford, and Anna V. Fielder. 2000. “Time for a party! Making sense of the commercialisation of leisure space for children.” In Children’s Geographies. Playing, Living, Learning, edited by Sarah L. Holloway, and Gill Valentine, 100-116. London/New York: Routledge. Piscitelli, Barbara, and David Anderson. 2007. “Young children’s perspectives of museum settings and experiences.” Museum Management and Curatorship 19 (3): 269-282. Rosenbaum, Jill Leslie, and Shelley Spivack. 2014. Implementing a Gender-Based Arts Program for Juvenile Offenders. London: Taylor & Francis. Sabatini, Federico. 2015. “Language, knowledge and community in museum discourse: Tate and Gam.” ESP Across Cultures 12: 105-126. Salvi, Rita, and Janet Bowker (eds.). 2015. The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English. Genres, Discourse Strategies and Professional Practices. Bern: Peter Lang. Sirhall, Elizabeth E. 2015. “Museum activism and social responsibility: building museum education programs for juvenile offenders.” Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs). http://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations/2094 Sloan, Laura. 2013. Your Brain on Art. Therapy in a Museum Setting and its Potential at the Rubin Museum of Art. MA thesis, CUNY, New York. Smith, Anne B. 2008. “Rethinking childhood: the inclusion of children’s voice.” In The Case for the Child: a New Agenda, edited by Ya’ir Ronen, and Charles W. Greenbaum, 15-38. Antwerp/Oxford: Intersentia.

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Sowton, Claire. 2014. “A review of the literature on young people’s motivation and gallery engagement.” Tate Research Centre http://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/learningresearch/working-papers/young-peoples-motivation Tzibazi, Vasiliki. 2013. “Participatory action research with young people in museums.” Museum Management and Curatorship 28 (2): 153-171. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2006. “Ideology and discourse analysis.” Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (2): 115-140.

Websites References to websites throughout the text are as follows: (WS+ progressive number). WS1 WS2 WS3 WS4 WS5 WS6 WS7 WS8 WS9 WS10 WS11 WS12

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https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV11&chapter=4&lang=en. https://museummum.wordpress.com/ http://www.bambinidavivere.com/2013/05/21/i-migliori-musei-in-italiada-sperimentare-con-i-tuoi-bambini/ KidsArt Tourism, kidsarttourism.com www.lincolnchildrensmuseum.org www.chicagochildrensmuseum.org/ http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/famiglie http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/kids-and-families http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/d/digital-kids/ http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/support/foundation-andgovernment/education-and-public-programs http://www.metmuseum.org/learn/kids-and-families http://www.metmuseum.org/learn/kids-and-families https://bostonchildrensmuseum.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/play-asimmunization-mitigating-stress-and-supporting-healthy-developmentthrough-collective-impact/#more-2359 https://www.kohlchildrensmuseum.org/outreach/everyone-at-play http://www.queensmuseum.org/art-access http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/06/18/193092510/ http://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/access/visitors-withdevelopmental-and-learning-disabilities/for-visitors-with-autismspectrum-disorders http://www.autisminthemuseum.org/p/blog-page.htm http//www.guggenheim.org/new-york/support/foundation-andgovernment/education-and-public-programs www.autismofirenze.org/progetto-musei) http://www.palazzostrozzi.org/education/visite-per-persone-condisabilita/

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Chapter Four www.archeologia.beniculturali.it/getFile.php?id=112 http://museopertutti.it/ http://museopertutti.it.blog/ http://www.gaslini.org/servizi/comunicatistampa/ricerca_fase02.aspx?ID =425 www.csvm.it/index.php/bilancio.../1030-iris-corso-slides-primo-incontro http://www.bronxchildrensmuseum.org/#!kids-powerhouse-discoverycenter/c6ac http://www.djs.maryland.gov/MarylandDJS_WDSHMosaicProject.asp http//www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH/b.5052709/k.B 5E3/SHADES_Stopping_Hate_and_Delinquency_by_Empowering_Stud ents.htm http://australianmuseum.net.au/blogpost/science/pacific-youth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Q29CH9-zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjkQxZ6PX1o) http://www.layouth.com/about-us/ http://www.layouth.com/why-museums-suck/ http://artmuseumteaching.com/2012/11/19/epilogue-why-museums-dontsuck-connecting-with-howard-hwang/

PART II A CORPORATE CULTURE OF TRUST

CHAPTER FIVE MARKERS OF TRUST: EPISTEMIC ADVERBS OF CERTAINTY AND RESTRICTIVE ADVERBS IN CSR REPORTS PAOLA CATENACCIO UNIVERSITY OF MILAN

1. Introduction The study presented in this chapter explores the function of epistemic adverbs of certainty and of restrictive adverbs in a corporate genre, namely the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report. The underlying assumption is that through the investigation of interpersonal resources such as epistemic and restrictive adverbs it is possible to retrieve crucial information about the ideological underpinnings of CSR discourse, thus contributing to a better understanding of this recently emerged discursive formation. Understanding the mechanisms of this communication will also give insights into how trust is built and maintained in business, at a time when large corporations are often subject to scrutiny and criticism, and intangible factors such as reputation become more and more important in determining business outcomes. Over the last few decades CSR discourse has become established as the main locus for a reconceptualization of the role of business in society centred on the idea that this role entails greater convergence between corporate and civil society aims and priorities than had traditionally been posited. Broadly speaking, and in a (very reductive) nutshell, CSR can be summed up in the motto of “doing well by doing good”; that is, in a CSRbased approach to business, the pursuit of profit which is (and to a large extent remains) the key measure of business success, is combined and tempered with a whole set of other concerns which are socially- and ethics-oriented, and which play a crucial role in fostering societal trust. The reconceptualization process that has led to this redefinition has long

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been in the making, and has entailed much debate around the role of business in society. Traces of this debate persist in CSR discourse, where signs of dialogic engagement with competing conceptualizations are frequent, though not always prominent. Often, alternative views of the role of business in society are only evoked through the activation of interpersonal textual resources which convey the author’s attitudinal stance, including (but of course not limited to) adverbials of stance, of which adverbs of epistemic stance and restrictive adverbs represent a subset. Authorial stance, however, is never purely personal: evaluation “both exploits and construes a value system belonging to the relevant community” (Hunston 2005, 4), and contributes to creating accepted world views and ideologies in which issues of trust are prominent. Investigating the intersubjective positioning of authors in value-laden texts is therefore especially important for a better understanding of the ideological grounding of newly hegemonic discourses such as the discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility.

2. Background This study is part of a larger research project on the discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility which aims to investigate its linguistic features and rhetorical structuring with a view to unearthing its ideological underpinnings. The project is set within an emerging tradition of discourse-based studies of CSR which has yielded a sizable body of research since its beginning in the early 2000s. The concept of CSR – broadly summed up as “the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development, by working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their quality of life” (WBCSD 2001, 6) – has a fairly established tradition in the history of managerial studies. In its contemporary form, it dates back at least to Bowen's Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (1953), but it was not until the late 1990s that it reached mainstream status. The last two decades have seen an exponential growth in the theory and practice of CSR, as well as a rapid spread of attending discourses aimed at fostering, justifying, and advertising CSR engagement. Over this period, CSR has gradually moved from being an emerging field to becoming a hegemonic paradigm commanding widespread support across ample sectors of business, politics and civil society, and arousing the interest of scholars from a variety of disciplinary fields. Communication is a crucial aspect of CSR practice. A key tenet of CSR is the need to engage in dialogue with stakeholders, not only for

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companies to negotiate mutually agreed courses of action, but also – and especially – as a form of impression and reputation management aimed at building and maintaining trust. Although the impact of CSR activities on overall financial performance is somewhat debated, their beneficial effects in terms of reputation are generally recognized (Balmer and Gray 1999). Such benefits are largely dependent on the company's CSR engagement and CSR performance results being known to stakeholders and analysts, which has led to sophisticated communication practices being developed to this end. Among them, a particularly important place is occupied by the genre of the CSR report. The practice of CSR reporting emerged in the 1990s and centered originally on environmental aspects of corporate management. Over the following decades, despite remaining largely voluntary, it spread rapidly thanks to a diffuse process of isomorphic adoption and progressive institutional entrenchment (Zeitz et al. 1999) whose development has been accompanied by increasing discursive standardization (thanks also to the publication of widely adopted standards and guidelines) which has both been fostered by and has contributed to reinforcing CSR implementation (Haak et al. 2012). The rapid international spread of CSR has contributed to its current status as a global phenomenon. There is evidence that, starting from the turn of the 21st century, a globalised notion of CSR began to appear (Bhur and Grafström 2007, 22) which framed CSR issues as global issues, and which deeply affected previous narrower conceptualizations based on national traditions. As Tengblad and Ohlsson (2009) highlight, when not aligned with the global framing of CSR, which is basically centered on a human rights approach (Welford 2002), such conceptualizations began to be systematically downplayed, so that contemporary CSR appears to be – even allowing for local peculiarities – a global concept, not least because of the increasingly transnational and often global nature of corporations. Contributing to the globalization of CSR, as Sobczak and Coelho Martins (2010, 446) point out, have also been the practices of supranational organizations, multinational companies, NGOs and trade unions, as well as the establishment of global norms and standards of the like of the UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the ISO 26000 Guidance on Social Responsibility. The “transnational dimension of many companies and their stakeholders” has favoured “a certain convergence of CSR practices and discourses” which has been further reinforced through the development of increasingly common concepts in academia and their dissemination through management education. In this respect, Schultz and Wehmeier (2010, 16) talk about a “mimetic institutionalization” of CSR

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discourse, whereby the adoption of CSR policies by large companies is a trigger to the adoption of similar policies by followers, increasingly motivated by a need for societal legitimation that can only be built on the basis of relationships of mutual trust between companies and communities. CSR reports are crucial to this process of discourse dissemination. Though they are only one amongst the many genres devoted to CSR communication (multimodal genres especially being widely used in the field), they are probably the most influential one, and certainly the one best suited to the circulation of ideas among discourse communities in the domain of CSR. The centrality of CSR reports to the development of CSR discourse has long been recognized by CSR scholars, also arousing from the very start the interest of linguists and discourse analysts. Early discourse-analytical approaches to the genre focused on its content (Ellerup Nielsen and Thomsen 2007; Everaert et al. 2009), but the scope of analysis soon spread to other aspects, including generic structure (Catenaccio 2012; Bondi in press), issues of self-representation (Malavasi 2011; Catenaccio and Degano 2011) and identity creation, including aspirational and futureoriented perspectives (Bondi 2016), sometimes with a specific focus on evaluation (Fuoli 2012). Lately, attention has shifted to aspects of rhetorical organization which appear to be particularly salient in CSR reports. For instance, analyses have been conducted of conventionalized codifications of changing business values in CSR reports (Catenaccio 2013, 2014), and Bondi (in press) has investigated the role played by importance markers in establishing hierarchies of meaning in CSR discourse. This study aims to contribute to this strand of research by identifying a further set of interpersonally-oriented discursive traits and exploring their pragmatic deployment in the genre, with special attention paid to the way in which they contribute to establishing shared values, thereby fostering mutual trust grounded in ideological alignment.

3. Corpus and methodological approach The study has been conducted on a 49-million-word corpus of CSR reports covering the fourteen-year period from 1999 to 2013. The CSR reports included in the corpus were all issued by companies included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in 2012: the list was used as a starting point for corpus collection, which included all retrievable CSR reports issued by the listed companies before and after 2012. The resulting collection comprises 1,514 CSR reports, unevenly distributed across the period considered, with the number of reports available growing

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consistently over the years, starting from only 2 in 1999 and reaching 214 in 2011. For the following two years (2012 and 2013) the collection was not complete due to time restraints, but the data available suggest that the practice of CSR reporting is increasing. The corpus is extremely varied and comprises companies from different sectors, countries and traditions. The Dow Jones Sustainability Index provides a breakdown of the companies included according to country and sector. These variables are certainly relevant in CSR discourse, and have been shown to play a role in characterizing its various forms (see paragraph 2 above). For the purposes of the case study reported in this chapter, however, it was decided not to take them into consideration, as a preliminary exploration suggested that the distribution of the discursive traits under investigation across the corpus was not subject to sectorspecific restraints; moreover, their role was hypothesized to be of a conceptually framing nature, hence disengaged from sector-dependent variables. The analysis is discourse analytical in focus, but relies on corpus techniques for the identification and retrieval of the adverbs considered. The approach is corpus-based: the categories of adverbs under investigation were selected a priori; corpus techniques were then used to identify the most salient ones and retrieve their contexts of occurrence, which were then analyzed qualitatively. It should be pointed out that the frequency of adverbs of epistemic certainty and of restrictive adverbs is not particularly high, and definitely not high enough to be statistically significant (in fact, only restrictive adverbs such as just and only are frequent enough to be statistically computable); however – as shall be shown in the rest of the paper – they appear to play a key role in framing CSR discourse and can therefore be hypothesized to be conceptually, though not statistically, salient. For the qualitative investigation, the study relies on previous research on epistemic and restrictive adverbs which has focused on their pragmatic and rhetorical effects, most notably Simon-Vanderbergen and Aijmer (2007) for the former, and Biber et al. (1999) for the latter. For the sake of clarity, the relevant literature is discussed in the sections devoted to the analysis.

4. Intersubjective role of adverbs of epistemic certainty and restrictive adverbs The role of adverbials in conveying interpersonal meaning has long been recognized (Biber and Finegan 1988; Hoye 1997) and specific categories of

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stance adverbials have been identified (Biber et al. 1999). Among them are also epistemic and restrictive adverbs. Epistemic adverbs of certainty such as certainly, of course and obviously have been shown to be interpersonal, stance-conveying devices among whose key functions are indexicality and reflexivity (Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2007, 40). Because of their indexical role, they point to evoked contextual elements which are brought to bear on the text; at the same time, they perform a reflexive, textorganizational role, “function[ing] as contextualization cues showing how the discourse is organized” (ibidem). For instance, an utterance introduced by obviously (as in “obviously businesses must be profitable”) invokes reader alignment with the encoder on the basis of an indexically evoked, contextually (ideologically) shared common ground; at the same time, from a text-organizational point of view, it represents a meta-pragmatic comment on the proposition it frames. In the utterance “obviously businesses must be profitable, but they must also be ethical”, for example, obviously metapragmatically emphasizes the conceded meaning of the first proposition, thereby alerting the reader procedurally to the inferential structuring of the overall utterance. Restrictive adverbs, which include adverbs such as only, simply and just, are a subcategory of circumstantial adverbs whose function is to restrict the scope or the truth value of an assertion, thereby conveying evaluative meaning (and therefore qualifying also, pragmatically, as stance adverbs). For instance, by saying that “profit is only one of the purposes of businesses”, the idea is conveyed that businesses have several purposes, and that profit is not necessarily the primary one. The use of only restricts the scope of the assertion, while at the same time signaling authorial stance, acting metapragmatically as a cue to overall text interpretation. In very broad terms, the two categories of adverbs would appear to perform very different functions: adverbs of epistemic certainty may be expected to be used to co-construct, strengthen and reinforce shared common ground; restrictive adverbs, on the other hand, are likely used to limit the scope of an assertion, or to restrict its applicability or validity within a given context (either textually encoded or contextually evoked), redefining, or at any rate assessing, textually established or culturally shared knowledge and assumptions. It is not uncommon, however, for adverbs belonging to the two categories to co-occur: a generalized claim can embed a restricted assertion, as exemplified in the utterance “of course, profit is only one of the purposes of businesses”. In this case, the use of of course constructs as shared knowledge the fact that businesses have multiple purposes, dialogically engaging with (and simultaneously denying) the evoked heteroglossic claim that the sole purpose of business is the pursuit of profit.

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Because of their stance-encoding function, epistemic adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs represent a useful starting point for the investigation of shared assumptions and ideologies on the one hand, and of restricted, reframed and redefined concepts on the other. This chapter takes its move from this assumption, and analyzes these two different but related categories of adverbs with the aim to identify recurring strategies of interpersonal engagement geared at 1) establishing/acknowledging/fostering the creation of common ground with an envisaged/imagined interlocutor and 2) highlighting salient and/or backgrounded or downgraded concepts and claims by means of rhetorical structuring.

4.1. Adverbs of epistemic certainty in CSR reports In a previous study conducted on a different corpus of CSR reports (Catenaccio 2014), I investigated occurrences of what Biber and Finegan (1988, 33) call “surely adverbials” coming to the conclusion that they were typically used in CSR reports to interpersonally negotiate the shift from a profit-oriented paradigm to a more socially-oriented one. More specifically, epistemic markers of certainty appeared to serve the function of establishing common ground with potentially skeptical interlocutors, while at the same time orchestrating a paradigm shift in a manner which was not disruptive of the past, but rather built upon it incrementally to gradually construct a new accepted role for business in society. The examples below, which are taken from that study, illustrate this point: (1) Though obviously companies need to be profitable to survive, financials should not be their only driver. A stable development that benefits all stakeholders also requires that companies give shape to corporate social responsibility (CSR). (ING 2002) (2) The business stakes are obviously important to ING, but there is also a social side to it. (ING 2002) (3) …businesses run their operations according to two basic principles. First and foremost, of course, is how to provide a good product. […] However, the question is then automatically linked to the second principle – the awareness of responsibility. That means offering a product that has the least possible environmental impact, both in the short and long term. (Schiphol 2002)

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(4) Clearly, our greatest responsibility as a public company is creating value; this is the most significant contribution we can make to society. But we are convinced that success is also determined by the way we create value and contribute to the communities in which we operate. (Fortis 2005)

What is interesting about the use of these epistemic markers is the fact that the explicit manifestation of certainty they intend to convey appears to suggest, instead, that an emphatic statement is needed because the truth value of the proposition the certainty marker refers to is not entirely undisputed. As Simon-Vandernberger and Aijmer (2007, 31-32) point out, […] markers of certainty mark something special, since strictly speaking they would be unnecessary information. As a result an epistemic marker “high on the scale of certitude” invites the inference that there is some doubt about the truth of the proposition.

Thus, in the examples above, the main function of certainty markers seems to be to reaffirm the centrality of the profit motive even while arguing in favour of CSR. In other words, they appear to be used to remind readers that business is not becoming “something else”, but rather evolving, with social commitment being added to – but not altogether replacing – profit orientation. In the larger corpus on which this study is based, markers of epistemic certainty display varying frequencies, often statistically negligible given the large amount of text considered, and are unevenly distributed across the corpus. Of course occurs in almost 50% of the texts, with a total number of occurrences of 726; certainly occurs in 15% of the texts, with a raw frequency of 316; obviously appears in only 9 % of the texts, with 188 occurrences. As these data show, the frequencies are very low – typically, the adverbs investigated occur only once in a text, and do not occur in all texts. However, their contexts of occurrence are remarkably homogeneous, although much more nuanced than the previous investigation had suggested. Some of the findings are consistent with those of the previous study. The pursuit of financial viability, for instance, continues to be defined as obvious, as in examples (5) and (6): (5) Expectations relating to corporate responsibility are higher than ever before and maintaining society’s trust and confidence is an increasing challenge for companies everywhere. Shareholders are of course still looking for a good return on their investment, but they increasingly want assurance that they are investing in a business that delivers shareholder value in a responsible way. (Astrazeneca 2002)

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However, certainty adverbs also appear to frame other principles – on occasion, principles which were not necessarily “obvious” in previously analyzed reports, as in example (7), where the perspective is reversed: (7) Acting responsibly is of course the right thing to do but at Home Retail Group we believe it makes good business sense too. We call our approach to corporate responsibility "the basis of good business". (Home Retail 2013)

While the use of of course frames the need for responsible corporate action as something unquestionable (and which therefore does not require further explanation/argumentation, being posited as self-evident), the emphasis is shifted to the financial benefits that can ensue. Different is the case of example (8) below, where certainly is used to emphatically stress the fact that CSR is beneficial to business. In this case, the pragmatic meaning conveyed is not one of invoked alignment on shared principles, but rather an inductive conclusion based on the implicit argumentation that forward thinking is better than retrospective action: (8) Companies are now showing greater awareness of their corporate responsibilities, and we are very encouraged by this trend. It used to take a scandal to force companies to change their behaviour, but we now see the corporate world thinking ahead rather than reacting after an event. Businesses certainly benefit from taking corporate responsibility seriously. I believe this new approach will gather momentum, not least because companies find that thinking about the world beyond their offices and factories creates real benefits for them over the longer term. (Storebrand 2006)

In this case as well, the certainty adverb plays an important indexical role in signalling the underlying assumptions warranting the claims being made. Example (9) is yet another different case of where of course seems to serve a reassuring function, possibly to counteract the declaration that corporate community involvement is pursued “whenever practical”, in itself a restrictive expression:

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(9) The company is a member of UK Business in the Community and we are committed to corporate community involvement across the whole Group wherever practical. Of course, we are also committed to meeting our community obligations under the law. (Smith&Nephew 2005)

The idea of reassurance is compounded, in this case, by the fact that the proposition introduced by of course is postponed, which reverses the conventional information structure, whereby the given (and what is obvious is by definition a given) should logically precede the new (the following proposition, which acquires greater assertive force, even in the absence of epistemic certainty boosters, precisely by virtue of its status as new). In another group of examples (of which (10) and (11) below are representative) certainty adverbs are used to highlight the difficulties which besiege CSR progress. They are embedded in contexts which refer to CSR as a path, a constant work-in-progress, something which requires persistent effort and attention – a typical trope in CSR discourse (Milne et al. 2006): (10) The only real way to start grappling with these questions is to get into action in the process of charting this new kind of progress – a progress that reduces poverty and tackles climate change together. This path is certainly not going to be easy – but then I would hesitate to call anything easy when talking of the key Global issues, nor for that matter will I call anything “easy” in business; so we are all used to the “non easy” path. (Wipro 2009) (11) Of course we can always do more, and do it better, but we are proud of our 2011 accomplishments. Going forward, we will continue to ask ourselves, as individuals and as a company, what it means to do business through the lens of humanity, bringing real value to the diverse communities we serve. (Starbucks 2011)

Finally, in example (12), of course is used to clarify the limits of corporate responsibility (serving more as a warning, or a reminder to the reader), while certainly has a commissive function. (12) What we make - essentially oil and gas - has a global market and it has been so for many years. Now the issue is how do we cope with the new threats of the world today looking globally at them. Of course we cannot make choices that belong to politics or to international organization, but certainly we can play a role in facing major issues like poverty, like climate change, like sustainable development of the Countries we work in. (Eni 2009)

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As these few examples show, adverbs of certainty occur in a variety of contexts in CSR reports, and serve multiple pragmatic functions. In most cases, they cue an invitation to recognise shared common ground – or emphatically signal that a common ground assumption is not being jeopardised by other issues which are being raised, most notably with regard to the convergence of business and social objectives.

4.2. Restrictive adverbs Another class of adverbs which play an important interpersonal function are restrictive adverbs. Biber et al. (1999, 556) define restrictive adverbs as a subcategory of circumstance adverbs which “emphasize the importance of one part of the proposition, by restricting the truth value of the proposition either primarily or exclusively to that part”. Thus, if the analysis of epistemic adverbs of certainty can uncover the taken-forgranted (actual or discursively enforced) underpinnings of CSR discourse, restrictive adverbs can help shed light on relevance hierarchies within CSR-related concepts and propositions. Typical restrictive adverbs are only, just, merely, solely, exclusively and simply, all of which are attested in the corpus, with only (featured in 95% of the texts) and just (occurring in 80% of them) being among the top adverbs in the frequency list (with frequencies of 0.04 and 0.01 per thousand words respectively; only also ranks higher), while merely and simply have much fewer (statistically negligible) occurrences. The adverb solely (also statistically irrelevant, but more frequent than both merely and simply) was excluded because of its formulaic usage (it typically occurred in legal commentaries of the kind “this report is meant solely for…”), while exclusively was not considered in this study because of time and space constraints. As mentioned above, the prime function of restrictive adverbs is to focus attention on one element of the message, with the restriction applying at clause or phrase level. Examples (13) to (18) below exemplify these usages: (13) For us, compliance is more than merely obeying laws and regulations; it means acting in accordance with corporate ethics as well as socially accepted norms. (Daiwa 2005) (14) For Win-Win growth to occur, such a strategy from the long-term perspective is necessary. By escaping from the worn-out management paradigm of merely focusing on short-term earnings through cooperation between large, medium and small businesses and carrying out competitive

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strategies while retaining a long-term perspective for cooperation between companies to be the driving force for sustainable growth, Win-Win growth is making a virtuous ecosystem, in which large, medium and small companies grow together. (Sam 2012) (15) [A company that wants to] be truly sustainable cannot limit itself merely to manufacturing “greener” products. As important as it is to focus our attention – especially in terms of innovation – on products that are environmentally friendly and that above all mitigate the consequences of climate change – we must not ignore other important areas if we are to become a truly sustainable business in the future. (Bayer 2010) (16) The Allianz4Good Principles for Social Engagement define the strategic approach to social engagement in the Allianz Group. They recognize that it is not enough to merely acknowledge our corporate responsibility to society through short-term social actions; it is essential to take a strategic, long-term perspective. (Allianz 2010) (17) In our view, achieving optimal success at impacting the environment means having as little impact on it as possible. To that objective, our aggressive approach to minimizing our environmental impact reaches from renewable energy and composting waste to using innovative technologies for biodegradable materials. However, all our efforts are only as effective as the commitment of our employees, clients, and suppliers. Working together, we are making important strides toward safeguarding and even restoring our environment. (Sodexo 2004) (18) LG Electronics is looking beyond its success so far and is preparing long-term strategies to create blue ocean markets through innovation. This forward-looking stance will power our growth into the global top-3 electronics and telecommunications firm by 2010. Additionally, we are well aware that any profits and benefits gained and the added value created are only truly meaningful when they can be increased on a sustainable basis. Growing the profits and benefits of stakeholders, this is our economic promise to you. (LG 2005)

Examples (13) to (16) clearly illustrate the evaluative function of the restrictive adverb merely: while not strictly necessary for the syntactic completion of the clause (in fact, it could be omitted with no detriment to the overall meaning), “its function is to alert the reader to the fact that an evaluative judgment is being made and omitting it would remove a key indicator of the stance of the writer towards the information given” (Charles 2009, 156). If we compare (13a) and (13b) below

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(13a) For us, compliance is more than obeying laws and regulations. (13b) For us, compliance is more than merely obeying laws and regulations.

we can note that compliance is said to go beyond laws and regulations in (13a); (13b) expresses a similar position, but, additionally, obeying laws and regulations is evaluated negatively, as something which unduly restricts, and downgrades, the notion of compliance. As to the other examples, it should be noted that the use of restrictive adverbs “also evokes a contrast with a wider proposition or entity” which may or may not be explicitly referred to in the text itself (Charles 2009, 155). In (17), “all our efforts are only as effective as the commitment of our employees, clients, and suppliers”, for instance, the implication is that there are cases in which corporate efforts are NOT effective. In so far as they evoke broader propositions, which are therefore brought to bear on the evaluative significance of the rhetorical deployment of restrictive adverbs, these adverbs can be seen as indicators of heteroglossia: they conjure other, alternative voices, which come to represent a necessary backdrop against which the restriction is meaningful. The discourse use of restrictive adverbs can be best examined by looking at their patterns of co-occurrence. If we look at the most frequent clusters featuring both only and just, we notice that they most typically include some form of negation (not is in both cases the most frequent left collocate by far): N

1 2 3 4 5

Cluster is the only is not only not only to not only in not only the

Frequency 672 568 552 397 382

Table 5-1. only-clusters.

N 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Cluster just a few is not just more than just is just one not just in not just the not just a not just about

Frequency 302 294 267 136 115 113 112 110

Table 5-2. just-clusters.

Previous research (Charles 2009) has shown that the use of restrictive adverbs in the construction of stance is particularly evident when they are associated with negation. Example (19) is a typical example:

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(19) The use of AFR in cement production not only helps manage the wastes generated by other facilities but also helps to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions (SGC 2014)

The negation of the restrictive adverb indicates that the writer accepts the first statement (the one containing the negated restrictive adverb), but that there is something more that has been left out and that the second part of the clause reintegrates. This two-part pattern is by far the most frequent one in the corpus (there are 6,399 occurrences of not only in the corpus, out of 23,439 occurrences of only, nearly all of them occurring in the pattern just described), and it contributes to constructing interaction between the reader and the writer. As Charles (2009, 159) puts it, “the negated statement contains information that is shared by both reader and writer and hence conforms to reader expectations, while the wider element holds new or unexpected information, known only to the writer”. Further examples of this rhetorical pattern are reported below: (20) Samsung takes care to ensure that its new products not only make people’s lives more convenient and enjoyable but also contribute to making the global community healthier. (Samsung 2013) (21) For an integrated Group such as Enel, service quality means not only reliability of the supply, but also the quality of relationships with customers who turn to the Company to activate or modify their contract, ask questions, and notify problems or doubts. (ENI 2011) (22) We believe that incentivizing our associates to create sustainable value is not only in the interest of the Group and its shareholders, but also encourages performance, loyalty and entrepreneurship of our associates. (Novartis 2009) (23) Our Values create an agenda for making a positive contribution not only to the world of business but also to society as a whole. (DSM 2008) (24) In demanding basic and further training, we are not just safeguarding the future of our company. Since our activities have a great impact on the environment, we also want to give back something to the regions. (RWE 2005) (25) Mirvac’s focus on delivering outstanding customer service generates highly valued repeat business. Mirvac has an opportunity to help its customers live a more sustainable way of life, not just through occupying a healthier, more energy efficient property, but in changing day-to-day activities for a better outcome. (Mirvac 2007)

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Similar patterns apply to merely and simply: (28) Our promotion of equal opportunity and workplace diversity is not merely a social responsibility, but a means of ensuring that we foster a culture of diversity in the belief that this brings business advantage. (Investec 2013) (29) The Jawun program is not simply about our employees providing their skills into Indigenous communities, it also presents a unique opportunity for our people to experience cultural immersion and to build their own cultural competency. (Woodside 2012) (30) We know we are not simply treating diabetes. We are helping people live better. That understanding is behind every decision or action we take, and fuels our passion to change the treatment, perception and future of diabetes for good. (NovoNordisk 2005)

In all these cases, expected actions or behaviours are framed by restrictive adverbs, with social commitment being presented as something that goes beyond it and redefines the meaning of corporate engagement.

4.3 Adverbs of certainty, restrictive adverbs and patterns of contrast A more complete understanding of the rhetorical patterns within which clauses containing the adverbs discussed above occur can be gained by examining the clause relations in which they participate. Clause relations have been defined as “the shared cognitive process whereby we interpret the meaning of a clause or group of clauses in the light of their adjoining clauses” (Winter 1994, 49). In the majority of the examples discussed above, both adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs occur in conjunction with markers of contrast such as but or however. This appears to be a recurring pattern with both types of adverbs. The pattern can be generalized as follows:

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Of course P; but also Q Not only P; but also Q

with P being the conceded proposition (given, shared, expected), and Q the asserted one (new, unexpected). Adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs invariably occur in the conceded proposition, reinforcing the common ground assumption which concession relies on. However, they are promptly countered (though not cancelled) by the following asserted proposition, which puts forth another position that the speaker presents as more valid than the conceded. Concessivity entails the manifestation of degrees of commitment to the truth value of two propositions whose compatibility is unexpected. Let me illustrate this point with reference to example (2) above, which is reproduced below for the sake of convenience: (2) The business stakes are obviously important to ING, but there is also a social side to it. (ING 2002)

The relationship between the two propositions which make up (2) can be represented as follow: x

P. And, contrary to expectations, Q

where P and Q represent respectively the conceded and the asserted propositions. The two propositions are compatible (And), and the unexpectedness of their compatibility is conveyed in (2) by but, which signals procedurally that the assertion goes counter the expectations raised by P. In other words, and with reference to aspects of commitment to the truth value of the propositions involved, both propositions are presented as true, with the second (the assertion) being favoured by the speaker over the first one (the conceded one), which, however, retains its validity. Similar remarks apply to not only… but also structures: the proposition in which the negated restrictive adverb occurs is presented as featuring an expected claim (one warranted by inference from shared premises, for instance), whereas the one introduced by but also goes beyond the expected to introduce something new and hierarchically higher, thereby conveying a heavily evaluatively framed stance.

5. Conclusions This chapter has investigated the role played by adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs in a large corpus of CSR reports. These adverbs are

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not statistically significant in the corpus, and their distribution is uneven across it. However, their contexts of occurrence are remarkably similar across the entire collection, with a marked emphasis on rhetorical strategies of conceptual framing of CSR aimed at building and maintaining trust in the companies, which emphatically portray themselves as both financially viable and socially committed. In previous literature, adverbs of certainty and restrictive adverbs have been found to have different pragmatic functions: among the ones performed by the former is that of emphatically conveying shared assumptions (either existing, or discursively constructed as such through the deployment of the adverbs), while the latter cue, amongst other things, explicit authorial stance, mostly bound to relevance hierarchies. The investigation of the CSR corpus has confirmed such findings. The epistemic adverbs of certainty which appear in the texts fall mostly in the category of expectation (Chafe 1986, 270), and are classified by White (2003) as examples of “concur”, i.e. they represent the textual voice as upholding a broadly shared position, concurring with the real or imagined reader and simultaneously, by converse, invoking the reader's alignment with its position. Both the evocation of expectation and the invocation of alignment interpersonally engage the reader in the co-construction of shared common ground. On the other hand, restrictive adverbs are used to create scales of values, foregrounding some and backgrounding others. The study has also shown that in the corpus under investigation adverbs of epistemic certainty and restrictive adverbs are often embedded (and occasionally co-occur) in syntactic structures featuring forms of concession. Concession entails and overcomes a clash between the expectations raised by the conceded proposition and the claims made in the one asserted, which is therefore given salience. Propositions linked by a relationship of concessions are not mutually contradictory; they coexist, but their coexistence is posited as something that would not normally be expected. In CSR discourse, what is posited as unexpected is the nonconflictual (and indeed mutually beneficial) coexistence of profit- and society-oriented motives, with adverbs of epistemic certainty being used to highlight the sharedness of the conceded proposition, and restrictive adverbs, usually accompanied by some form of negation (not only, not just, more than just), being deployed in the service of the redefinition of priorities. This rhetorical pattern seems to be especially suited to the argumentative structuring of CSR discourse, which is still struggling with conceptualizing the compatibility – or indeed convergence – of business and social objectives. The examples retrieved from the corpus are not many, but they feature in remarkably homogeneous rhetorical constructions. Their

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rarity is to be put down to the fact that justifications of CSR engagement such as the ones they convey rarely occur more than once in a given report; they are not, therefore, salient in frequency terms – but they play a very important role in the discursive construction of CSR, where they often cue one of the most debated crucibles at the heart of the CSR proposition and contribute to the redefinition of the role of business in society by discursively overcoming potential contradictions and redesigning priorities in the name of ethical commitment and active societal engagement, thereby contributing to building trust and maintaining businesses' license to operate.

References Balmer, John M. T., and Edmund R. Gray. 1999. “Corporate identity and corporate communications: creating competitive advantage.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 4 (4): 171-176. Bhur, Nola, and Maria Grafström. 2007. “The making of meaning in the media.” In Managing Corporate Social Responsibility in Action. Talking, Doing and Measuring, edited by Frank den Hond, Frank G. A. de Bakker, and Peter Neergard, 15-31. Aldershot: Ashgate. Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan. 1988. “Adverbial stance types in English.” Discourse Processes 11 (1): 1-34. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. Bondi, Marina. 2016. “The future in reports. Prediction, commitment and legitimization in CSR.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (1): 57-81. —. in press. CSR reports in English and in Italian. Focus on generic structure and importance markers. In LSP Research and Translation across Languages and Cultures, edited by Giuliana Elena Garzone, Dermot Heaney, and Giorgia Riboni. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bowen, Howard R. 1953. Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. New York: Harper and Brothers. Catenaccio, Paola. 2012. Understanding CSR Discourse. Insights from Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. Milano: Arcipelago. Catenaccio, Paola. 2013. “The discursive encoding of changing business values in CSR reports: a corpus-based investigation.” In The Three Waves of Globalization, edited by Franca Poppi and Winnie Cheng, 5676. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. —. 2014. “The evolution of business discourse and the emergence of the Corporate Social Responsibility paradigm: An investigation of CSR

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reports.” In Evolution in Genre. Emergence, Variation, Multimodality, edited by Paola Evangelisti Allori, John Bateman, Vijay J. Bhatia, 1944. Bern: Peter Lang. Catenaccio, Paola, and Chiara Degano. 2011. “Corporate Social Responsibility as a key to the representation of corporate identity. The case of Novartis.” In Discourse and Identity in the Profession. Legal, Corporate and Institutional Citizenship, edited by Vijay K. Bhatia and Paola Evangelisti Allori, 79-102. Bern: Peter Lang. Chafe, Wallace. 1986. “Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing.” In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, edited by Wallace Chafe, and Johanna Nickols, 261-272. Norwood, New Jersey: Albex Publishing Corporation. Charles, Maggie. 2009. “Stance, interaction and the rhetorical patterns of restrictive adverbs: discourse roles of only, just, simply and merely.” In Academic Writing. At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse, edited by Maggie Charles, Susan Hunston, and Diane Pecorari, 152-169. London: Continuum. Ellerup Nielsen, Anne, and Christa Thomsen. 2007. “Reporting CSR. What and how to say it?”. Corporate Communications: An International Journal 12 (1): 25-40. Everaert, Patricia, Lies Bouten, Luc Van Liedekerke, Lieven De Moor, and Johan Rene Christiaens. 2009. “Discovering patterns in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting: a transparent framework based on the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines”. Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 09/557. Available at http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_09_557.pdf (accessed 15th May 2016). Fuoli, Matteo. 2012. “Assessing Social Responsibility: a quantitative analysis of Appraisal in BP’s and IKEA’s Social Report.” Discourse and Communication 6 (1): 55-81. Haak, Patrick, Dennis Schoeneborn, and Christopher Wickert. 2012. “Talking the talk, moral entrapment, creeping commitment? Exploring narrative dynamics in Corporate Responsibility Standardization.” Organization Studies 33 (5-6): 815-845. Hoye, Leo. 1997. Adverbs and Modality in English. London: Longman. Hunston, Susan. 2005. “Conflict and consensus. Construing opposition in applied linguistics.” In Strategies in Academic Discourse, edited by Elena Tognini Bonelli, and Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciottoli, 1-15. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Malavasi, Donatella. 2011. “ 'Doing well by doing good': a comparative analysis of Nokia’s and Ericsson’s Corporate Social Responsibility

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Reports.” In Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise. Genres and Trends, edited by Giuliana Garzone, and Maurizio Gotti, 193-212. Bern: Peter Lang. Milne, Markus J., Kate Kearins, and Sara Walton. 2006. “Creating adventures in Wonderland: the journey metaphor and environmental sustainability.” Organization 13 (6): 801-839. Schultz, Friederike, and Stefan Wehmeier. 2010. “Institutionalization of Corporate Social Responsibility within corporate communications. Combining institutional, sensemaking and communication perspectives.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 15 (1): 9-29. Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, and Karin Aijmer. 2007. The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty. A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sobczak, André, and Ligia Coelho Martins. 2010. “The impact and interplay of national and global CSR discourses: insights from France and Brazil.” Corporate Governance 10 (4): 445-455. Tengblad, Stefan, and Claes Ohlsson. 2009. “The framing of Corporate Social Responsibility and the globalization of national business systems: a longitudinal case study.” Journal of Business Ethics 93 (4): 653-669. WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development). 2001. The Business Case for Sustainable Development. Geneva: WBCSD Publications. Available at http://www.wbcsd.org/pages/edocument/ edocumentdetails.aspx?id=197&nosearchcontextkey=true (accessed 15th May 2016). Welford, Robert. 2002. “Globalization, Corporate Social Responsibility and human rights.” Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 9 (1): 1-7. White, Peter R. 2003. “Beyond modality and hedging. A dialogic view of the language of intersubjective stance.” Text 23 (3): 259-284. Winter, Eugene. 1994. “Clause relations as information structure: two basic text structures in English.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis, edited by Malcom Coulthard, 46-68. London: Routledge. Zeitz, Gerald, Vikas Mittal, and Brian McAulay. 1999. “Distinguishing adoption and entrenchment of management practices: a framework for analysis.” Organization Studies 20 (5): 741-746.

CHAPTER SIX CONVEYING TRUST IN A GLOBALIZED ERA FRANCA POPPI UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA

1. Introduction In present times much of a company’s success depends on the relevant stakeholders’ perception of their reputation and image. It is therefore particularly important for a company to disseminate suitable information about itself and use public-relations tools as effectively as possible. More particularly, the belief that a company can “do well by doing good” has been gaining momentum recently, in response to rising public awareness of the social impact of a company’s performance. This has led an increasing number of enterprises to devote greater care and attention to the drafting of their Corporate Social Responsibility reports (CSR), which have thus become important communication instruments. However, the impact of globalization, which has brought along an increase in international business exchanges and the subsequent need to address a variety of audiences, has also given rise to important and controversial issues for what concerns corporate communication in general. On the one hand, companies are faced with the challenge to reach out to a multicultural audience, but on the other hand, in order to distinguish themselves from their competitors, they cannot but emphasize some traits of their national culture and identity, in an attempt to project a trustworthy and reliable image. This is in line with Hofstede’s principle: ‘Think locally, act globally’ (1998). In fact, several studies (Han and Terpstra 1988; Ettenson 1993; Jaffe and Nebenzahl 2006) have demonstrated that stakeholders often refer to the ‘country-of-origin’ image as a tool to evaluate companies and their services/products. The present study focuses on the English version of the CSR reports published on the websites of two airlines with different cultural backgrounds: Delta (USA) and JAL (Japan). The analysis aims at finding

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out whether or not, in our present globalized era, the two selected airlines still refer to the typical values of their respective countries to create a positive halo (Tversky and Simonson 1993) that may influence their stakeholders’ attitudes. The research is based on small-scale electronic corpora, which comprise the CSR reports published on the airlines’ corporate websites between 2011 and 2013. The cross-cultural analysis will mainly rely on metadiscourse and corpus linguistics tools in search for patterns of variation. In the first place, Hofstede’s taxonomies for analysing culture have been referred to. Then, Hyland’s categorization of metadiscourse (1998) has been used to investigate the corpora in terms of discursive features.

2. Analysing corporate communication: CSR reporting Corporate communication is an essential tool for pursuing the strategic objectives of international companies, as it contributes to building a positive image of the organization among all groups of stakeholders and it helps in building up a reputation capital based on trust. Consequently, Breeze (2013, 182) remarks that corporate communication - and in particular reports and websites - have become overwhelmingly promotional in tone, thus being closely related to Aristotele’s concept of ‘rhetoric’ and having the major function of strengthening the adherence of an audience to the ideas that are presented. As far as CSR reports are concerned, this vision is supported also by Degano (2010), who defines them as an interplay of informative and promotional discourse, in which the firm has to convince the stakeholders of its ‘goodness’. In recent years, the social expectations of immediate stakeholders, NGOs, activists, media, communities, governments and other institutional forces have made companies more and more conscious of the need to report publicly on various aspects of their social and environmental performance, thus giving rise to a new genre of corporate reporting (Owen and O’Dwyer 2008). The issue first achieved real prominence in the 1970s because of the debate concerning the role of the corporation in society, at a time of rising social expectations and an emerging environmental awareness. Nevertheless, as the 1980s progressed, macro-economic factors, such as rising unemployment and a consequent slow-down in economic growth, focused the attention on economic priorities rather than on social and environmental performance. In the 1990s non-financial reports reappeared on the scene, probably to a large extent as a response to several environmental catastrophes. Consequent to the rising public awareness of the potentially negative impact of corporate economic activity on the

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overall quality of life, the reports were dominated by environmental concerns. At the end of the 1990s a shift towards a more socially rounded reporting occurred. Nowadays, within the broader frame of corporate communication, Dixon et al. (2005) have recognized that CSR reporting is increasingly becoming an important strategic instrument for companies, also because it serves three distinct objectives. First, companies need to react to stakeholder pressures for greater transparency, both by complying with the increasing number of regulations and by responding to pressure groups that require greater accountability from firms. Second, enterprises are experiencing an increasing business risk from environmental issues, which forces them to set up clear processes and procedures to manage them. Also KPMG (2013)1 shows that in the largest companies worldwide, reports are considered drivers of performance and innovation, for example by shifting the company towards renewable energy and sustainable products. Third, it enhances the reputation internally and externally. Companies may wish to use non-financial reporting in order to improve their image, or gain benefits not only by impacting on the public’s perception but also by affecting employee pride and motivation, and the recruitment and retaining of new employees.

3. Hofstede’s cultural model Among the various models which have been devised to map cultural differences, Hofstede’s impressive study is still seen by many scholars as one of the most useful ones. He describes cultural differences between nations by using a series of bipolar dimensions. Every single nation under analysis is rated on each of these dimensions on a scale from 1 to 100 and the scores assigned allow for predictions to be made on the way their societies operate (1997, 89). x Power distance (PD) is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.

1

KPMG [the name "KPMG" was chosen when KMG (Klynveld Main Goerdeler) merged with Peat Marwick] is one of the largest professional service companies in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ (http:// www.kpmg.com/it/it/pagine/default.aspx). Web source: PDF document “The KPMG Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting” 2013.

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x Individualism (IND) vs. Collectivism (COLL) refers to the degree to which individuals are supposed to look after themselves or remain integrated in groups. x Masculinity (MAS) vs. Femininity (FEM). Masculine-oriented cultures pursue goals such as assertiveness, financial success and heroism, whereas feminine-oriented ones value life quality and interpersonal relationships. x Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI) refers to the extent to which a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. x Long-Term (LTO) vs. Short-Term Orientation represents the extent to which a culture programs its members to accept delayed gratification of their material, social, and emotional needs (Hofstede and Hofstede 2005). x Indulgence (INDUL) versus Restraint. Indulgent societies allow relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun. Restrained ones control gratification of needs and regulate it by means of strict social norms (Hofstede 2011).2 Since Hofstede’s model of cultural dimensions assumes a high degree of cultural homogeneity within a country, it has not escaped criticism (Tung 2008).3 However, despite this criticism, Iles and Zhang (2013, 30) have confirmed that Hofstede’s work has had an enormous impact on the field, because: (i) by adopting nation/state culture as the basic unit of analysis, he succeeded in narrowing down the concept of culture into more concise and measurable components; 2

Minkov's World Values Survey data analysis of 93 representative samples of national populations finally led Hofstede to identify a sixth and last dimension: indulgence versus restraint. 3 The most recurring criticism is that the IBM research was conducted many years ago and that it may no longer be able to provide an up to date view of the current situation. Moreover, it was restricted to the data collected within a single company, whose members all shared a common corporate culture which distinguished them from the wider population. Furthermore, some scholars (Gerhart and Fang 2005) argue that, even if there are differences within and across countries which should not be underestimated or ignored, the actual impact of national cultural differences on the practices of organizations should be reconsidered also in relation to the role played by organizational culture.

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(ii) he established culture values as a key impact on organizational behaviour; (iii) his theory enhanced the awareness of cultural variations; (iv) his culture paradigm inspired other scholars and practitioners in large-case studies. In fact, Hofstede’s categories have been used by several scholars to investigate the communication styles adopted by different countries (Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey 1988; Salvi 2002, 2011; De Moji 2014). The decision to adopt Hofstede’s taxonomies in the present study is closely connected with the relevance of ‘nationality’ in the airline industry, which is definitely exceptional in global business. Despite recent mergers and take-overs (such as the consolidation of Air France and KLM in 2004 or of British Airways and Iberia in 2010), the ownership and control rules which still dominate the aviation industry make them in any case much less common than those in a “normal” industry.4 The association of an airline with a ‘nationality’ is a practice which stems from the traditional state ownership of airlines and this has remained unchanged throughout the modern history of air transport. As a result, until the privatization of British Airways in 1986, Swiss Air was the only flag carrier with no state ownership in the European area. Furthermore, despite the fact that nowadays most entirely state-owned carriers have been replaced by private ones, many governments continue to have a significant amount of shares in their national airlines, thus being apparently committed to keeping a ‘national carrier’ (Borestein and Rose 2014, 99).

4. Rhetorical effects and metadiscourse In discussing corporate rhetoric, Hyland refers back to the Aristotelian categories of rhetoric, which include logos (appeals to rationality), ethos (appeals to credibility) and pathos (appeals to affect). In this respect, he stresses the importance of metadiscourse in engaging the audience, guiding their understanding of the information presented, but above all accomplishing persuasive objectives (Hyland 1998, 233). Rational appeals or logos have the primary objective of leading the audience to accept an argument. This is accomplished by defining problems, 4

Apart from Australia, Chile and New Zealand, the vast majority of states still limit foreign ownership of domestic airlines. An example is provided by the US, which not only limits foreign ownership to 25 per cent of the shares, but also requires two-thirds of the members of the board of directors to be US nationals.

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supporting claims, validating premises and stating conclusions, but most of all through logical connectives. Furthermore, corporate rhetoric also aims at fostering the writer’s credibility. Credibility appeals or ethos are related to the creation of a confident, decisive and commanding image which instils trust in the stakeholders. In fact, companies need to attain credibility if they want to persuade their audience, as the perceived authority and trustworthiness of the speaker are critical elements of an effective communication. The aspects of metadiscourse which contribute most to the credibility appeals are hedges, emphatics, relational markers and attributors, all providing an insight into the writer’s conviction in his/her views. “Emphatics” (such as in fact, definitely, and it is clear) indicate the writer’s certainty in a message, whereas “hedges” (such as it is possible, might, and perhaps) mitigate the writer’s full commitment to statements. “Attributors” such as according to or X says draw on external sources to underline the authority of the writer’s assertions. Finally, relational markers are usually expressed by the use of the personal pronouns I and we with the aim of strengthening the writer’s presence in the text. In addition to the need to present a rational argument and foster credibility, affective appeals or pathos are used to involve the readers, address them, empathize with their values and directly invite them to respond. The categories of metadiscourse that realize affective appeals are relational markers and attitude markers.

5. Objectives, data and materials The primary objective of this exploratory work is to ascertain whether or not some of the major global players within the airline industry draw upon their cultural identity when communicating to a variety of audiences worldwide, trying to convince them to choose their services. This study is part of a larger project for which a small-scale corpus of 541,839 tokens was collected. It includes the CSR reports published between 2011 and 2013 by British Airways (56,783), Delta (64,650), Etihad (26,500), JAL (31,292), Korean Air (88,742), LATAM (27,832), Lufthansa (144,931) and SAS (101,109). Only the CSR reports issued as PDF documents were taken into consideration for two main reasons. Firstly, PDF documents are usually longer, thus providing a larger quantity of data for empirical analysis. Secondly, they are a ‘frozen’ format and therefore less volatile and subject to change.

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The airlines taken into examination were selected as representatives of different cultures among the world’s top 50 airlines by seats5, in order to focus the attention on those airlines that are operating in a wider, more global context or at least addressing a greater variety of audiences. In this respect, a major constraint in the selection was posed by the format of the CSR reports because most of the airlines have not published the PDF version of their disclosures for the most recent years. For this reason, since in the Arabian region no company included in the CAPA (Centre for Aviation) list presented the PDF version of its CSR reports, Etihad was chosen as the representative for this area. In fact, the United Emirates’ airline was rated the Middle East’s 2014 top airline by Skytrax6, a United Kingdom-based consultancy which runs an airline and airport review and ranking site. Low-cost airlines have been excluded from this selection mainly because they are less imbued with the idea of “nationality” than full service network carriers7, and also because their operations are usually restricted to a more limited area. The African region was not taken into consideration because “aviation on the continent is however beset by a range of impediments to growth”.8 The great differences in the number of tokens of the sub-corpora depend on the quantity of material which was accessible on the individual websites, according to the criteria previously described. Therefore it should be noted that a lower token number does not imply that the airline publishes less about CSR, since it might have produced CSR disclosures in the html format for some of the years within the time span under consideration. The present study focuses on the comparison between two airlines characterized by greatly different cultural backgrounds: Delta and JAL. In the first place, the two countries where the airlines are headquartered were investigated on the basis of Hofstede’s taxonomies for the analysis of culture, with a view to establishing their most relevant features. Then, Hyland’s categorization of metadiscourse was used to investigate convergences and divergences which the corpora exhibit in terms of discursive features, 5

Web source: CAPA, 2013. Established for over 25 years, CAPA delivers market analyses and data that support strategic decision-making at many of the world’s most recognized organizations. 6 http://www.worldairlineawards.com/Awards_2014/Airline2014_top20.html. 7 As a matter of fact, the most important full service network carriers were also the former national carriers, at least in the European Union (German Aerospace Center 2008, 5). 8 http://centreforaviation.com/about-capa/updates/capa-world-aviation-yearbook2013-country-airlinedata-in-a-comprehensive-1000-page-report-109509.

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with particular reference being made to credibility appeals. This part of the analysis was carried out with the support of AntConc 3.4.3. (2014), free software for linguistic analysis developed by Laurence Anthony from Waseda University. Finally, the findings from the analysis of the corpora were crossreferenced with the data from Hofstede’s studies.

6. The analysis As already stated, the first step of the analysis entailed applying Hofstede’s bipolar dimensions to the investigation of the two countries where the airlines are headquartered. The acronyms in the first line of the following table indicate the dimensions described in paragraph 3.

6.1 Hofstede’s bipolar dimensions Country Japan USA

PD 54 40

IND 46 91

MAS 95 62

UAI 92 46

LTO 88 26

INDUL 42 68

Table 6-1. The ratings of the two countries on the basis of Hofstede’s bipolar dimensions. On the grounds of what has been already discussed, it is clear that the above data should be considered as providing general indications rather than prescriptive information. However, also with the necessary provisos, it seems possible to pinpoint the main features which characterize each country.

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Japan Society: x is prepared to accept both equality and inequality in the distribution of power; x attaches a slightly higher degree of importance to the relationship between individuals and the group than to individualism; x wholeheartedly values financial success and assertiveness over life quality and interpersonal relationships; x feels remarkably uncomfortable in unstructured situations and has little tolerance for deviance from the norm; x willingly accepts delayed gratification of material, social and emotional needs; x accepts that gratification of needs may be regulated by means of strict social norms.

USA Society: x is strongly in favour of social equality; x people´s self-image is defined in terms of ‘I’; x pursues financial success and assertiveness; x feels comfortable also in unstructured situations and is prepared to accept innovations; x prefers to maintain time-honoured traditions and norms while viewing societal change with suspicion; x expects results to be routinely and scrupulously checked and is not prepared to accept delayed gratification of material, social and emotional needs; x allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires.

Table 6-2. The main distinguishing features of Japan and the USA.

6.2. Attributors As far as credibility appeals are concerned, metadiscourse involves linguistic elements which help realize ethos by projecting the company into the written text to present a competent, trustworthy, authoritative, and honest persona (Hyland 1998, 240). Among the aspects of metadiscourse which contribute most to the credibility appeals, attributors are an essential part of the corporate’s ethos. According to Degano (2010), the presentation that corporations give of themselves usually raises scepticism on the part of the reader, thus inducing them to report external points of view that are meant to reinforce the strength of their statements. These points of view are generally introduced by attributors, such as according to or X says (Hyland 1998). A quantitative investigation of the presence of according to for each sub-corpus provided the results summarized in the following table.

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According to

Delta 0,079

117 JAL -

Table 6-3. Frequency of according to. As shown by the data above, attributors are not very common in the analysed corpora. In fact, there are no occurrences in the JAL corpus and only a few in the Delta corpus. Moreover, by looking at the concordances of according to in detail, it emerges that it is used to draw on external sources and endorse the company’s performance only on very few occasions: (1) According to ATAG’s10 Aviation: Benefits beyond borders report, aviation provides 56.6 million jobs worldwide and $2.2 trillion of global GDP. If aviation were a country, it would be the 19th largest economy in the world. Air transport carries around 35% of world trade by value and only 0.5% by volume. (Delta)

In the above example the attribution to sources works with positive evaluation to reinforce the endorsement of the company’s performance. It is by far more common to find according to used with the meaning of “in a manner corresponding or conforming to”11, as a synonym for in compliance with or in accordance with. (2) In an effort towards continuous improvement, Delta contracts with certified professional environmental auditors to review its station compliance programs with a focus on local requirements according to all state, city, county and district regulations that impact the airline’s operations. (Delta)

For this reason, it was considered potentially interesting to compare the patterns of occurrences of a sample of words related to the semantic field of regulations and initiatives, against which airlines benchmark their economic, social and environmental performance. The list of the items to be analysed contrastively was compiled by looking at frequency wordlists of the general corpus, which was investigated so as to retrieve the ten most repeated items related to international and institutional initiatives. Also 9

In order to be able to compare the results, all the rough figures were normalized per thousand words (ptw). 10 Air Transport Action Group. 11 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/according.

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ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) has been included, because it is a specialized agency of the United Nations which codifies the principles and standards for international air transport to operate efficiently and securely in every region of the world.12 The table below provides an overview of the frequency data for the selected items. .

audit* certificat* code compliance G3/G4 GRI guideline* ICAO regulation* standards Total

Delta 0,59 0,49 1,31 0,06 0,20 0,25 0,28 0,57 0,46 4,22

JAL 1,73 0,13 0,10 0,26 0,06 0,03 0,35 2,65

Table 6-4. Frequency of markers of attribution. This suggests that another strategy used by airlines in order to promote their ‘legitimacy to operate’ and reduce stakeholders’ scepticism consists in highlighting their adherence to international initiatives, standards and codes. Delta scores much higher than JAL in this respect. This may sound surprising since Japan has less tolerance for uncertainty (UAI) than the USA and one would have therefore expected Japan to be more concerned with the observance of external regulations. However, it should not be forgotten that while Japanese society accepts that companies will only achieve the expected results in the long run (high LTO), in the USA society expects results to be routinely and scrupulously checked. By looking at the concordances of two of the above words, i.e. guidelines and compliance, it is possible to notice another clear difference between the two airlines: (3) We will fulfill our responsibilities as a corporate citizen not only through activities that build the basis of our company, such as flight safety, which constitutes the Group's foundation, as well as compliance and corporate governance, but also through activities that only the JAL Group can perform. (JAL)

12

http://www.icao.int/about-icao/Pages/default.aspx.

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(4) We have established JAL Philosophy as conduct guidelines of our company and encourage employees to put them to practice. The general affairs department promotes the maintenance of the internal controls system. The general affairs department oversees operations related to compliance and monitors the operations situation and maintenance of related official regulations. We have set up an inspection system to ensure the employees execute their duties in compliance with relevant laws and regulations. (JAL) (5) The Board of Directors has established corporate governance standards by adopting Corporate Governance Guidelines as a key set of rules to supplement the Companies Act, related laws and regulations, and our own Articles of Incorporation.(JAL) (6) In addition, these training modules make employees aware of where they can go for help should they be concerned about a potential violation of the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct or the company’s compliance obligations. Ninety-four percent of Delta’s salaried employees have completed Delta’ Ethics and Compliance course since 2010. Employees can anonymously report unsafe, illegal or unethical activity through Delta’s Safety, Ethics & Compliance Hotline. (Delta)

While JAL has established an inspection system to ensure that employees execute their duties in compliance with relevant laws and regulations, ninety-four percent of Delta’s salaried employees have completed Delta Ethics and Compliance course since 2010. Employees can therefore anonymously report unsafe, illegal or unethical activity through Delta’s Safety, Ethics & Compliance Hotline. In other words, while JAL has felt the need to set up an inspection system to invigilate on its employees’ behaviour, Delta, after providing training courses on compliance, leaves its workers free to autonomously report on unsafe, illegal or unethical activities. This becomes more easily understandable if we bear in mind that Japan is a borderline hierarchical society and Japanese are always conscious of their hierarchical position in any social setting and of the need to act accordingly. Therefore the people who are higher up in rank have the responsibility of making sure that their subordinates carry out their duties. On the contrary, in the USA, as a consequence of the lower PD, individuals are granted much more freedom to autonomously choose their own preferred course of action. In addition, by looking at the examples, there is another difference which is worth noticing. Rather than describing and commenting on the

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measures and actions already implemented as part of a consolidated policy, as is the case with Delta (7) Formal domestic and international union agreements also address safety and health at a broad level to ensure compliance with governmental regulations and standards. Health and safety topics include employee safety committees; participation of employees in health and safety inspections, audits, and accident investigations; and training and education. (Delta)

in the reports of JAL we can perceive a thrust toward a future course of action which has still to be implemented. This is confirmed, for instance, by the frequent use of will (a frequency of 1.31 ptw in the JAL corpus vs a frequency of 0.03 in the Delta corpus): (8) We take these matters seriously and will thoroughly investigate these incidents, rigidly enforce preventive measures, and reinforce measures to ensure flight safety so that customers can rely on us and fly with peace of mind. JAL recognizes that ensuring safety in flight operations is the basis of the existence of the JAL Group and our social responsibility. As a leading company in safety in the transportation sector, JAL will maintain the highest standards of safety. (JAL)

Looking at the content of the sub-corpus in more detail, we learn that for a year the company has been wading through troubled waters and is now feeling the need to prove its ability to keep its promises to its stakeholders: (9) The JAL Group is now similar to a first-year company with a long way to go. We can never let down our guard, even when business results are positive, and we will do our best to further improve business performance by ensuring flight safety and providing unparalleled services. We must never forget our remorse and regret for past failures or our gratitude to all who have helped bring us to this point.

6.3 Emphatics When external attributions are not employed, a company has to build its ethos through an appropriate presentation of the self. One way this can be accomplished is through the use of emphatics, which are widely used to demonstrate a decisive and commanding image and instil confidence and trust in the stakeholders. In the present analysis, alongside the typical terms mentioned by Hyland (1998), it was decided to include also will, but

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only when used in its dynamic meaning (Palmer 1979) expressing the company’s willingness to undertake a certain course of action. definitely clearly firmly believe strongly will Total

Delta 0.030 0.015 0.770 0.815

JAL 0.22 0.15 0.28 0.16 3.48 4.29

Table 6-5. Frequency of emphatics. For what concerns the use of emphatics, JAL scores 5 times as high as Delta. This is probably due to the peculiar situation the company has been going through, but may also be considered in line with the tendency of Japanese society to value assertiveness (high MAS, almost twice as high as the MAS index of the USA). (10) Policies should be a reflection of what Delta is as a company and clearly tie back to the Rules of the Road and the Flight Plan. (Delta) (11) We plan to clearly distinguish ourselves from our competitors in the three areas of Enhancement of the JAL Brand, Route Network, Products and Services and Cost Competitiveness under the Medium Term Management Plan, toward our goal of becoming the customers' most preferred airline by providing unparalleled services to continuously deliver a fresh and enjoyable travel experience for customers. (JAL) (12) While JAL's resurgence was nothing short of a miracle, I came away from reading this report with the impression that JAL had clearly recovered integrity in its management. (JAL) (13) The JAL Group wants to pass on a promising future to the next generation and therefore strongly hopes that children will have dreams to pursue for the future. (JAL)

It is quite common to find the modal auxiliary verb co-occurring with first person personal pronouns (frequency 1.31 ptw), to express the writer’s willingness to undertake a certain course of action. This form of personal attribution represents “an overt acceptance of personal

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responsibility and is the most explicit attempt to build a personal ethos of competence and authority” (Hyland 1998: 41). (14) Each and every employee who works for the JAL Group must be thoroughly committed to safety, meticulously prepared, and willing to take on challenges to ensure safety. I will continue to do everything I can to ensure this becomes deeply rooted as our corporate culture. (JAL) (15) We can never let down our guard, even when business results are positive, and we will do our best to further improve business performance by ensuring flight safety and providing unparalleled services. (JAL)

6.4 Hedges Hedges can serve the purpose of gaining an ethos of credibility by means of frank admission and rhetorical honesty. generally may might perhaps should would Total

Delta 0.09 0.20 0.03 0.01 0.17 0.23 0.73

JAL 0.22 1.02 0.22 0.06 0.25 0.67 2.44

Table 6-6. Frequency of hedges. There are more hedges in the JAL corpus than in the Delta one. Obviously this does not mean that the company is tentative in the implementation of the suggested actions/measures. Rather, the use of hedges adds to the idea of frank honesty. (16) While this may have made JAL appear to have been a victim of circumstances, private companies cannot use such an excuse. (JAL) (17) The JAL Group promotes CSR activities so that we may pass on a better society to future generations. (JAL) (18) The JAL Group is embarking on a new journey as a private company through the understanding and cooperation of many people. We will press forward with optimism and positivity through joint efforts, while never

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forgetting our gratitude to society, so that we may become the world's most preferred airline group by customers. (JAL)

Moreover, the higher frequency of hedges in the JAL corpus could also be correlated with high UAI. In fact, while will is mostly used when it is necessary to emphasize an idea of willingness (see Paragraph 5.3), whenever the need occurs to refer to a future prediction, the mitigated, more tentative would is employed, in line with Japan’s high UAI index. (19) Second, although I would not say this about all JAL employees, many of them had never given serious consideration to the customer first concept. They were only concerned with doing the job they had been assigned and made no additional efforts, even when doing so would have been of service to customers. Employees seemed somewhat arrogant in their belief that JAL could not fail, even at this level of work quality. (JAL) (20) Under the amended rule, actuarial gains and losses and past service costs that are yet to be recognized in profit or loss would be recognized within the net asset section, after adjusting for tax effects, and the deficit or surplus would be recognized as a liability or asset without any adjustments. (JAL)

6.5 Relational markers: first person pronouns An interesting feature of the attempt to build a personal ethos is the extensive use of first-person pronouns: 109 in the Delta corpus out of a total of 203 occurrences of all personal pronouns and 453 in the JAL corpus out of a total of 515 occurrences of all personal pronouns. we I Total

Delta 1.17 0.51 1.68

JAL 11.28 3.19 14.47

Table 6-7. Frequency of first-person pronouns. A remarkable feature of these data is the significant quantitative difference in the frequency of the pronoun we across the different subcorpora, with JAL scoring very high, as opposed to Delta. The use of we in JAL contributes to restoring some humanity to a faceless corporation and makes it easier for stockholders to identify with its ideals and objectives.

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Chapter Six (21) Moreover, we were allowed to continue our operations as we proceeded along the path to rehabilitation. Today, as we continue to advance step by step as the reborn JAL, we are entirely indebted to the understanding, cooperation and support of a great number of stakeholders, to whom I once again express my sincere gratitude. (JAL)

At times we can also find we followed by must to provide the idea of a kind of self-imposed duty. (22) To optimize this business opportunity, we realize we must continuously review our Medium Term Management Plan, enforce new measures to survive future competition, and strengthen cooperation with our alliance partners. Differentiation to Outlast the Competition. (JAL) (23) Our work is not simply about handling the flights assigned to us; it's also about making a united effort through collaboration, cooperation, support and seamlessly passing along responsibilities from one colleague to another. Consequently, we must constantly be talking and confirming with each other. (JAL, emphasis added)

The company is willing to take on responsibility for the implementation of measures which will, in the future, yield positive results. We also have this idea of the company as a group (slight COLL) which has to improve on its cohesion and common efforts towards the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction, as in (21). By looking at the Delta corpus, it is possible to notice that the company is often mentioned by its proper name, as in the following examples: (24) Delta’s high value customers and members of the media were invited to Restaurant Eugene. (Delta) (25) Delta will be the sole airline among many large companies discussing ways we can find affordable energy while being mindful of our impact on the planet. (Delta)

In addition to the company’s names, other more impersonal forms of self-mentions are used, such as the company, the Group, the Board of Directors. Here is an example: (26) Delta has separated the role of Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer because the Board believes this structure strengthens independence and enables the CEO to focus on the management of Delta’s business. (Delta)

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6.6 Address pronouns In order to convey an idea of trust, it is also important to create a dialogue and to involve the audiences by directly addressing them. The second-person pronoun you and its relative possessive your introduce an element of pathos as they make the reader feel directly involved by the company.13 Quantitative results are reported in Table 6-8. you your Total

Delta 0.09 0.02 0.11

JAL 0.29 0.29 0.58

Table 6-8. Frequency of you. What seems to emerge from the quantitative analysis is that JAL scores higher than Delta in directly addressing readers. Furthermore, a closer qualitative scrutiny has also shown some differences in the actual “type” of readership being addressed. In fact, Delta seems to address a general audience, as inferred from the following sentences: (27) Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you on your next Delta flight. (Delta) (28) Along with this report, you can find more information about our commitment. (Delta)

In the above sentences the information conveyed is quite general, and the tone is neutral and detached. On the other side, JAL shows a higher degree of emotional involvement, signalled by evaluative lexis, expressions of beliefs, emphatics and argumentative connectives, as in the excerpts reported below: (29) Thank you very much for sharing your valuable thoughts. (JAL)

13

In the case of JAL, however, the total number of instances of you also include interviews with members from the top management, whereby the personal pronoun mostly referred to the interviewees. For this reason, each wordlist was searched and filtered manually, in order to select only those instances of you and your that actually address the readership.

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Once again this might be linked to the particular situation of JAL, but on the other hand it is also in line with the country’s COLL index, which makes it strive for the harmony of society as a whole.

7. Discussion of findings Delta scores higher than JAL in the use of attributors. This can be interpreted as a consequence of the tendency of American society to routinely and scrupulously check results (low LTO). At the same time, the results also show that JAL tends to keep a much firmer grasp on its employees, to ensure that they follow the recommended course of action (high PD), while Delta leaves its employees more freedom in their chosen course of actions. On the other hand, JAL uses many more emphatics than Delta, which may be considered to be in line with the tendency of Japanese society to value assertiveness (high MAS, almost twice as high as the MAS index of the USA). In the JAL corpus there are also more hedges. This could correlate with the country’s high UAI, which leads to the mitigation of epistemic predictions. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that in the case of JAL, probably on the grounds of its particular situation, the need to maintain a delicate equilibrium between confidence and candour is clearly reflected in the balance between emphatics and hedges. The degree of commitment or assurance that the company invests in its statements provides the readers with an image of authority (by means of emphatics) and sincerity (hedges). Finally, JAL also relies more heavily than Delta on first person pronouns and address pronouns. This is in line with the company’s willingness to take on responsibility for the actions and initiatives that will be undertaken (high PD and MAS). Moreover, the frequent use of we contributes to restoring some humanity to a faceless corporation and makes it easier for stockholders to identify with its ideals and objectives. The company is seen as a group (COLL) which should strive to improve its undertakings (see reference to bad employees’ behaviour in example (17)). This process will take place under the guidance of those who occupy high-ranking positions (PD) with the ultimate aim of reaching a harmonious society (COLL), since the harmony of the group goes above the expression of individual opinions. In contrast, in the case of Delta, we can infer the idea of the company described as a group of independent individuals (high IND).

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8. Conclusions Several studies have been made on the effect of the country of origin. Schooler (1965) has been one of the first scholars to analyse and empirically demonstrate the existence of effects on consumers' behaviour due to the products' country of origin. After the introduction of the concept itself by Schooler, one of the first theoretical frameworks on the country of origin was proposed by Nagashima (1970), who defines it as “the picture, reputation, stereotype that businessmen and consumers attach to products of a specific country” (Nagashima 1970, 68). Banking on this, companies may try to reinforce their audiences’ favourable attitude and create a positive halo. In the past, when it came to booking their flights, many people often chose them on the basis of the airline operating them. For instance, many people used to favour Lufthansa on the grounds of its being the German national carrier and as such symbolically charged with the typical traits that everybody tends to associate with this country: high performance, robustness, quality, unfriendliness, trustworthiness (Viale 2012). Nowadays, however, most airlines have been privatized and have been involved in mergers and global alliances. This new context, therefore, requires different strategies for building and maintaining trust. The investigation of Delta’s and JAL’s CSR reports has unveiled a pattern of variations which can be interpreted in different ways. In the first place, in the case of JAL it is important to bear in mind the particular situation the company was going through at the time the corpora were compiled. However, it cannot be denied that some of the differences that have been outlined are actually related to differences in their cultural backgrounds. Delta draws on its American heritage by introducing itself as a company which consists of autonomous and independent individuals, devoted to routinely and scrupulously checking results. JAL seems to rely on its Japanese origins by clearly underlining its firm grasp on its employees, as well as its willingness to take on responsibility for a series of actions which have to be undertaken for the benefit of all its stakeholders. Moreover, it also stresses its willingness to strive for the harmony of society, which is the ultimate goal to reach, more important than the expression of individual opinions. In other words, we can conclude that global communication in the airline industry is still deeply influenced by values related to the carriers’ cultural identity, which, albeit only in part, seem to overshadow the need for cosmopolitanism and for reaching out to a global audience. This would confirm the hypothesis advanced by Garzone (2007, 320) that “there

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continues to exist a tension between the original cultures of the people who use English for transnational communication and their identity as global interactants, i.e. between the local and the global dimension”. However, because of the limited sample of the corpora under scrutiny here, there is still much need for future research both in the airline and in other industries, in order to obtain a more comprehensive view of the impact of globalization on intercultural communication and local cultures in business settings.

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CHAPTER SEVEN BUILDING TRUST THROUGH CORPORATE IDENTITY: AN ANALYSIS OF CSR REPORTS AND WEBPAGES DONATELLA MALAVASI UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA

1. Introduction With the emergence of a highly competitive global economy, communication has become the lifeblood of all organizations and a strategic tool to differentiate themselves from other players, to establish their position in the market, and to prosper and survive in the long term. In particular, it is through corporate communication that enterprises transmit information about their good qualities, managements’ veracity and trustworthiness, promote their corporate identity and image, and strive to increase their credibility. Corporate communication, which brings together “all communications that involve an organization as a corporate entity”, aims at projecting “one uniform and unambiguous image of what the organization is and stands for” (Christensen 2002, 162). In other words, the main goals of corporate communication are to nurture commitment among stakeholders, gain support of customers and employees, enhance investors’ confidence in corporate management, and build public consent for the organization and for its businesses (for a comprehensive treatment of corporate communication see van Riel 1995; Goodman 2000, 2001, 2006; Christensen 2002; van Riel and Fombrun 2007; Cornelissen 2014). Undeniably, nowadays the prominent position taken up by stakeholders and the increasing popularity of the stakeholder approach have resulted in a widespread realization that “the future of any one company depends critically on how it is viewed by key stakeholders such

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as shareholders and investors, customers and consumers, employees and members of the community in which the company resides” (Cornelissen 2004, 9; for more background on the Stakeholder Theory, see Freeman 1984, 1994; Cornelissen 2004, 2014; Friedman and Miles 2006; Freeman et al. 2010). Thus, organizations’ success in building or maintaining their reputation, and gaining their licence to operate has become ever more dependent upon the corporate ability to address multifarious constituencies, respond, at least verbally, to their expectations, and satisfy their requirements (Foster and Jonker 2005; Johansen and Nielsen 2011; Brennan et al. 2013). Accordingly, in the current context of growing public suspicion and distrust towards businesses, firms have been under mounting pressure from investors, governments, and many other stakeholders to commit to corporate social responsibility or CSR. That is, to integrate environmental, social and economic considerations into their business strategies and practices (for some definitions of CSR see Carroll 1999; Lantos 2001; Dahlsrud 2008). Therefore, in an attempt to boost their legitimacy and reputation, companies have sought to align their behaviour with the interests of stakeholders, and have consequently started to orient “their activities towards value creation in three dimensions – People (creation of well-being in and outside the organisation), Planet (achievement of ecological quality) and Profit (maximization of profit)” (Resche 2007, 14). The centrality acquired by CSR in the corporate and managerial world is well reflected in the growing research on this topic in a plethora of academic fields such as marketing and corporate marketing (Maignan and Ferrell 2001, 2004; Sen and Bhattacharya 2001; David et al. 2005; Porter and Kramer 2006; Podnar and Golob 2007), corporate communication and identity (David et al. 2005; Balmer et al. 2007; Nielsen and Thomsen 2007; Rolland and Bazzoni 2009; Johansen and Nielsen 2011; Salvi and Bowker 2013). Within this rapidly growing body of literature, however, rather scarce and fragmented attention has been paid to the communication aspects of CSR (Golob et al. 2013). Although they all accentuate the important role of communication for CSR, different perspectives have offered different insights into what CSR communication is. In management and marketing studies, for instance, CSR communication is understood, in an instrumental/functionalistic sense, as the use of “promotional techniques that are directed at informing about companies’ CSR and actively supporting CSR-based brand identity and reputation” (Golob et al. 2013, 178). In a constructivist approach, instead, CSR communication is about “how organisations interact and connect with stakeholders with the

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aim of negotiating and discussing CSR projects and activities as a process of achieving mutual understanding” (Golob et al. 2013, 179). Specifically, most of the studies conducted so far on CSR communication have mainly focused on the strategies, media and genres that companies use to ‘put their CSR into words’. In this strand of research, corporate websites have been analysed as the firms’ preferred conduit for disseminating information on their commitment to and implementation of CSR activities (Esrock and Leichty 1998; Snider et al. 2003; Pollach 2005; Branco and Rodrigues 2006; Bamford and Salvi 2007; Garzone, Poncini and Catenaccio 2007; Rolland and Bazzoni 2009). In addition to websites, also CSR reports (Idowu and Towler 2004; Kolk 2008; Williams 2008; Mahoney et al. 2013; Garzone 2014) have begun to gain ground as strategic communication tools. Whereas in the 1970s companies’ tendency was to include some CSR information in their annual reports, in the 2000s a separate document, labelled as CSR Report, Sustainability Report or Environmental Report, began to be issued. Generally speaking, however, CSR reporting, which remains a voluntary, and rather unrestricted form of disclosure, consists in “communicating the social and environmental effects of organizations’ economic actions to particular interest groups within society and to society at large” (Gray et al. 1996, 3, quoted in Snider et al. 2003, 176). Besides, a second stream of research, although relatively new and limited, has started to concentrate on the outcomes/consequences of CSR reporting, both in terms of consumers’ reactions to corporate CSR endeavours (see e.g. Creyer and Ross 1997; David et al. 2005), and effects on companies’ image, reputation, and identity (see Murray and Vogel 1997; David et al. 2005; Rolland and Bazzoni 2009; Zhang and Huxham 2009; Golob et al. 2013; Pérez 2015). Set against this theoretical background, this study aims first to examine how companies communicate their CSR and reveal their ethical identity in CSR reports and webpages, and then to reflect on the impacts that the construction of identity has on the building of stakeholders’ trust. Central to the study is the concept of corporate identity, which is commonly intended as the expression of organisational traits “revealed through behaviour, communications, as well as through symbolism to internal and external audiences” (van Riel and Balmer 1997, 341; see also Balmer 2001; Topalian 2003; Melewar and Karaosmanoglu 2006). Defined as a company’s self-presentation articulated in corporate communication, corporate identity is regarded here as an important strategic resource to ensure that a corporation is perceived as credible and reliable by its stakeholders (Melewar 2003).

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As such, the reporting of sustainable initiatives and practices is postulated to forge a ‘good and responsible’ corporate identity, thereby contributing towards developing constituencies’ trust. The existing literature widely recognizes trust as an attitude of a trustor (in this study, the stakeholder) toward a trustee (in this case, the firm) which is built on evaluations of the trustee’s trustworthiness (i.e. ability, integrity and benevolence following Mayer et al. 1995), or on the trustee’s ethical decisions and actions based upon ethical principles (Hosmer 1995). In other words, “a party’s willingness to trust is linked to the moral character and perceived trustworthiness of the trusted party” (Greenwood and Van Buren III 2010, 428). When viewed from a more linguistic perspective, then, trust is recognised as “a discursive practice continually constructed, negotiated, accomplished (as well as potentially jeopardised) among different participants (including researchers), with different interests and purposes, in different settings and critical sites” (Candlin and Crichton 2013, 9). Put simply, “whether we trust others has a lot to do with what they say (including what they do not say), and with how they say it, as well as with what we tell them and how we do that” (Pelsmaekers et al. 2014, 7). In this study, the construction of identity and trust is investigated in some verbal resources deployed by a sample of European leading companies in two different types of disclosures, CSR reports and websites. In particular, by assuming that CSR reports are more technical and specialized documents while webpages are rather ‘popularised’ disclosures targeted at a wider audience (Calsamiglia 2003; Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004), the analysis sets out to examine the variation in enterprises’ selfpromotion as ‘impeccable’, reliable corporate citizens in relation to the process of popularisation. Borrowing from the insights offered by Calsamiglia and van Dijk (2004, 370), popularisation is a vast class of various types of communicative events or genres that involve the transformation of specialized knowledge into ‘everyday’ or ‘lay’ knowledge […] This means that popularization discourse needs to be formulated in such a way that non-specialized readers are able to construct lay versions of specialized knowledge and integrate these with their existing knowledge.

The organisation of this chapter is arranged as follows. The research materials and methodology will be described in the next section, while the findings obtained will be presented and discussed in Sections 3 and 4.

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2. Materials and methods The paper draws its empirical information from two small electronic corpora, which collect respectively the CSR reports (approximately 270,000 tokens) and Web pages (circa 345,000 tokens) created by six prestigious European organisations: Nestlé, Unilever, Credit Suisse, BASF, BBVA and Eni. These companies were identified and chosen among the first eight best performers in the 6th CSR Online Awards 2014 (Figure 7-1), which were decided by Lundquist, an Italian strategic consultancy specialized in online corporate communications. The CSR Online awards research evaluated how the 100 largest companies in Europe use digital channels to communicate their corporate responsibility and engage with stakeholders (White Paper published by Lundquist at http://www.lundquist.it/wp-content/uploads/ 2014/06/White_Paper_6th_CSR_Online_Awards_2014.pdf). According to the ranking, three couples of companies each operating in a particular industrial sector or two interrelated ones were judged to be amongst the best performers in CSR online communication. As such, to make the sample more homogeneous and consistent, these groups were selected for the analysis, namely Credit Suisse and BBVA for Banking; Nestlé and Unilever for Food and Beverages; BASF for Chemicals and Eni for Oil and Gas. Because of its active engagement in the oil and gas sector, BASF was grouped together with Eni.

Figure 7-1. The first ten best performers in the 6th CSR Online Awards 2014. http://www.lundquist.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/White_Paper_6th_ CSR_Online_Awards_2014.pdf

In more detail, one corpus is constituted of the 2014 CSR reports published on the Web by the six companies listed above. All the reports are stand-alone CSR documents, with the only exception of BASF that

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created a unique, hybrid disclosure covering both sustainability-related and annual financial performance. The other corpus is made up of the CSR sections retrieved from the corporate websites of the six organisations considered. Only the sections of each website devoted to CSR, apart from news, press releases, articles and the full set of case studies, were included in the corpus, while the remaining pages of the website such as, for instance, companies’ presentations, financial data, and descriptions of products/services were not taken into account. Furthermore, only the verbal text of both reports and webpages was included in the collection of materials analysed, whereas tables, charts, images and other visual, multimodal aids were removed. In the first phase of the study, the two collections of texts were examined through a selection of words which are both quantitatively representative of the documents studied and functional to the enactment of corporate identity. With the support of corpus linguistic tools and the software suite WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott 2008), a sample of recurrent items were identified and analysed in their concordance (cf. Sinclair 2003, 2004) in an attempt to recognise some key discursive strategies adopted by companies to build an admirable and enduring identity. The reports and websites were examined in some recurrent combinations or clusters of linguistic resources exploited by firms to espouse their CSR creed, and eventually to inspire enthusiasm about themselves among stakeholders. In the second phase of the research, a more focused study was conducted of the top 15 most key keywords of sustainability webpages vs. reports. The analysis of keywords in their phraseology was carried out with the purpose of shedding some light on how the techniques developed by firms to demonstrate their accountability vary in the remediation of information from printed into digital materials or transposition of knowledge from specialised into popularised discourse.

3. Results 3.1. The construction of corporate identity: an examination of wordlists The creation of the two wordlists, which include the most frequent words occurring in the two sets of disclosures collected, is fundamental to a preliminary identification of the items on which companies base their discursive self-representation as responsible and trustworthy entities. By virtue of their hypothesised contribution to the formulation and construction of

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corporate identity, a sample of words was identified and selected among the most recurrent 50 words (see Table 7-1 for the list of words considered). CSR REPORTS 7,00 our 9,00 we 22,00 water 26,00 business 30,00 development 41,00 products 42,00 management 43,00 million 45,00 employees 46,00 environmental

Frequency 4199,00 3347,00 1052,00 873,00 718,00 555,00 552,00 545,00 529,00 522,00

% 1,55 1,24 0,39 0,32 0,27 0,21 0,20 0,20 0,20 0,19

CSR WEBPAGES 7,00 our 9,00 we 25,00 business 26,00 water 28,00 sustainable 33,00 people 38,00 products 46,00 development 50,00 environmental

Frequency 5976,00 4569,00 1118,00 1079,00 1065,00 921,00 846,00 677,00 642,00

% 1,73 1,32 0,32 0,31 0,31 0,27 0,24 0,20 0,19

Table 7-1. CSR reports and webpages: wordlists. An overall examination of the two wordlists above reveals that many words similarly occur in the two datasets created. Among these a particularly interesting feature is the repeated recourse to two forms of self-reference, the possessive adjective our and the first-person plural pronoun we. A closer inspection of the collocational patterns of our gives evidence of the important role it plays in the enactment of companies’ identity. In both CSR reports and webpages the combination of our and nouns, such as aim, ambition, challenge, commitment, effort, goal, objective, plan, strategy and target in (1) and (2), is a clear signal of organisations’ willingness to reassure stakeholders of their far-sighted approach, commitments to CSR and promising courses of action for the future. (1) Environment Energy and climate protection. As a company in an energy-intensive industry, we are committed to energy efficiency and

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As evidenced by the previous examples, the use of these constructions is emblematic of firms’ ‘paternalistic’ benevolence and intentions to do good to stakeholders. However, the reiterated insistence on enterprises’ plans and pledges for the future is counterbalanced by continuous references to corporate past performance in reports, and ongoing, presentday actions in webpages. Lexical formulations which revolve around our activities (3), business, growth (4), initiatives, operations, performance, programme, progress, and work similarly express companies’ success, expertise, competence and ability, thus offering a factual and ‘objective’ guarantee of their trustworthiness. (3) In our Private Banking & Wealth Management division, for example, we have launched targeted revenue growth initiatives after having focused on improving efficiency in recent years. As part of these initiatives, we intensified our activities in the emerging markets – including in Asia Pacific, which we regard as an important growth region. (Credit Suisse report) (4) Our growth has enabled us to help improve the lives of millions of people – through the products and services we provide and through employment, our supplier networks and the contribution we make to economies around the world. 4.1 million families earn a living because of Nestlé, including many rural smallholders in developing countries. (Nestlé website)

An analogous contribution to enterprises’ efforts to ingratiate stakeholders is brought in digital and hard-copy CSR disclosures by the qualification of their businesses, operations and decision-making processes as peoplecentred. Extensive passages in which our co-occurs with mentions of different groups of stakeholders reveal the firms’ orientation to the external world, and the relevance of their behaviour to individuals’ needs and desires (Salvi 2013). More precisely, clients, consumers, shareholders, employees, people, partners and stakeholders are depicted

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in the texts examined as the main beneficiaries of the range of initiatives and actions undertaken by companies as in (5) and (6). (5) Responsible customer management. The customer is at the heart of BBVA’s strategy. Our main aim is to get to know our customers so we can provide them with the products and services they need and establish a lasting and trusting relationship. The Customer Quality and Experience area works hard to maintain a dialogue with our customers to ensure they receive unbeatable service. (BBVA website) (6) Our goal is to become the most efficient energy user among food manufacturers. However, reducing our energy consumption has been more of a challenge. This is largely due to the evolution of our product portfolio over time towards more value-added products, which in turn allow our consumers to save energy. Since 2004, the total on-site energy consumption has increased by 5.5% while the total production volume increased by 61.2% over the same period, resulting in a decrease of 34.5% in the total energy consumption rate per tonne of product. (Nestlé report)

Similarly, the examination of we in its co-text shows its tendency to appear in repeated formulae pointing, on the one hand, to future plans or objectives, and on the other, to actions. The use of this form of selfreference reflects the dual approach adopted by companies in CSR reports and webpages to profile themselves as actors who are both ‘intellectually and actively’ engaged in sustainability. Prominence to the see-sawing between past and ongoing factuality and projects for the future is given by verbs such as achieve (7), contribute, create, develop, implement, offer, and reach, on the one hand, and aim, believe, commit (8), plan, pledge, seek, and strive, on the other. (7) For BBVA it was a productive year because we achieved good earnings, took important decisions that improve the Group's growth potential and made notable progress in our digital transformation strategy to become the best Bank in the world. (BBVA report) (8) We are committed to realizing actions aimed at promoting respect for people and their rights, for the environment and, more generally, the widespread interests of the communities in which we operate by creating opportunities for local people and businesses. (Eni website)

Apart from personal forms of self-address, additional reassurance of companies’ dependability is provided by the emphasis they place on a diversified repertoire of CSR values they adhere to and which are congruent with the set of principles stakeholders consider worthy. This is

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signalled by frequent content words such as business, development, products, environmental, water (occurring in both CSR reports and webpages), management and employees (in reports), sustainable and people (in websites). Irrespective of the industry they work for, the high incidence of lexical items such as business, products and development reflects the six companies’ main objective to run their business successfully and profitably. Nevertheless, the study of these words in their surrounding linguistic environment demonstrates that the firms’ self-identification as producers of business success, economic growth and development, innovative, customised, and high-quality products goes hand in hand with their self-description as responsible corporate citizens whose contribution to the environment and society is not to be underestimated. Examples of this combination of interests as supported by the groups under consideration are reported in examples (9) to (11): (9) Business benefits from reductions in environmental impacts are increasing rapidly as we transform our manufacturing processes and redesign our products and packaging. (Unilever report) (10) When developing sustainable products and services, Credit Suisse works with experts from research institutes, non-governmental organizations and leading think-tanks. These partnerships help us to meet our clients’ need for promising, future-oriented business and engagement opportunities in the field of philanthropy and responsible investment. (Credit Suisse website) (11) Eni, one of the leading operators at European level, still believes that gas is the ideal solution to offset the inconsistency of supply that is typical of solar and wind power and is in line with an energy policy that combines development, environmental protection and energy security. (Eni report)

In particular, one key lever commonly used by companies to build a solid identity and leave a positive impression on stakeholders is the insistence on their role as defenders of the environment. The pervasiveness of the adjective environmental in ‘semi-fixed’ constructions such as reduce the environmental impact(s), environmental protection in (12), environmental sustainability, improve the environmental performance suggests that firms long to be perceived as entities which are proactively involved in projects and actions aimed at the safeguard of the planet. This is also confirmed by the occurrences of water which foreground the attempts made by the firms to improve water efficiency, to support water

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conservation, reduce or optimize water consumption (13), and to guarantee access to water and sanitation for all. (12) Environmental protection plays a central role when BASF researchers develop new products: A high-quality product must be environmentally compatible if it is to be accepted by our customers. Economic efficiency and environmental protection are therefore closely interlinked when we develop innovative processes. (BASF website) (13) Adopting innovations such as the re-use of by-product water to reduce water consumption, the factory has reduced water usage by 22%, energy consumption by 39%, and both CO2 emissions and solid waste production by 20% over the last five years. (Nestlé report)

Furthermore, while stressing their profitable and eco-friendly nature, the organisations under study tend to parade an ethos of reliability by prioritizing their commitment to stakeholders, and in particular employees in CSR reports and people in websites. Thus, in CSR reports, to arouse trust and esteem towards themselves in the readership, companies tend to accentuate their role as premium employers who care about their staff, their betterment, safety and health (14). The devotion to employees in reports seems to be replaced on the Web by a greater insistence on corporate wholehearted support for people in general, and disadvantaged, local, poor, young people in particular (15). (14) To promote a good working environment, we provide – and continue to develop – a wide range of programs worldwide that help employees better combine their careers with family and personal life. This increases our employees’ identification with the company and bolsters our position as an attractive employer in the competition for qualified personnel. (BASF report) (15) Through our Global Education Initiative, we set ourselves the objective of providing 45,000 children and young people with access to high-quality education and improving the quality of educational opportunities. (Credit Suisse website)

In addition to the more considerable attention paid to employees, CSR reports were found to be characterised by the constant ‘presence’ of hard data, mentions of procedures and organisational responsibilities. In line with their genre-related specificities, primacy is attributed in reports to factual, performance- and governance-related contents as a response to investors’ demand for cues on which to base their assessment of the

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company as well as their investment decision-making processes. This function is served by items such as million and management, as can be seen in the following examples. (16) BBVA's mortgage loan portfolio totaled €107,160 million as of December 31, 2014, to finance the purchase of 1.8 million houses which are home to 5.8 million people. Spain accounts for €75,957 million, i.e. 890 thousand houses in which 2.4 million people live. (BBVA report) (17) To reflect our updated Quality Policy, we also revised the NQMS in April 2014, so that it focuses on new requirements and initiatives across the value chain. Third-party certification bodies ensure we comply with the NQMS, while our Food Safety Management System is certified against the ISO 22000 and FSSC 22000 food safety certification standards. In 2014, 97% of our manufacturing and R&D sites were certified by the ISO/FSSC 22000 (2013: 94%). (Nestlé report)

Factuality and objectivity, which are two substantial determinants of a firm’s identity in reports, give way to more background, general and grand claims about corporate sustainability in webpages. The examination of sustainable in its concordance lines reveals that on the Web considerable stress is laid on enterprises’ participation in programs, initiatives, and partnerships with well-known international organisations, as in (18) and (19). (18) As far back as the mid-1990s, as part of our Sustainable Agriculture Programme, we started developing Good Agricultural Practice Guidelines for palm oil. In 2004, we became founding members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Building on RSPO’s Principles & Criteria (P&C) as a foundation, our Sustainable Palm Oil Sourcing Policy is designed to drive market transformation. It will do this by working with key suppliers and the wider industry to halt deforestation, protecting peat lands and driving positive economic and social impact for people and communities. (Unilever website) (19) Eni participates in this dialogue also through the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which is directed by Professor J.D. Sachs and involves academia, civil society and international organizations, and which is engaged in the definition of a proposal of indicators and targets to measure progress with respect to the Sustainable Development Goals. In the various contexts in which the company operates, Eni promotes the development of targets and indicators for measuring the contribution made by companies, as well as Countries, to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. (Eni website)

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Hence, the linguistic inspection of a selection of frequent words shows that in order to construct a clear and admirable identity companies similarly intrude the text and advertise their performance and future objectives in the three main areas of CSR, namely economic, environmental and social. Although the standardised nature of CSR disclosures emerges strongly from the analysis, some differences were identified in the strategies, mainly content-related ones, adopted by companies to build trust. In the banking sector, both BBVA and Credit Suisse seem to underline their social and community responsibility both at a national and global level. In the disclosures analysed, priority is given to the creation and maintenance of goodwill in customers (in the case of BBVA) and clients (in the case of Credit Suisse) who are reassured over the high social impact and advantageous services offered by the two banks. However, while both groups promote themselves also as supporters of initiatives aimed at fostering people’s literacy, education, training and development, Credit Suisse appears to insist more on its cooperation with other organizations and on value creation for its employees. As for the food sector, in order to create a reputation of being reliable, both Nestlé and Unilever were found to be especially prone to accentuate their role in guaranteeing healthy and high-quality products, developing sustainable supply chain, safeguarding the environment, complying with regulations, and supporting the community. In particular, Nestlé chose to demonstrate its accountability by methodically addressing specific issues such as the sustainability of the production and procurement of raw materials, the protection of human rights and labour conditions through the whole supply chain. On the other hand, the social function of Unilever figures prominently in its proactive involvement in projects that contribute to people’s betterment and wellbeing. Finally, due to the specificities of the sectors they work in, namely Chemicals and Oil and Gas, BASF and Eni were recognised to emphasise their dedication to the safeguard of the environment, and workers’ as well as people’s safety. Nevertheless, while priority is given by Eni to community programmes, BASF, which combines financial and sustainability information in its integrated report, appears to allocate most attention to the economic impacts of its businesses. Although the construction of distinctive corporate identities is suggested to be pre-eminently homogeneous and to a lesser extent contingent upon sectoral peculiarities and companies’ idiosyncrasies, great variability in the adoption of trust-building strategies was found to be determined by the medium and genre being used. As further discussed in the next section, reports tend to ‘reverberate’ with more factual, updated

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and numerical appraisals of firms’ performance and expertise, while webpages are commonly interspersed with more general and down-toearth descriptions of corporate support for projects, initiatives and partnerships that are geared to benefit the whole of society.

3.2. The construction of corporate identity: an examination of keywords The analysis of the set of frequent words presented in the previous section enabled the identification of a range of similar and different strategies developed by companies in CSR reports and webpages to enact their ethical identity. Medium- and genre-related dissimilarities were further explored through the examination of a sample of keywords of digital vs. hard-copy disclosures (see Table 7-2). The keywords of CSR webpages vs. reports suggest that in the process of intralinguistic translation of information from technical to popularised materials, companies tend to draw on a complementary, yet different ‘arsenal’ of discursive strategies to show themselves in a good light. Rank 2 5 7 8 9 10 11 12

Word sustainable eco palm behaviour people living change women

Frequency of occurrences Webpages % Reports % 1065,00 0,31 349,00 0,13 214,00 0,06 21,00 283,00 0,08 70,00 0,03 156,00 0,05 20,00 921,00 0,27 423,00 0,16 268,00 0,08 66,00 0,02 489,00 0,14 180,00 0,07 478,00 0,14 178,00 0,07

Table 7-2. Keywords of CSR webpages vs. reports with related ordinal rank and frequency of occurrences. On the Web, to generate positive feedback from stakeholders, the six companies selected appear to speak the language of ‘every’ reader/stakeholder, and to put out long tracts full of claims about their proactive engagement in corporate social responsibility. The cooccurrence of sustainable with general nouns such as agriculture, business, development, energy and growth is a marker of the firms’ inclination to showcase their participation in admirable initiatives, and their fruitful cooperation with international partners (see examples 18 and 19 above). Thus, in an effort to assist stakeholders in the understanding of

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their ‘genuine’ commitment to CSR, in reports enterprises prove to favour the narration of successful performance backed up with numerical evidence, while, on the Web, they seem to combine background considerations and practical illustrations of their sustainability. Notably, in corporate websites, the perception that firms want to create of themselves as defenders of the planet emerges strongly from statements about sound environmental values, and exemplifications of how these values are translated into action. As substantiated by the occurrences of eco, palm and change in their linguistic context, as in (20), (21) and (22), the enactment of an eco-friendly identity is achieved in webpages by insisting on companies’ ‘participatory’ approach to the safeguard of the environment and cooperation with other organisations. (20) To build on the momentum of our eco-efficiency programme in existing factories, we have ring-fenced capital investment to drive energy, CO2 from energy, water and waste reduction projects that deliver the most beneficial environmental and financial benefits. (Unilever website) (21) Credit Suisse became an Ordinary Member of the RSPO in 2010, becoming the 7th member in the ‘Banks and Investors’ category. Today the objective of the RSPO is supported by over 1,000 members across the supply chain, from oil palm growers and traders to retailers and NGOs. Credit Suisse is committed to working with clients and other industry stakeholders across the palm oil supply chain to comply with the RSPO Code of Conduct and the internal Credit Suisse Palm Oil guidelines in order to promote the vision and mission of the RSPO. (Credit Suisse website) (22) Furthermore, Eni was one of only six companies in the world to take part in the pilot phase of the LEAD Board Programme aimed at reinforcing Boards’ of Directors awareness of sustainability issues. Furthermore Eni supports the "Caring for Climate" initiative, aimed at advancing the role of business in addressing climate change. (Eni website)

The same strategy turns out to be adopted in firms’ self-appraisal as supporters of the community they are members of. In other words, on the web, to highlight and demonstrate their responsible orientation towards society’s welfare, the enterprises under study seem to highlight their engagement in a number of projects intended to promote positive behaviour change among people, improve their living conditions, empower women, and foster people’s health, well-being, education and growth. Specifically, the collocational patterns of the keywords change, behaviour, people, living and women reveal that corporate self-portrayals as reliable and

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benevolent citizens rest on continuous references to social programmes and local or international actions developed by the companies. Some illustrative examples are: (23) Among the slum dwellers of Munhava, Mozambique, particularly the young people live in great uncertainty with regard to their economic, social, ecological and health future. The BASF Stiftung helps to improve the living conditions of Munhava's population. In collaboration with UNHABITAT, it is financing the construction of a Multifunctional Clean Energy Center (MCEC). The building will provide access to energy and sanitary facilities. (BASF website) (24) Nestlé is committed to scaling-up its business-related activities and programmes to focus on promoting gender equality and education for women and girls. The company supports the United Nations’ ‘Every Woman Every Child’ initiative that encourages governments, businesses and organisations to play a greater role in improving the health and wellbeing of women and children. This includes exploring how it can do more to help improve the lives of women in its supply chain. (Nestlé website)

As proved by the previous portions of websites, exemplifications are a key and common strategy resorted to by organizations to persuade stakeholders of their benign nature, sustainable behaviour, and dependability. As a result, in order to demonstrate their sustainability and how it is ‘brought to life’, firms turn out to implement different persuasive techniques on the Web as opposed to reports. Descriptions of projects, partnerships and initiatives which abound in websites are accompanied by full accounts of data and performance results in reports.

4. Conclusions The study discussed in Section 3 suggests that the companies’ tendency to embrace the concept of CSR into their business practices forms the basis for the construction of a positive social identity. As such, CSR reports and webpages have the potential to be powerful tools for companies to maintain their credibility, legitimise their behaviour and trigger stakeholder identification. Disclosing CSR practices and values that reflect stakeholder concerns has thus become increasingly vital for firms to improve their public perception, achieve deep stakeholder engagement, develop trust with different constituencies and, last but not least, strengthen their economic viability.

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In particular, the analysis of the most recurrent words of the two datasets has shown that some techniques of self-representation are analogously endorsed by the top management of the six groups to win stakeholders’ trust regarding their ethical attitudes and behaviours. In both reports and websites personal forms of self-reference are frequently combined with lexical items which belong to the semantic fields of actions and commitments to highlight the nature of companies as proactive entities manifestly concerned with CSR. Furthermore, the study of some repeated content words in their phraseology has cast some light on the organisations’ efforts to stress similar sustainability-related values to convince stakeholders of their dedication to CSR. Notably, the companies selected were commonly found to profile themselves as economic actors striving to offer products/services capable of satisfying clients’ needs, to preserve the environment and to impact positively on the community and their whole range of constituencies. Therefore, the enactment of corporate identity appears to be based on a set of attributes, namely ability, integrity and benevolence in the words of Mayer et al. (1995), which determine the trustworthiness of an enterprise, and eventually lead to the establishment of trust in stakeholders. That the pattern of findings was similar for all the firms considered was not really surprising. Indeed it is fairly predictable that the creation of a desired corporate identity is grounded in the use of analogous communicative strategies and in the promotion of a set of common CSR aspects, i.e. community involvement, environmental stewardship, employee related issues and profitability. However, some variability was observed to derive from companies’ specificities and the industry sector in which they operate. Even more remarkably, however, the analysis has demonstrated that, in accord with prior studies (see Branco and Rodrigues 2006; Malavasi forth.), the popularisation or translation process from specialised, hardcopy CSR reports to ‘everyday’, ‘lay’, digital disclosures entails changes in the enactment of companies’ identity. Although across the two discourses enterprises are similarly keen to disseminate information on their CSR policy and practices, different discursive strategies are utilised on the Web vs. in reports to impart a sense of legitimacy among stakeholders and to meet their general requests for corporate accountability. On the one hand, highly factual, numerical and performance-based information is typically present in reports, which are primarily directed at investors. On the other hand, in their websites, which are aimed at a broader public, companies are more inclined to prioritize community involvement, use fairly down-to-earth, simple and ‘fluid’ descriptions to

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promote their initiatives and give illustrations of the relevance their programmes have in the everyday lives of citizens. Despite the limited sample of disclosures and words examined, the findings documented here show that firms, while popularising their corporate communications, have also committed themselves to the popularisation of their identity construction. In an effort to obtain agreement from stakeholders whose interests and backgrounds vary greatly, companies establish a dependable identity by demonstrating their capability of creating products and services that customers are willing to buy, offering jobs that employees want to fill, and being a good citizen in the community. In doing so, enterprises appear to rely on some key structures which are suggested by Calsamiglia and van Dijk (2004) to be typical of popularising knowledge, such as exemplification and description. It can be hoped that further research will contribute to the identification of similar and dissimilar strategies developed by companies in hard-copy and digital CSR disclosures to demonstrate how caring they are and to shape stakeholders’ positive perception of the enterprise.

References Balmer, John M. T. 2001. “Corporate identity, corporate branding and corporate marketing. Seeing through the fog.” European Journal of Marketing 35 (3/4): 248-291. Balmer, John M. T., Kyoko Fukukawa, and Edmund R. Gray. 2007. “The nature and management of ethical corporate identity: a commentary on corporate identity, corporate social responsibility and ethics.” Journal of Business Ethics 76 (1): 7-15. Bamford, Julia, and Rita Salvi (eds.) 2007. Business Discourse: Language at Work. Roma: Aracne. Branco, Manuel C., and Lúcia L. Rodrigues. 2006. “Communication of Corporate Social Responsibility by Portuguese banks. A legitimacy theory perspective.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 11 (3): 232-248. Brennan, Niamh M., Doris M. Merkl-Davies, and Annika Beelitz. 2013. “Dialogism in Corporate Social Responsibility communications: conceptualising verbal interaction between organisations and their audiences.” Journal of Business Ethics 115 (4): 665-679. Calsamiglia, Helena. 2003. “Popularization discourse.” Discourse Studies 5 (2): 139-146.

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Calsamiglia, Helena, and Teun A. van Dijk. 2004. “Popularization discourse and knowledge about the genome.” Discourse and Society 15 (4): 369-389. Candlin, Christopher N., and Jonathan Crichton. 2013. “From ontology to methodology: exploring the discursive landscape of trust.” In Discourses of Trust, edited by Cristopher N. Candlin, and Jonathan Crichton, 1-18. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Carroll, Archie B. 1999. “Corporate Social Responsibility. Evolution of a definitional construct.” Business and Society 38 (3): 268-295. Christensen, Lars T. 2002. “Corporate communication: the challenge of transparency.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 7 (3): 162-168. Cornelissen, Joep. 2004. Corporate Communication. Theory and Practice (First Edition). London: Sage Publications. —. 2014. Corporate Communication. A Guide to Theory and Practice (Fourth Edition). London: Sage Publications. Creyer, Elizabeth H., and William T. Ross Jr. 1997. “The influence of firm behavior on purchase intention: do consumers really care about business ethics?” Journal of Consumer Marketing 14 (6): 421-432. Dahlsrud, Alexander. 2008. “How Corporate Social Responsibility is defined: an analysis of 37 definitions.” Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 15 (1): 1-13. David, Prabu, Susan Kline, and Yang Dai. 2005. “Corporate Social Responsibility practices, corporate identity, and purchase intention: a dual-process model.” Journal of Public Relations Research 17 (3), 291-313. Esrock, Stuart L., and Greg B. Leichty. 1998. “Social responsibility and corporate web pages: self-presentation or agenda-setting?” Public Relations Review 24 (3): 305-319. Foster, David, and Jan Jonker. 2005. “Stakeholder relationships: the dialogue of engagement.” Corporate Governance 5 (5): 51-57. Freeman, R. Edward. 1984. Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Boston: Pitman Publishing Inc. —. 1994. “The politics of stakeholder theory: some future directions.” Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (4): 409-421. Freeman, R. Edward, Jeffrey S. Harrison, Andrew C. Wicks, Bidhan Parmar, and Simone de Colle. 2010. Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, Andrew L., and Samantha Miles. 2006. Stakeholders: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Garzone, Giuliana. 2014. “Evolutions in societal values and discursive practices: their impact on genre change.” In Genres and Genre Theory in Transition. Specialized Discourses across Media and Modes, edited by Giuliana Garzone, and Cornelia Ilie, 39-65. Boca Raton (Florida): BrownWalker Press. Garzone, Giuliana, Gina Poncini, and Paola Catenaccio (eds.). 2007. Multimodality in Corporate Communication. Web Genres and Discursive Identity. Milano: Franco Angeli. Golob, Urša, Klement Podnar, Wim J. Elving, Anne E. Nielsen, Christa Thomsen, and Friederike Schultz. 2013. “CSR communication: quo vadis?” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 18 (2): 176-192. Goodman, Michael B. 2000. “Corporate communication: the American picture.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 5 (2): 69-74. —. 2001. “Current trends in corporate communication.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 6 (3): 117-123. —. 2006. “Corporate communication practice and pedagogy at the dawn of the new millennium.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 11 (3): 196-213. Greenwood, Michelle, and Harry J. Van Buren III. 2010. “Trust and stakeholder theory: trustworthiness in the organisation–stakeholder relationship.” Journal of Business Ethics 95 (3): 425-438. Hosmer, Larue T. 1995. “Trust: the connecting link between organizational theory and philosophical ethics.” Academy of Management Review 20 (2), 379-403. Idowu, Samuel O., and Brian A. Towler. 2004. “A comparative study of the contents of Corporate Social Responsibility reports of UK companies.” Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal 15 (4): 420-437. Johansen, Trine S., and Anne E. Nielsen. 2011. “Strategic stakeholder dialogues: a discursive perspective on relationship building.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 16 (3): 204-217. Kolk, Ans. 2008. “Sustainability, accountability and corporate governance: exploring multinationals’ reporting practices.” Business Strategy and the Environment 17 (1): 1-15. Lantos, Geoffrey P. 2001. “The boundaries of strategic corporate social responsibility.” Journal of Consumer Marketing 18 (7): 595-630. Lundquist. 2014. White Paper. 6th CSR ONLINE AWARDS. Beyond Reporting to Create Distinctiveness in CSR Communications. European and Italian Editions. http://www.lundquist.it/wp-content/

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uploads/2014/06/White_Paper_6th_CSR_Online_Awards_2014.pdf Mahoney, Lois S., Linda Thorne, Lianna Cecil, and William LaGore. 2013. “A research note on standalone corporate social responsibility reports: signaling or greenwashing?” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 24 (4-5): 350-359. Maignan, Isabelle, and O.C. Ferrell. 2001. “Corporate citizenship as a marketing instrument. Concepts, evidence and research directions.” European Journal of Marketing 35 (3/4): 457-484. Maignan, Isabelle, and O.C. Ferrell. 2004. “Corporate Social Responsibility and marketing: an integrative framework.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 32 (1): 3-19. Malavasi, Donatella. Forthcoming. “From corporate social responsibility reports to sustainability webpages: an analysis of convergences and divergences.” In Proceedings of the XXVI AIA Conference “Remediating, Rescripting, Remaking: Old and New Challenges in English Studies”, University of Parma (Italy), 12-14 September 2013. Mayer, Roger C., James H. Davis, and F. David Schoorman. 1995. “An integrative model of organizational trust.” The Academy of Management Review 20 (3), 709-734. Melewar, T. C. 2003. “Determinants of the corporate identity construct: a review of the literature." Journal of Marketing Communications 9 (4): 195-220. Melewar, T. C., and Elif Karaosmanoglu. 2006. “Seven dimensions of corporate identity. A categorization from the practitioners’ perspectives.” European Journal of Marketing 40 (7-8): 846-869. Murray, Keith B., and Christine M. Vogel. 1997. “Using a hierarchy-ofeffects approach to gauge the effectiveness of Corporate Social Responsibility to generate goodwill toward the firm: financial versus nonfinancial impacts.” Journal of Business Research 38 (2), 141-159. Nielsen, Anne E., and Christa Thomsen. 2007. “Reporting CSR – What and how to say it?” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 12 (1): 25-40. Pelsmaekers, Katja, Geert Jacobs, and Craig Rollo. 2014. “Trust and discursive interaction in organizational settings.” In Trust and Discourse: Organizational Perspectives, edited by Katja Pelsmaekers, Geert Jacobs, and Craig Rollo, 1-10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pérez, Andrea. 2015. “Corporate reputation and CSR reporting to stakeholders. Gaps in the literature and future lines of research.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 20 (1): 11-29.

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Podnar, Klement, and Urša Golob. 2007. “CSR expectations: the focus of corporate marketing.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 12 (4): 326-340. Pollach, Irene. 2005. “Corporate self-presentation on the WWW: strategies for enhancing usability, credibility and utility.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 10 (4): 285-301. Porter, Michael E., and Mark R. Kramer. 2006. “Strategy and society: the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility.” Harvard Business Review 84 (12): 78-92. Resche, Catherine. 2007. “L’implicite dans le discourse des grandes enterprises sur leur responsibilité sociale.” Les Cahiers de l’ILCEA 9: 7-47. Rolland, Deborah, and Jana O. Bazzoni. 2009. “Greening corporate identity: CSR online corporate identity reporting”. Corporate Communications: An International Journal 14 (3): 249-263. Salvi, Rita. 2013. “Intercultural issues in virtual professional settings”. Textus 1: 13-28. Salvi, Rita, and Janet Bowker (eds.). 2013. Space, Time and the Construction of Identity. Discursive Indexicality in Cultural, Institutional and Professional Fields. Bern: Peter Lang. Scott, Mike. 2008. Wordsmith Tools (Computer Software. Version 5.0). Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. Sen, Sankar, and C.B. Bhattacharya. 2001. “Does doing good always lead to doing better? Consumer reactions to corporate social responsibility.” Journal of Marketing Research 38 (May): 225-243. Sinclair, John M. 2003. Reading Concordances. London: Longman. —. 2004. Trust the Text. Language, Corpus and Discourse. London: Routledge. Snider, Jamie, Ronald P. Hill, and Diane Martin. 2003. “Corporate Social Responsibility in the 21st century: a view from the world’s most successful firms.” Journal of Business Ethics 48 (2): 175-187. Topalian, Alan. 2003. “Executive perspective: 1. Experienced reality. The development of corporate identity in the digital era.” European Journal of Marketing 37 (7-8): 1119-1132. van Riel, Cees B. M. 1995. Principles of Corporate Communication. London: Prentice Hall. van Riel, Cees B. M., and John M. T. Balmer. 1997. “Corporate identity: the concept, its measurement and management.” European Journal of Marketing 31 (5/6): 340-355.

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van Riel, Cees B. M., and Charles J. Fombrun. 2007. Essentials of Corporate Communication: Implementing Practices for Effective Reputation Management. London: Routledge. Williams, Cynthia C. 2008. “Toward a taxonomy of corporate reporting strategies.” Journal of Business Communication 45 (3): 232-264. Zhang, Ying, and Chris Huxham. 2009. “Identity construction and trust building in developing international collaborations.” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 45 (2): 186-211.

CHAPTER EIGHT ORGANIZATIONAL TRUST CREATION IN PEER COACHING EVENTS: MULTIMODAL MEANS AND REPRESENTATIONS JANET BOWKER SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

1. Introduction In our increasingly visual age, where people are engaging consistently in an iconic relationship with the world, discourse analysis is extending to information data which has a significant visual component (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 2002, 2006; Lemke 2002; Kress 2010; Norris and Maier 2014). Research is moving beyond the monomodal study of written or oral products as data, and towards tackling multimodality in its complexity, a fast-burgeoning, multi-disciplinary area, arguably still in its infancy.1 Within this perspective, the chapter included here investigates the creation of trust and the processes of trustwork in organizational discourse, looking more specifically at the in-house peer coaching and employee development events within a large multinational consulting group based in North America. Knowledge dissemination of this kind is essential in contemporary work practices, where the “Learning Organization”, based on the continuous updating of competencies, depends on creating shareable human, psychological and social capital. The data consists of a selection from ten hours of audioconferenced internal employee coaching,

1

Multimodal research is currently characterized by multi-disciplinarity, using a variety of theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches and target fields: gestalt psychology assists the field of visual semiotics, visual perception illuminates the “takeup” of images, graphical and interface design is increasingly a component of media studies, to name some of the most salient fields.

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and the pragma-linguistic analysis is carried out primarily on the multimodal visual data which accompanied the trainers’ oral presentations. The PowerPoint sequences will be studied for their role in creating visual meaning through the processes of sense-making images, in other words, to investigate the power pertaining to PowerPoint communication. In a bid to break down the barriers between image and text, form and content, the research focus will be on the nature of word-image interdependence, and only secondarily on that between written and spoken language. In the fusion of verbal and non-verbal semiotic coordinates in visual formats, it will be possible to investigate in a micro-textual dimension, what Kress has called “the modal division of labour” (Kress 2010, 12). The data used in this study sheds light on evolving organizational realities and communicational environments, in which knowledge creation and dissemination is radically being transformed from a top down, hierarchically structured system of information production and consumption to a more horizontal, participatory pattern, in which employee engagement and empowerment are becoming key organizational objectives. The training events which are the focus of this study mirror these changes and provide a window onto the indispensable trust efforts by both parties, trustors and trustees, to effectively co-construct knowledge and enact learning. The study proposes a conceptual framework for trust construal which enables us to link textual features, pragmatic purpose and intended communicative upshot. In this way, the dynamics of trust construal (describable in terms of perceived organizational competence, legitimacy and authenticity) can be traced discursively via the use of these strategic visual texts, used for specific didactic objectives between corporate management and employees. With these objectives in mind, we need explanatory models and frameworks which allow us to investigate more systematically the discursive and semiotic construction of trust in knowledge dissemination in these specific communicative events. Kress’s pioneering work in socio-semiotics provides a valuable theoretical footing in his accounts of stability and change in knowledge creation and diffusion, and the relationship between signs, sign-making, sense-creation, and social interaction. When talking about the social embeddedness of signs and sign-making practices he says: “Individuals, with their social histories, socially shaped, located in social environments, using socially-made, culturally available resources, are agentive in sign-making and communication” (Kress 2010, 54), and at the same time generative: “In the process of representation, sign-makers remake concepts and ‘knowledge’ in a constant new shaping of the cultural

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resources for dealing with the social world.” (Kress 2010, 62). The study in this chapter is contextualized in such a panorama, with shifting agencies in the redistribution of knowledge and organizational power sharing. We will see how participants use the meaning potential of PowerPoint resources and we will investigate how and why information is presented as it is. The study will be conducted along three dimensions: content analysis into the scaffolding of organizational knowledge, and the argumentative, expository functions of these representational texts in the transfer of visual “explanations”, occupies one strand of investigation. The framing processes identifiable and activated through visual design with its “windowing” and perspectivizing features, and related to specific cognitive dimensions in learning contexts, are the focus of another. The persuasive uptake of the information on the part of participants, the creation of intersubjectivity and authentication of knowledge by learners constitutes another layer of the analysis. We will see how accomplishment in these three areas, argumentation, then perception, understanding and learning, and ultimately, persuasion, translate into trust terms, in the image construal of an expert, credible, and ultimately, benevolent organization.

2. Organizational change: employee priorities and discourses 2.1 Evolving employer – employee expectations and alliances In these new (and at the same time highly transient and mobile) realities, the incisive handling of information lies at the heart of corporate success in global markets: distributed information has to be converted into useful and useable knowledge through the processes of effective learning, working towards the creation of the “Learning Organization” through knowledge management processes. Organizational communications are the main vehicle for these achievements. The critical importance of effective professional interpersonal relationships in this scenario has resulted in a changing perception of roles on the part of both corporate management and the workforce. In contrast with a previous management paradigm, where the workforce was evaluated predominantly in terms of cost rather than asset, employees are becoming widely recognized as human capital, literally human resources, making use of what people know in order to create the intelligent enterprise – namely, a collective of education, experience and skills. In this new organizational context, members are valued as both “social capital”, to be maximised through productive performance in networking

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channels, and “positive psychological capital”, in possession of optimism, resilience and mental resources: in other words appreciated for what they know, who they know and what they are.2 A great deal of the relevant organizational literature focuses on major changes in employer-employee relationships in the evolving knowledgedriven organization (see Luthans 2011, chapters 3, 7 and 8 for an overview). Traditional management hierarchies are being impacted by new organizational systems such as multi-functional teams and distributed work patterns, flattened managerial layers and a re-distribution of status and authority in general. Organizational studies have distinguished between “loose – tight” and “soft – hard” mixes of collaborating and organizing in management behaviours (Aritz and Walker 2012). This is indexical of authoritative top-down styles, on the one hand, and democratic, participatory associations in relationships, on the other (Oswick et al. 2002; Cornelissen 2004). Employees, also, have differing participant needs from the past in terms of their expectations of professional development, growth and personal satisfaction. The workforce’s motivations have shifted more towards intrinsic kinds, based on a positive evaluation of their roles, their satisfaction with the work they actually perform, and their perceptions of the worth of the company they work for, rather than mere calculations of extrinsic factors such as pay and productivity bonuses. At the same time, in a fluid labour market with a relatively high turnover rate (for much of North America, at least), retention of the best talent becomes a priority for companies. These considerations explain the value of the attention currently being directed on the part of corporate and management to be seen as a “caring organization” by its workforce.

2.2 The “New Communications Agenda”: prioritising internal communications These priorities have led to a new “Communications Agenda” in internal knowledge dissemination and in developing dialogue with employees. Keywords in managerial communications in these evolving relationships with employees are “empowerment”, “participation” and “co-operation”, all subsumed in the key code word used explicitly in 2

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, when asked about the key to the successful organization replied “People are the key. The technology can be purchased and copied: it levels the playing field. The people, on the other hand, cannot be copied” (quoted in Luthans 2011, 6).

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executive discourse, “Engagement”. In this attempt, internal company communications have become a central priority. Communication has been said to fill an organization-making function rather than just an organization-maintaining one (Barker and Camarata 1998, 444), and many research findings identify the link between enhanced organizational communication and performance.3 The multimodal analysis of internal employee training and development sessions reported in this chapter reveals the synergy of these interests, in attempts by interactants to create an organizational culture marked by relevant, transparent communications, from the bottom up. From the organizational research, we can summarize the benefits accruing from systematic, internally-organized training and development sessions as follows: x Employee communications are a valuable part of participatory knowledge-sharing and perform actively in the processes and practices of dissemination and use of knowledge throughout the organization. x Personal knowledge is upgraded: at the same time, a fund of collective knowledge (information, skills and competences) is created, together with its evaluation of how it can be considered useful and useable from the employee point of view. x Peer-coaching is a forum for valuable feedback to management about the state of employee motivation and engagement. This happens through employees’ expression of the areas of growth and opportunity which they appreciate and their feedback about how much learning has taken place. x Learning experiences of this kind encourage membershipping, ingrouping, a sense of inclusion: they create shared interests and responsibilities, and promote closer relating with company interests. x On an affective level, training discourse extends bonding, empathy and trust-building between colleagues, peer groups, and a sense of positive identification with the company they work for. 3

The evidence for this has been collected by The Gallop Organization (mostly known for its famous Gallop Poll), which possesses a massive survey research base, containing thousands of organizations and millions of people. A recent longitudinal study of over three hundred companies for over twenty years found that the management of human resources through extensive training and empowerment techniques resulted in performance benefits, but operational initiatives, such as total quality management or advanced manufacturing technology, did not.

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x Self-knowledge, self-awareness ensues: positive self-image, roles and identities are re-enforced. Employees experience rewards as the result of taking up the corporate challenge for self-improvement. This results in valuable changed perceptions and attitudes, in the process. Throughout the training-learning process, employees convey how they perceive themselves, singly, as a group or in relation to the company, and how they would like to be seen by the organization, so revealing their own perceptions of roles and identities. Employee communication events are a part of living and sharing the values of the learning organization and constitute an essential part of culture in the making. By participating in knowledge-sharing processes and practices, employees contribute to company culture re-enforcement and adaptation. Employee-based discourse is of obvious value to management. Kevin Murray, specialist in strategic communication and coach on the language of leaders, sums this up: “Successful leaders know that relationships are the engines of success, and they keep a close eye on the state of all key relationships” (Murray 2012, 99). Conversely, opportunities for personal and profession growth and development within employee ranks create harmony, bonding, consensus and intrinsic motivation. All of the benefits listed above can be seen to constitute the foundations for, and at the same time, the products of trust creation and maintenance within the organization.

3. Conceptualizing trust: analytical frameworks Trust studies abound in the organizational literature. Thomas et al. (2009), for example, make connections between the quality and adequacy of communications, the ensuing trustwork and employee commitment in dealings among co-workers, supervisors and top management. “Trust is based on beliefs about the other party, which are shaped through information” (Thomas et al. 2009, 290). Trust, they say, seems to be a matter of perceptions of communication openness: the quality of information, evaluated insofar as it is accurate, timely and useful, is aligned with the quantity of information, the information flow. Overall, the organizational research literature shows that interpersonal trust has positive performance outcomes on individual, group and organizational results such as job satisfaction, individual productivity, and a perception of organizational citizenship (Luthans 2011, chapters 5 and 6). However, one of the drawbacks within the organizational research perspective, frequently acknowledged by researchers themselves, is the

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criticism of under-theorization of trust as a phenomenon, often taken as a given and under-deserving of conceptual elaboration. A working definition of trust for the purposes of this chapter must therefore be formulated before we can attempt to identify it and trace its itineraries in this particular set of data. The sociological formulations of Rod Watson (2009) provide a useful descriptive framework for conceptualising trust. Starting from the constructs of the noted ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel (1967), trust creation is seen to be intrinsic to the enactment of sociallyshared “constitutive practices” (Watson 2009, 475 et passim). It is the underpinning and necessary prerequisite for social interaction to work and for effective rapport management: it is a default background condition to all meaningful action in a society. Watson’s work (2009, 494) also elucidates a “proceduralized description of trust” in inter-relational practices where: One of the basic conditions of any constitutive practice is a mutual commitment to rules of engagement in that practice—that is, all parties to the interaction must understand that they are engaged in the same practice, must be competent to perform the practice, must actually perform competently, and assume this also of the others. (Watson 2009, 475)

This pragmatic, process-based view of trust can fruitfully be applied to the organizational context under examination, where participants direct their communication resources to demonstrating competence and authority, together with constructing a belief in others that they are able to do the same. However, trustworthiness on the part of trustors and trustees involves a second layer of participant belief, appealing not only to reason and reasonableness, but to a fundamentally affective, empathetic zone: perceptions of competence must also be set alongside perceptions of honesty, truthfulness, integrity and benevolence, deriving from the behaviour of the claimants to trust. In both cases, trust construal is considered to be essentially relational, persuasive appeals being made at a variety of levels. The following pragma-linguistic micro-analysis of the data under examination casts light on some of the trust dynamics derived from interactional practices, the fostering of relationships through language and sense-making, and the shaping of intersubjectivities in a specific organizational setting.

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4. The data The material used in this chapter is part of a relatively large, selfcompiled, specialized corpus of business discourse (around 1,000,000 words) consisting of both in-house communications and external, clientbased data. The source is a large multinational group based in North America, a global leader in organizational consulting and leadership development.4 This study uses the sub-corpus of audio-recorded in-house training and development sessions in the form of peer-coaching workshops, totalling ten hours of oral presentations (around 150,000 words), accompanied by PowerPoint slide sequences. The trainers who act as facilitators are company experts in their specialist areas, addressing employees of all ranks including Group Leaders, Practice Teams, lower and middle management, and administrative staff. The sessions take place with live audiences in the company’s offices across the Pacific Region (six States in all), and these regional sites are simultaneously connected up in conference-call mode, using the computer screen and phone lines. Subsequently, the recorded events are webcast to company personnel for a limited time and access. A different topic occupies each session and different trainers are used. The topics cover a wide range of subjects but can be divided roughly into four main groups: x Updating, informing and sharing knowledge about the company– sharing and understanding company financial results, business goals, pension plans, etc. x Practical task completion: how to make best use of technological hardware and software, using databases, and getting information techniques. x Professional competence building and skills development, for example developing professional communications skills: giving effective conference calls, facilitating meetings, and job recruitment interviewing skills.

4

A range of media, modalities, genres and sub-genres are represented in the corpus. Other than in-house peer coaching sessions, sub-corpora include recorded external client workshops, internal management-to-employee conference calls, and on-line ‘webinars’ (web-distributed seminars) used for corporate updates. To date the corpus has been used for a variety of linguistic studies including storytelling and narration in organizational discourse (Bowker 2009, 2014), organizational metaphor and corporate identity (Bowker 2012) and evolving business genres and modalities (Bowker 2013a, 2013b).

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x Personal professional growth: stress management; “competency modelling” (matching personal and company objectives); “personal branding” – career management (producing a video CV, or promoting and building an online profile, for example). All ten hours of recordings of the training sessions have been analysed, but for the purposes of this chapter, in the interests of coherence and reader ease, the data from four events will be used: x Facilitating meetings (hereafter Meeting) x Interviewing techniques (hereafter Interview) x Stress management – self-understanding and self-monitoring in personal and professional roles (hereafter Stress); x How to build an online profile – focusing on self-promotion while building and protecting a virtual identity (hereafter Online).

5. Approach and research focus The study adopts the Situated Social Semiosis approach elaborated by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 2002, 2006) and Kress (2010), as explained in the Introduction, where the research topic is the relationship between signs, sense-making and social interaction, and its various components have been defined as follows: Discourse answers the questions “What is the world about?” and “How is it organized as knowledge?” Genre answers the question “Who is involved as participants in this world; in what ways; what are the relationships between participants in this world?” Mode answers the question “How is the world best represented and how do I aptly represent the things I want to represent in this environment?” (Kress 2010, 116)

These concepts provide the framework for this analysis, where the focus is on the processes of semiosis, and the data consists of “modal ensembles”, several modes being used together, either simultaneously, in a spatial configuration, or over a temporal span, with changing modalities.5 It is the composite of signs as a whole that makes meaning: “Such ensembles are based on designs, that is on selections and arrangements of

5

Kress (2010, 28) points out that in communication several modes are always used together in modal ensembles: the most commonly used modes are speech, still image, moving image, writing, gesture, music, 3D models, action, and colour.

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resources for making a specific message, about a particular issue, for a particular audience” (Kress 2010, 28). The complexities of multimodal study are particularly challenging, not the least because, following Lemke’s distinctions (2002, 302), we need a three-dimensional analysis of meaning systems: x On the ideational plane, conceptual content is considered, constituting “presentational meanings”; x On the textual plane, form is considered as semiotic content, displaying “organizational meanings”; x On the interrelational plane, affective content is examined, providing “orientational meanings”. These categories allow us to formulate the following research questions for the data under review: x Regarding the content of knowledge, how are the functions of argumentation and exposition achieved through visual texts? Can different stages and structures in the training/learning process be distinguished? x Can we create a descriptive framework for the significant features of these spatially-organized representations? Can Kress’s “principles of composition”, choices in style, design, layout, display, and language, be verified and elaborated? Perceptually and cognitively, how do these features operationalize “framing”, “signing”, and “windowing”? x At an interpersonal level, in the reading/viewing experience which accompanies the oral presentation, how do these texts engage the trainees and how are intersubjectivities realized? What is the persuasive uptake in terms of trust creation and maintenance?

6. The analysis 6.1 Visual didactic explanations: argumentation and exposition The main purpose of these training and learning events is the effective transfer of information, on the part of trainers, and its evaluation and personalization as useful knowledge, by the trainees: the functional load, then, is first and foremost argumentative and expository. Both verbal and non-verbal modes are used for these purposes to much the same degree in

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the PowerPoint slides (although individual trainers often show personal preferences for one or the other mode). A point of departure for the analysis of these visual didactic representations can be found in Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) “semiotic categories”: x Intensity and emphasis: placement, size, contrasts in tone and colour, sharpness. x Salience: given and new, foregrounding/backgrounding. x Ordering of priority in the sequencing of messages. x Linking: much of semiosis is about linking of various kinds, by adjacency and proximity, temporal or spatial. “Whatever the mode and its affordances, its forms of linking and separating – of participants, objects, events – are always meaningful” (Kress 2010, 120). Analysis, then, can be conducted on two planes: contemporaneous and sequential. The composite image is hard to deconstruct in meaning terms and all information is simultaneously available in a single slide. Yet structuring and sequencing is intrinsic to the PowerPoint slide presentations, and meanings are cumulative, building over previous stretches. The exposition is ordered through temporal and spatial “routines” serving different argumentative functions, as the following examples show. (1) (Meeting) “Today’s objectives” ¾ Share best practices ¾ Select 1 skill or technique to focus on as a meeting facilitator ¾ Have fun and participate ¾ Let us know what else we can do to support you (2) (Meeting) “Why does this matter?” *Engagement *Performance *Bring our values to life Service, Quality, Fun, Teamwork, Financial Performance

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A presentation usually begins with a statement of intentions, as in example (1) above, providing a preview and an overview of the talk or demonstration. The slide serves to cue and focus attention, indicates the start of the expository sequence and maps out the information to be covered in the allotted time. Example (2), still on effective meeting facilitation skills, is close behind, spelling out the organizational benefits, the added value of the training experience at an individual, group and corporate level, as well as providing the overall rational for the training event. (3) (Interviewing)

Hiring the right person the first time takes planning and preparation

The slide in example (3) is more varied in layout and sign content, making use of an inset containing friendly, smiling cartoon faces (these skills are fairly easy to learn, seems to be the message to the trainees, confirming that an image is rarely purely “decorative” and hence empty of meaning). Again the objective of the training session is foregrounded, positioned at the top of the slide frame, namely to provide skills and competencies in conducting successful recruitment interviews. Linguistically, as in (1) and (2), the main features are nouns, gerunds and “nouning” for the purposes of concision and compression of information, constituting a cognitive shorthand, in a listing format and neat table-frame. From then on, the main argumentation structure is broken down into its components, sometimes signposted beforehand as in example (4). (4) (Meeting) The 5 P’s: 1. Purpose 2. Planning 3. Preparation 4. Presentation 5. Participation

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Examples (5) and (6) each analyse in detail one stage of the competencies under review. Interestingly, the use of inverted commas in the heading, as in quotations in general, imparts a kind of third-party, external voice to the visual text, making it appear to be one step removed from the presenter’s voice, adding a virtual authority. Another significant linguistic choice is the use of the imperative form, used very frequently in the training and development slides and also the accompanying oral presentations. Clearly the imperative mood is not used to issue coercive commands or orders here, but serves a directive speech function, and performs a series of tasks throughout the learning discourse: suggestions, tips, advice, proposals, instructions, commentaries and demonstrations.6 At the same time, knowledge is imparted in a direct, informal, but businesslike manner, while at the same time creating proximal stance and dialogue with the audience. The main macro-expository and argumentative functions in the training discourse are cause and effect, problem and solution, and hypothesis and action. Within these, micro-functions such as defining, describing, summarizing and exemplification are realized. Examples (7) and (8) show how visual representation is used to illustrate arguments.

6

Bowker (2015) uses the trainers’ oral data in the sub-corpora of employee training events in order to identify the framing structures and processes at work in directive acts, storytelling and narration. The term Directive Act is used in the sense coined by Searle and Vanderveken, 1985, in their classification of five categories of illocutionary act: assertive, commissive, directive, declarative and expressive.

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(7) (Meeting)

¾

¾

“A day in the life: Mending dilemmas and solutions” People don’t take the meetings seriously. They arrive late, leave early and spend most of the time doodling. Solution: Focus on mindset. Post questions at every meeting. This is an invitation to truly focus on mindset. If you truly have the conviction that the meeting is work, it shifts everything. People don’t tell the truth—there’s plenty of conversation but not much candor. Solution: Embrace anonymity where it makes sense. Focus on building trust and creating a safe meeting environment. It is for the facilitator to put out, to say: “Here’s our agenda”, “I will not shoot you down”, “All ideas are welcome”.

Again, the visual image is not trivial, even if it is accessorial: hardy leaders in unchartered waters looking out for a safe harbour. Once more the verbal content seems to derive from an external voice, this time reenacting a sort of dialogue in a two-way ventriloquist mode, one voice posing the problem and the other offering the solution. Example (8) is also illustrative, listing the warning signs in resumes for interviewers to pick up on, the symbolic metaphorical red flags taking physical, material form.

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We have seen how structuring and sequencing is an essential part of the PowerPoint slide presentations, and meanings are built up through careful selection, ordering and linking. Language use aims for maximum quality in terms of pragmatic upshot, using the minimum quantity, achieving effects with economy. Choices in layout and visual design (the “textual, organizational meanings” identified in Paragraph 5), together with linguistic features, realize this. PowerPoint representation is also essential on the ideational level in the conveyance of “presentation meanings”, namely the content of knowledge, in a concise and learnable fashion. It is also instrumental in rapport and relational management, and rich in “orientational meanings”, working to create a sense of inclusion and building value with trainees. In particular, trustwork is aimed at constructing an image of corporate authority and competence, but as importantly, on an affective, interpersonal dimension, a bridge is forged between company objectives and those of the trainees. This is achieved through personalization and involvement strategies: the use of informality creates proximity, solidarity and identification. In this way, a bid for honesty and benevolence has been extended on the part of the trainers as part of their concern for the employees’ wellbeing.

6.2 Changes in representation: transduction and resemiotization Whereas the previous section has looked mainly at the selection, ordering and linking of information, to use some of Kress and van Leeuwen’s semiotic categories (2006) stated at the beginning of section 6.1, this part of the analysis considers the modal effects of intensity and emphasis through the integration of image and verbal language, together

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with the creation of salience and relevance in these spatially-organized representations. We now address the second and third research areas stated in section 5. What are the roles of style, design, layout, display, and language? In terms of perception and cognition, what sort of knowledge is framed, what kinds of frames are used, and how does signing and windowing work?7 And then, what is the persuasive impact on the participants, how is learning enhanced, how are intersubjectivities created, and what kind of trustwork is being attempted? Framing is the key to understanding multimodal meaning-making, intended as social interaction, in general, and visual representation, in particular. As Kress (2010, 149) explains: There is no meaning without framing. For meaning-making to be possible, human cultures need and do provide means for framing aspects of the world to which an individual needs or wishes to attend. [...] The frame provides unity, relation and coherence to what is framed, for all elements inside the frame. Without a frame we cannot know what to put together with what, what to read in relation to what. If we do not know what entities there are, we cannot establish relations between them. We cannot know, therefore, where the boundaries to interpretation are: we cannot make meaning. Frames and means of framing are essential for all meaningmaking, in all modes.

Within Kress’s model (2010, 42), communication is seen as joint and reciprocal work analysable as a semiotic sequence consisting of attention, framing and interpretation: a message, intended as a “prompt”, engages the attention; framing involves selection of what is criterial, a “mapping” not only in a physical sense, but also in a conceptual and affective one; communication, in the end, depends on the transformative-interpretative engagement by a participant, which produces a new inner sign. This model has direct relevance for the learning and knowledge dissemination taking place in the employee peer coaching sessions described here, where multimodal presentations serve to attract and engage, inviting participants to elaborate and interpret information, and ultimately to take away their own personally-evaluated, authenticated version of events. Multimodal meaning-making derives from the dynamics of textual change and contrast: in other words, the processes of semiosis involve changes in representation. These have been named “transduction” or 7

Frame Theory, originally coined by the anthropologist and semiotician Gregory Bateson (1954), was significantly developed by the sociologist Erving Goffman (1974, 1981), who described framing as both an essential social as well as a cognitive sense-making mechanism.

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“remediation” (Lemke 2002), and “resemiotization” (Iedema 2003). Both constitute the basic semiotic resources of framing. Transduction is the change in meaning expressed in one mode to another, shifts in mode or channel, from image to speech, or from writing to film or static image, for example. Resemiotization, or intersemiotization, on the other hand, involves a resemiosis, a shift in meaning, moving meaning from one semiotic domain to another, while remaining in the same mode: the inclusion of graphical and pictorial data within an image mode, for example, or the use of citations and references, within a verbal mode. There is a conceptual link, here, with the notions of intertextuality and interdiscursivity which have been widely used in discourse analysis to date (Salvi 2015). The following sequence of excerpts from the data illustrate these two processes, resemiotization and transduction, at work in multimodal meaning-making. 6.2.1 Citation and “reportings”: building expertise, legitimacy and authority (9) (Meeting) “Recent Research”

(10) (Meeting) “Why are Meetings ineffective?”

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What is being framed in the examples above is some technical information required for the audience to extract salience and relevance from the training session on the importance of meeting facilitation skills. The kind of frame is that provided by statistics and charts, and the framing has a didactic function, not only in information transfer and sharing knowledge, but also cognitively and affectively in gathering and holding the trainees’ attention and interest. At the same time, this use of intersemioticity in the form of references to the relevant literature boosts the competence image of the trainer, increasing her bid for credibility and expertise through broadening the range of knowledge sources she uses. Similar trust claims ensue from the next three excerpts. (11) (Online

(12) (Online)

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Again dialogism is created through the inclusion of external sources of authority, creating a polyphony of “voices”: job recruiters and employers participating in surveys, the people posting the results of the surveys, and the voice of the trainer, who proceeds to involve the audience with a humorous, spoof poll activity. Once more, graphical data, charts, tables and drawings provide the “windows” and, verbally, the use of questioning and direct speech close the interactional and interpretative space between trainer and trainees. 6.2.2 Metaphoric-metonymic constructs and processes: engagement and identification Another form of resemiotization is the use of metaphoric-metonymic imaging, describing the main protagonists, events and circumstances intrinsic to the training situations in terms of pictorial “similarity” and “otherness” between a source and a target entity. In fact, Kress’s descriptive framework stresses the metaphorical value which is constantly present in signing: “All signs are metaphors, always newly-made, resting on, materializing and displaying the interest of the maker of the sign” (2010, 71). The type of frame used in the following extracts could be described as “iconic representation” in line with the work of the prominent French iconographer, Liliane Louvel (2011) on “iconotexts”. The socio-cognitive frame in (14) is that of the comic strip, creating a fictional story, metonymically depicting the characters: the boss, the incompetent meeting organizer, and Carol, his sarcastic, knowing secretary. The training discourse as a whole is significantly marked by the use of humour, which works to bond the audience in a non-threatening atmosphere.

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(14) (Meeeting) “How Maany Meetings Does D It Take?”

The kind of joking relationship which w the re gional groups display between theemselves estaablishes a relaxed interacctional ambient where participants all feel on ann equal footing g and consequuently are morre willing to consider nnew ideas andd experiences. This informaality is also a feature f of the next exccerpt. (15) (M Meeting) “Thee Monopoly Accommoodating Differeences”

Story,

Me eting

Personalities,

A rangee of intersem miotization resources r aree used in th his slide: photographss, drawings annd cartoons. The T way the framing takess place is through mettaphoric-metonnymic represeentation, descrribing the pro oto-typical meeting parrticipants in terms t of one defining behhavioural charracteristic. This needs tto be explaineed, however, in the oral preesentation, as the slide is not fullyy explanatory in itself. Th he slide in (115) requires an a act of transductionn, then, a shifft of meaning with a changge in channell, moving from the scrreen to the spooken word, in order to fill thhe meaning gaap.

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(Trainer): So, in terms of participants here come characters we’ve all met. In the five images, in the upper left hand corner you have a monopoly board game and that’s there to refer to the monopolizer, the person who has to be the first one to raise their hand, to have the last word. And the gentleman with his hands […] the tangent talker, so what are you going to do about that? And what about the person […] the fence sitter, so who just can’t focus on the decision-making meeting […] and the last one on the right is the cynic, giving you body language that says I don’t really care so much. The devil’s advocate is an interesting role that we’ve all played at different times, picking holes in things.

This sort of multimodal representation enhances learning: messages are compressed and immediately understood and retained, the audience can more easily identify with the protagonists and so more readily explore roles, identities and so, in the overall context of the training topic, evaluate their own contribution to organizational practices and cultures. (16) (Online)

(17) (Online)

In Paragraph 6.1 the use of expert citation and referencing in order to boost trainer authority was discussed. In (16) and (17) again external sources of information are used, in this case, from the media, the intersemiotization being provided by the front cover of Time magazine and the straplines accompanying the article which follows inside. The metonym in question is the nomination of the humble employee as The Person of the Year by the prestigious publication which has become synonymous with the annual accolade.

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The semiotic framing in the front cover is relatively complex in terms of layout, display and design. The image is a composite whole, the graphical and verbal semiotic coordinates creating a holistic ensemble. It is cognitively received as a gestalt, an organized whole. Kress sums up the power of such images: By contrast with speech, image is “displayed” on a surface in a (usually) framed space. All its elements are simultaneously present: the arrangement of elements in that space in relation to each other is one fundamental organizing principle and means for making meaning. (2010, 81)

This arrangement achieves its salience through the placement of elements in particular “zones” in the visual space: the framing consists of three embedded rectangles, working from a neutrally demarcated zone to the reconstructed Time cover, which, in turn, gives pride of place to a computer screen, bearing the centrally important element You. Connective graphical effects are also construed and endowed with complex meanings through backgrounding and foregrounding, and size. The master head Time is considerably larger than You, but takes a back seat, giving precedence to the news. Framing is happening also in the verbal mode, with varying information value according to positioning: the “given” element, Person of the Year, occupies the upper space, followed by the “new” mega-reference, You, significantly centre-stage, and then an enacted conversation completes the dialogue with Yes you, you control the Information Age [...] in the lower space. The iconic impact of the ensemble is further enhanced by the emphatic use of font and colour: the Time outer frame is reproduced in its own colour, red, and the black, chunky font You is superimposed on the grey computer screen. The striking front cover announces a long feature article inside the magazine about technology, changing work practices and individual career management, accompanied by the caption in (17), which metonynmically places we, you and me in the same relational and identity space. 6.2.3 Role-play and simulation: experiencing, interpreting and evaluating The previous sub-section looked at how transduction and resemiotization, changes in mode and semiotic domain, are used in the creation of metaphorical and metonymical meanings in the visual texts under analysis, which allow the trainees to engage in the learning process, among other things, through exploration in personal and professional roles and identities. This final part of the analysis describes how these two

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multimodal semiotic resources come into play in the training sessions where participants actively take part in roleplays and professional simulations. What is being framed are typical problems and solutions experienced by employees in hypothetical scenarios, for example managing stress, and also using the internet to assist personal career development. The visual texts, as exemplified below, constitute the sociocognitive frames, the “stage props” for these individual and group experiences. (18) (Stress)

(19) (Stress)

Example (18) is part of an induction into the use of breathing techniques in order to control stressful moments, and the photograph in (19) is the starting point for an exercise in positive imagery and how to develop emotional control through mental focusing on places of comfort and happiness. The framing works at an experiential level, construing a kind of “embodiment”, where mind and body achieve fusion. Trust ensues between trainer and trainees through their direct engagement with this

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value-laden information, resulting in the creation of authentic intersubjectivities and the extraction of a special kind of relevance, or “weight”, from the re-enactments. Evaluation and authentication of information also accrue from this final role-play, illustrated in (20). (20) (Online)

This is the beginning of a session on managing a personal online profile and the professional benefits of self-promotion on the internet. Movement is a design feature of this screenshot: with a series of mouse clicks, starting from the centre of the image, the Google Map changes, zooming in to various places and keeping pace with the oral presentation. Transduction, the integration of image and speech, is necessary to complete the meaning. Trainer: So, I’m just going to start off with, going to the Google pages. I just looked up WhitePages.com and I put in my name. So, I have pretended I have submitted my resume and you want to do a real quick search on me before you call me in for interview. So through this you found my name and my husband’s name, and my address as well as my phone number. Along with that you have a map about how to get to my house. If you go down you can actually go into detail and get the history of the home. […] Not any of this is really ground-breaking but it gives you an idea what can be found really quickly. People can get a bigger picture of what’s going on in my life.

Conducting live demonstrations of these kinds is especially powerful when the interaction is a group phenomenon. The participants are progressively drawn into their own experiences, which are later collectively shared. Trust-building results from this bonding, creating

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empathy between colleagues, peer groups, and a sense of positive identification with the company, seen to be the agent of self-improvement achieved through self-knowledge, self-awareness and changed attitudes. In the preceding analysis, an explanatory framework has been proposed in order to account for the semiotic processes at work in the PowerPoint presentations. Transduction and resemiotization result in differing sensemaking through framing, signing and windowing: we have identified what kind of knowledge is framed, what kinds of frames are used, and how they work, over a selection of the training data. We have also hypothesized the kind of trustwork which is being attempted by all parties (evidence of its actual achievement is beyond the bounds of this chapter). The data would suggest, however, that claims to organizational trust rest on the creation of inter-relational meanings which promote perceptions of competence, authenticity, legitimacy, honesty and benevolence.

7. Concluding remarks As Kress has pointed out, multimodality is not a new phenomenon and is the normal state of human communication, and image has been a part of human cultures longer than script: “The world of meaning has always been multimodal [...] what is new is the intensity of the change, its pace, aided by current means” (2010, 5). He also makes the link between modal meaning and knowledge dissemination: “Knowledge is made and given shape in representation, according to the potential of modal affordances; the process of representation is identical to the shaping of knowledge. Makers of representations are shapers of knowledge” (2010, 27). The inhouse peer coaching sessions which have been the subject of this chapter illustrate these observations. An analysis of the visual texts used in these events reveals ways that knowledge is created and shared, the trust dynamics predicating this achievement, and at the same time, how these multimodal experiences are not only agentive but also generative of organizational meaning-making. Methodologically, using a Situated Social Semiosis approach, it has been possible to evaluate the usefulness of Gunther Kress’s conceptualizations, his theoretical framework and models. This allows us to go beyond impressionism and the production of unwieldly, excessive categories in the description of sense-making, in order to describe what are probably overlapping, embedded cognitive functions when viewed in a holistic processing perspective. With regard to discourse analysis, it is probably true to say that multimodal interactional analysis is signalling a significant paradigm shift. Increasingly studies are going beyond written

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or spoken data treated in isolation, requiring changed conceptualizations: the notion of intertextualty-interdiscursivity is moving towards a consideration of intersemiocity and resemiocity; genre hybridization is incorporating the idea of modal “admixtures”; generic structure is accommodating microtextuality and iconotexts, to name some of these elaborations in constructs. Future work in multimodal analysis will undoubtedly see an extension of discourse fields and contexts: a significant number of studies have been carried out on the mass media (Bateman 2008), and educational products (Jewitt 2009), but organizational learning and knowledge dissemination have received only limited attention to date. On the other hand, the interdisciplinary nature of much multimodal analysis suggests a benefit from collaborating in a wider research framework than before, with mutual exchange and new research partnerships. This will be particularly rewarding for treating complex subjects, the study of moving image, for example. In sum, it is hoped that a study of this kind can contribute to the field of multimodal analysis, and in particular can cast light on the indispensable role of trust creation in organizational change, where emerging communicational priorities, means of knowledge dissemination, resources and admixtures, provide discourse analysts with new challenges.

References Aritz, Jolanta, and Robyn Walker (eds). 2012. Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communication. Maddison (WI): Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Barker, Randolf T., and Martin R. Camarata. 1998. “The role of communication in creating and maintaining a learning organization: Preconditions, indicators, and disciplines.” The Journal of Business Communication 35 (4): 443-467. Bateman, John. 2008. Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents. Basingstoke, UK/New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Bateson, Gregory. [1954] 1972. “A theory of play and fantasy.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry,

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Evolution and Epistomology, by Gregory Bateson, 177-193. New York: Balantine. Bowker, Janet. 2009. “Descriptive processes in business audioconferencing: Telling the corporate story.” In Point of View: Description and Evaluation across Discourses, edited by Sara Radighieri, and Paul Tucker, 175-193. Roma: Officina Edizioni. —. 2012. “From Communities of Practice to Communities of Learning: Interdiscursivity in changing corporate priorities.” In Researching Discourse in Business Genres: Cases and Corpora, edited by Paul Gillaerts, Elizabeth De Groot, Sylvain Dieltjens, Priscilla Heynderickx, and Geert Jacobs, 115-138. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2013a. “Variation across spoken and written genres in internal corporate communication: Multimodality and blending in evolving channels.” In Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse: Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics, edited by Julia Bamford, Silvia Cavalieri, and Giuliana Diani, 47-64. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. —. 2013b. “Multimodal, virtual professional space: ‘Unboundedness’ and ‘grounding’ in corporate webcasting events.” In Space, Place and Identity: Discursive Indexicality in Cultural, Institutional and Professional Fields, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 163-190. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2014. Internal Organization Discourse in English: Telling Corporate Stories. Roma: Aracne Editrice. —. 2015. “Directive acts and narration in corporate training events: Framing structures and processes through language.” In The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English: Genres, Discourse Strategies and Professional Practices, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 145-168. Bern: Peter Lang. Cornelissen, Joep, P. 2004. Corporate Communications: Theory and Practice. London: Sage. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York, NY: Harper & Row. —. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Iedema, Rick. 2003. “Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice.” Visual Communication 2 (1): 29-57. Jewitt, Carey. 2009. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London/New York: Routledge.

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Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse. The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold Publishers. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2002. “Colour as a semiotic mode: Notes for a grammar of colour.” Visual Communication 1 (3): 343-368. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge. Lemke, Jay. 2002. “Travels in hypermodality.” Visual Communication 1 (3): 299-325. Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext. Trans. Laurence Petit. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Luthans, Fred. [1973] 2011. Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach. New York: McGraw-Hill, Irwin. Murray, Kevin. 2012. The Language of Leaders. How Top CEOs Communicate to Inspire, Influence and Achieve Results. London: Kogan Page. Norris, Sigrid, and Carmen Daniela Maier. 2014. Interactions, Images and Texts. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Oswick, Cliff, Tom Keenoy, and David Grant. 2002. “Metaphor and analogical reasoning in organization theory: Beyond orthodoxy.” Academy of Management Review 27 (2): 294-303. Salvi, Rita. 2015. “Re-contextualizing specialized English: from legislation to business.” In The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 19-46. Bern: Peter Lang. Searle, John, R., and David Vanderveken. 1985. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Gail F., Roxanne Zolin, and Jackie L. Hartman. 2009. “The central role of communication in developing trust and its effects on employee involvement.” Journal of Business Communication 46 (3): 287-310. Watson, Rod. 2009. “Constitutive practices and Garfinkel’s notion of trust: Revisited.” Journal of Classical Sociology 9 (4):475-499.

PART III MAINTAINING AND REPAIRING TRUST

CHAPTER NINE A DIGITAL ‘MEETING PLACE’? A SOCIO-SEMIOTIC AND MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF THE WHITEHOUSE.GOV SOCIAL HUB ILARIA MOSCHINI UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE

1. Introduction Since the beginning of his first mandate, President Barack Obama has been committed to expanding the ways in which the Administration communicates with the public and - as it happened for his presidential campaigns - digital technologies have played a crucial role in supporting and enabling this process. Indeed, Obama’s commitment was evident since the original restyling of the White House website, which was modeled after his highly interactive 2008 campaign page (www.barackobama.com) and has resulted in the flow of institutional messages on social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and, the latest of them, Tumblr (Mechaber 2013). These changes in the White House’s institutional communication strategies and channels were originally inspired by the guiding principles that informed the President’s political approach: the necessity to create a government which is “more efficient, more transparent and more creative” and to “reach beyond the halls of government to engage the public” (Weekly Address, April 25 2009). Such principles were confirmed by a White House Blogpost published in May 2009 that announced the creation of official pages on social media platforms, where any citizen would find information and would be able to interact with the institution (Phillips 2009a). In order to facilitate access to the nowadays huge and (almost) daily updated amount of information, the Obama Administration has recently

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created a section in the institutional website named “Engage and Connect” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/engage), the aim of which is both to promote citizens’ participation and to serve as a “social hub” to the official pages that have been created over the years on the different platforms. The present study, which constitutes an additional step in the analysis of the ‘webridization’ of US institutional language (Moschini 2010, 2015 and 2016), features a micro-level analysis of the “social hub” page in order to study how trust and participation are discursively constructed at a linguistic/semiotic and digital level. The case study has been selected after mapping the evolution of the White House’s website since 2008 and it seems to be emblematic in highlighting President Obama’s institutional rhetoric on the relationship between socio-political participation and digital networks. In particular, the object of the analysis will be the framework of the “social hub” page (that is the infrastructure which sets the interpretative frame) and not the various contents which are changed and updated on a regular basis. The methodology adopted to investigate the communicative and textual structure of the “social hub” page is characterized by the integration of instruments derived from Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and Systemic Functional Linguistics with a socio-semiotic approach to multimodality. Indeed, such a choice is motivated by the fact that the analysis of the sole verbal component would not be sufficient to decode the institutional discursive process of trust creation (Adami and Kress 2014), since several resources (such as layout, videos or images) and “modes” - that is the result of socio-cultural shaping of these semiotic resources (Kress 2009) - concur in the creation of meaning in the digital text studied here. Moreover, in order to show how the White House promotes trust through its call to community engagement via social media participation, the linguistic/semiotic analysis will be integrated by references to “the high order semiotic plane of context of culture [that is of] the US cultural history [which] is to be seen as the context for language as system, and thus for meaning potential” (Miller 2004, 59). In detail, through the use of a qualitative framework that encompasses intertextuality and framing theory (Bateson 1954, Bakhtin 1981, Goffman 1981), the author aims at mapping the main discursive strategies used by the White House to build up its image as “the most open and participatory administration in history” and to shed light on the concept of engagement foregrounded by the institutional page, since “engagement” is a key word where social media rhetoric intermingles with US political discourse.

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2. The ‘‘Obamificaation’ proceess of the W WhiteHouse.gov Presidennt Obama’s coommitment to o expanding tthe ways in which w the Administration communiicates with the public waas manifest since s the original resttyling of the White House website, whiich was modeeled after Obama’s 20008 campaign page. Indeed d, as one can see in Figures 9-1 and 9-2, even if the main com mmunicative aim of the Whhite House web bsite is to offer inform mation and services concerning the institution ittself, the versions of the website before and during d Obamaa’s Presidency y diverge from each oother in termss of structural and functionnal organizatio on. To be more precisse, Figure 9--1 features a screenshot of the Whitte House homepage ddated January 2009, that is a few days b efore Barack Obama’s first inauguuration (Januuary 20); wh hile Figure 99-2 shows the t same homepage in May 20009, soon afteer the 2.0 w website restyling was announced iin the White House H blog (Ph hillips 2009b)).

uary 2016 Figure 9-1. www.whitehouuse.gov, Januaary 5, 2009, retrieved Janu https://web.arrchive.org/web//200901052127 743/http://www w.whitehouse.go ov/.

The layoout mode in Figure 9-1 has a vertical ori entation highllighted in the textual organization of the homep page, where iinformation is divided into three ccolumns (“In focus”/ “Lattest News”/ ““Features”). Here, H the reading process involvess an almost liinear path wiith hyperlinkss that are mainly intraatextual refereences to otheer pages of thhe same webssite. User participationn is solicited only by a section s namedd “interact”, which is positioned inn the middle of the first co olumn - that i s not a “priorrity zone” (Nielsen 20000) - and is noot given any other o form of ssalience in terrms of the

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type, color aand font size that t have been n chosen. As rregards the “n navigation mode” (Askkhave and Ellerup E Nielseen 2005), thhe section acctivates a hypermodal connection to an interacctive forum tthat is internal to the website, whhere citizens can c “submit questions q to A Administration n officials and friends oof the White House”. H In contraast, the layoutt of Figure 9-2 2 features a hoorizontal, modular and conceptual oorientation whhich revolvess around a recctangular massk, where the iconic ccomponent hoolds a promin nent position.. This site off display, which is veery similar to the one of Obama’s O electtoral site (Fig gure 9-3), suggests an idea of unity and activates a navigationaal path that is not n fixed, nor linear. S Such a shift inn the layout mode m can be reelated to a ch hange that has occurred in society from “‘verticcal’ to ‘horizoontal structures’, from hierarchical to more opeen participato ory relations” (Bezemer an nd Jewitt 2010, 194).

Figure 9-2. www.whitehoouse.gov, May y 3, 2009, rretrieved Janu uary 2016 https://web.arrchive.org/web//200905030653 345/http://www w.whitehouse.go ov/.

The partticipatory stannce suggested d by the layouut is reinforceed by the tenor structuure of the hoomepage and by its degreee of interacttivity. As regards the iinterpersonal realization off the multimoddal ensemble, focusing only on the most salient part p of the first scroll (the rrectangular mask), m one can identifyy two markerrs of the so-ccalled “digitaal tenor [whicch] tends towards an iinformalizatioon of discoursee” (Posteguilllo 2002, 29). Indeed, I at a lexical levvel, we find a ‘personalizattion’ of the sppeech delivereed by the

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President, w which is idenntified as “y your weekly address”, a linguistic construct w with the secoond person possessive ppronoun that aims at shortening the distance between thee sender and the receiverrs of the message andd is typical off “promotionall culture” (Faiirclough 2006 6). Such a personalizattion strategy iss reiterated in the homepag e by a lexical//semantic chain: “our government””/“contact us””/“your money ey at work” [emphasis [ added].

Figure 9-3. w www.barackobam ma.com, February 27, 2008, reetrieved January y 2016 https://web.arrchive.org/web//200802271957 738/http://www w.barackobama.ccom/index .php.

At a visual level, thee perspective chosen by thee photographer (Kress and van Leeeuwen 2006 [1996]) positiions the view wer in the roo om where Obama is rrecording the address. The receiver off the message is thus ‘visually’ enngaged in the action of taking part inn the recordin ng of the weekly webb video addreess, one of th he key compponents of the on-line transparencyy strategy inaaugurated by Obama’s preesidency. At the same time, the recceivers’ identiity is multilayered since theey are portrayeed as part of the comm munity to whicch the message is addressedd (thanks to th he generic tradition of presidential messages m whiich the weeklly address bellongs to); they are alsoo portrayed ass individual members m of succh a community, given the promotional practice of perceiving g the personaal pronoun “y you” as a singular (Peetroni 2011, 788) and as a ‘sp pecial’ individdual member,, who has been offeredd the possibilitty to access th he White Housse itself.

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On the left: ww ww.barackobamaa.com, Feb. 27 , 2008, retrieveed January Figure 9-4. O 2016 https://w web.archive.orgg/web/20080227 7195738/http:///www.barackob bama.com/ index.php. On the righht: www.whiteehouse.gov, May 3, 2009, retrieved Janu uary 2016 https://web.arrchive.org/web//200905030653 345/http://www w.whitehouse.go ov/.

As far aas the interactive componen nt of the messsage is conceerned, the institutional domain makes fair use off directives suuch as “get up pdates” or “search the site”, which are a given salieence in the m multimodal enssemble as visual anchhors (Djonovv 2007). Neevertheless, tthe highest level of interactivityy is embodied by the box en ntitled “Stay Connected” (Figure 94) which, thhrough its exhhortative title, invites visittors to ‘keep in touch’ with the govvernment on external e platfo orms such as F Facebook or YouTube, Y here represeented by meanns of their naames and theirr logos, wherre official profiles/channnels have beeen created. The T box appeaars to be modeled on a similar secttion, “Obamaa everywheree” (Figure 9--4), that had d already identified thhe loci of ‘soccial’ intertextu uality in Obam ma’s electorall website. As a matterr of fact, duriing the first presidential p caampaign, the different profiles on the most reppresentative so ocial networkking sites were highly exploited byy the then rellatively unkno own candidatte, since theirr function was to expaand his area of o influence by semantically ly delineating it via all possible connnotations likke, for instan nce, a descripption in term ms of his favorite muusic, favorite books and favorite movvies in “netw works of friends” succh as MySpaace or Faceb book, or in tterms of pro ofessional experience iin networks likke LinkedIn (M Moschini 201 0, 143). The strucctural comparrison between n Obama’s eleectoral site (Fiigure 9-3) and the restyyled White House H webpagee (Figure 9-2)) suggests a process p of

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personal branding, that I refer to as ‘Obamification’, which is semiotically reinforced at a visual level by the massive use of the color blue in both the websites. Indeed, blue is - with red and white - one of the colors of the American Flag, and the three colors are all present in both Obama’s electoral site and in the institutional homepage. However, the salience given to blue in the promotional site may potentially be ascribed to the fact that, since 2004, it has become the color that identifies the Democratic party in the Republican/Democrat color-code scheme (Bensen 2004). The ‘Obamification’ of the institutional webpage appears to be testified also by the third message posted in the newly created White House blog on the inauguration day (January 20, 2009). In the blog post entitled “Change has come to the WhiteHouse.gov”, Macon Phillips, the thenDirector of New Media for the White House and former internet strategist for Obama’s campaign, paraphrases the Election Night Victory Speech (2008) and metonymically links the new institutional website to the national community. A process of trust building between the political bodies and citizens is then undertaken by symbolizing the presidential residence as the home of the nation. In addition, the message makes the connection between the campaign website and the new WhiteHouse.gov explicit and exhorts citizens to interact with the institution, through a directive speech act that activates a link to the internal “contact us” page (i.e. “use this form to let us know”) since their participation “will be a priority for the administration [and] the internet will play an important role in that”. At a lexico-grammatical level, the modal verb “will” expressing, as it does, the highest level of probability (Martin and White 2005) contributes to the reinforcing of the seriousness of the commitment: a commitment towards the on-line/national/global community that is strengthened further at the textual level by an adjunct reference to President Obama’s previous experience as a community organizer, that here functions as an implicit TOKEN of judgment.

3. The centralizing stance of the “social hub” The “social hub” page (http://www.whitehouse.gov/engage/socal-hub) - the central object of our analysis - appears to be the evolution of the interactive box mentioned in the previous paragraph (Figure 9-4). Technically, a social hub is a content-aggregation page where all the different social network profiles owned by an institution or a corporation are brought together in the main website, and constitutes an improvement on the more common situation where the reference to social media are given by logo buttons, usually positioned on the homepage of ‘traditional’

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websites (Soames 2012). In addition, social hubs, integrating a multitude of social networks in the same page, offer the opportunity to have a panoramic view of all the social activities in a single glance. Nevertheless, the creation of such content-aggregation pages actually sets up a hierarchy of the different digital pages/profiles of an institution or corporation, thus turning ‘traditional’ websites into the central nodes in the information flux. It is a graded order that appears to be semantically confirmed by the figurative term selected to name the new nodes: indeed, the word “hub” identifies the central part of a bicycle wheel and, metaphorically, the most important part of a particular place or activity, that is where things happen and where important decisions are made (OED 2015). The etymology of the word can be traced back to early 16th century English when it denoted a shelf at the side of a fireplace used for heating pans; alternatively (especially in its variants “hubbe” or the archaic “hob”), it was meant to refer to a peg or stake used as a target in games (Webster 1966). The main concept around which all the above mentioned meanings of the word “hub” revolve is the idea of centrality and it is exactly with this meaning that it is used in network science to indicate a node that features a number of links greatly exceeding the average. Indeed, according to Ravasz and Barabási, who demonstrated that many real networks (including the internet) display a high degree of clustering, hubs are “highly connected nodes” in the hierarchical architectures where they “play the important role of bridging the many small communities of clusters into a single, integrated network” (2003, 6). Such a definition of nodes seems to add a sort of oxymoronic connotation to the expression “social (media) hub”, since social media discourse is characterized by a rhetoric that celebrates egalitarianism and individualism (Gee and Hayes 2011; Spilioti 2015): a rhetoric that stems out of the merging of cybernetics with US counterculture (Turner 2006) and has been strengthened by the portable and highly personalized fruition of social media platforms offered by mobile phones (Baron 2008; Szeredi et al. 2014). In addition, the hierarchical conceptualization of hubs intertextually combined with the metonymical link between the institutional website and the nation itself, which is established by Phillips’ first post on the White House blog, seems to recreate the unbalanced tenor structure of institutional discourse. More in detail, the composition of the social hub page (Figure 9-5) appears to rhetorically revolve around two different forces. In Bakhtin’s dialogical terms (1981 [1941]), one can trace a ‘centripetal’ force that aims at strengthening the unifying and centralizing function of the hub (and of the government) in shaping public debate and

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participationn, along withh the ‘centrifu ugal’ invitatioon to take paart in the national connversations seet up on the different plaatforms the so ocial hub transversallyy links to.

Figure 9-5. WhiteHouse.goov Social Hub Page, Januaary 31, 2016, retrieved February 2016 www.whitehoouse.gov/engag ge/social-hub.

Indeed, at a textuall level, imm mediately afteer the top horizontal h navigation bbar that identtifies the insttitution and tthe main secttions into which the w website is divvided, we fin nd a priority zzone where two t main communicattive functionss are at worrk: describingg the social hub and soliciting uuser participattion. The firrst element oof this sectio on is the sentence “enngage and coonnect”, which is given saalience by its thematic visual posittion, size andd color. The latter contrassts with the chromatic c compositionn of the rest of o the page (aand, as pointeed out in the previous paragraph, oof the entire website): w it iss a semiotic rrealization thaat attracts the viewers’’ attention annd amplifies th he modality oof the messag ge. As for the two impperative verbss (“engage an nd connect”), they are useed in this context as ““a friendly, dirrect call for action, [as] atteention-seeking devices known from m promotionaal and adverttising discourrse” (Askehaave 2007, 736). At a sem mantic level, the words ch hosen pertainn to two diffeerent, yet partially inteermingling doomains: while “connect” caan be directly related to the social m media jargon, the t verb “eng gage” means too refer to “so ociability” (Keenan annd Shiri 20009), which is i one the sstructural feaatures of contemporarry mobile com mmunication (Hanna ( et al. 22011; Gil de Zúñiga Z et

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al. 2012). Nonetheless, the term “engage” is the carrier of a polysemy that can be disambiguated only if one makes reference to the tradition of US political discourse. As a matter of fact, the call for engagement can be traced back to the “moral duty” each American is committed to, a concept which is to be found in the document that constitutes the origo of both the nation and its myth: the Declaration of Independence (Bonazzi 2003 [1999]). Indeed, American citizens are ideally linked by an ethical bond of reciprocity towards the community, the roots of which lie in the founding Covenant, the ‘mutual pledge’ and solemn commitment free people entered into, when they created the new nation (Walzer 1985). The logic-semantic organization of the two terms features the thematic position of the verb “engage”, while the paratactical structure confers them an equal status: such a relationship highlights a temporal progression, with the first element initiating the action and the other continuing it (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, 375), thus marking socio-political engagement as the prerequisite activity for social media participation. Furthermore, returning to US political discourse, a significant relationship between “engagement” as a structural element of the American “sacred socio-political experiment” (Bercovich 1975), and “engagement” as a defining component of the participatory stance on the web can be found in many of the documents which describe the so-called “Digital Revolution” (Moschini 2013). For instance, in the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (Barlow 1996) - a text that mimics the language of the US founding document in many of its passages “cyberspace” is defined as “a new civilization of the Mind” based on a “social contract” and modeled on the same ethical and philosophical principles of the original Declaration as well as on the biblical “Golden Rule”. Such a parallelism has been endorsed also by Hillary Clinton while serving as Secretary of State under the first mandate of Obama’s Presidency, that is in the same years the social media restyling of the institutional website was set up. In her famous speech on “Internet Freedom” (2011), she made the connection between the new digital democracy and the American experiment explicit, by affirming that the new technologies are the “tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression” and by framing global participation on social media into the tradition of the social contract by means of a long chain of intertextual citations to a corpus of texts that goes from the Declaration of Independence to Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms Speech” (Moschini 2013, 548). The call for participation in the White House on-line community appears thus to resonate with a heteroglossic connection to the national

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founding documents that reinforces the modality of the request for sociopolitical/social media engagement. As the co-text positioned under the sentence “engage and connect” explains, it is a commitment that is strongly advocated by the President wishing to make his administration “the most open and participatory” one and to give people “a way to engage with [the] government”. In the message (that is quoted below), the role of the government is emphasized by a lexical/semantic chain (“administration”/ “White House”/“government”), while a chain of superlatives aims at strengthening the illocutionary persuasive force of the declarative act and the action of participating seems to hint at the semantic liminality between socio-political and social media engagement aforementioned. (1) President Obama is committed to making this the most open and participatory administration in history. That begins with taking your questions and comments, inviting you to join online events with White House officials, and giving you a way to engage with your government on the issues that matter the most [emphasis added].

4. The call for grassroots (digital) engagement Obama’s invitation to “engage and connect” resonates also with the words of the message one can read in Figure 9-3 at the centre of the top horizontal area of the Official website of Obama’s first presidential campaign: “I am asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours”. Indeed, the text stages a semantic relationship between a transcendent level of faith and an immanent level of action through participation, which favors the representation of the receivers of the message as DOERS empowered by their being SENSERS. The webpage layout functionally portrays this message, which is made of quotations from Obama’s electoral speeches, as a sort of preamble, that is a performing and ceremonial illocutionary act which sets the interpretative frame of the entire website and shapes the interpersonal relationships between the participants in the communicative event: the then-candidate, the audience and the politicians in Washington. At the same time, its paratactic and anaphoric structure together with the major verbal process emphasize the role of the receivers, who are given power to believe in their capacity to become politically engaged through the on-line and off-line grassroots networks offered by the website. The message can be considered also an example of “Constitutive Rhetoric” (White 1985, Dong et al. 2010) merged with the rhetoric of grassroots democracy (Stout 2010, 264), since it aims at creating, through

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language, a collective identity for the community of receivers who are directly involved in this creation. Trust is based here on the mutual exchange of sets of common values and beliefs thanks to an intertextual chain of references to the corpus of Obama’s electoral speeches and to the sharing of digital platforms, which work as the material symbols of empowerment. Such an ideological common ground is linguistically realized through the direct “interpellation” of the addressees (Althusser 1971, 174) who become the “recruited subjects” of the proposed narration. Returning to the Social Hub page (Figure 9-5), the other element of the first priority zone is the video message “Your Voice Matters”1, which is positioned on the upper right side and which appears to combine all the elements analyzed until now. Indeed, this multimodal text, strengthening, as it does, the semantic liminality between socio-political and social media engagement, seems to constitute a tangible and living proof of the realization of Obama’s participatory and empowering electoral promise discussed above. As far as the layout is concerned, the text is intratextually connected to the “Engage and Connect” tagline by means of the green frame and by the label which exhorts users to watch it; on the other hand, its title “Your Voice Matters” features an inclusive message that uplifts the tenor position of the receivers of the message and highlights - through a synecdoche - the stories users would be told by activating the familiar button link on the YouTube screenshot. This latter is a rhetorical strategy that outlines the usual conversational metaphor of net-speak as well (Crystal 2011). The YouTube video activated by the link – which is entitled “Why Your Voice Matters” – refers to the grassroots participation during the campaign created by the White House in order to convince the Congress not to let the payroll tax cut expire, as stated on the White House Page dedicated to the campaign: (2) In December of 2011, and again in February of 2012, the American people took to the Internet to tell Washington in no uncertain terms that letting the payroll tax cut expire was not acceptable. Tens of thousands of Americans tweeted, called and emailed to remind Washington that politics is not a game – serving the American people is a serious responsibility and the decisions made in Congress have serious consequences on people’s lives. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/40dollars)

1

It is possible to retrieve the video “Your Voice Matters” on the White House You Tube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IyI22mih47s. (Last accessed in February 2016)

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In the text quoted above, Congress is referred to twice by means of a metonymy in which the place (“Washington”) stands for the activities that occur there. Such a figurative trope can also be highlighted as a TOKEN of rhetoric of anti-rhetoric exploited by the White House to shape their selfpresentation in order to align themselves with the interest of the American people. Thus, the main communicative purpose of this brief text seems to be the representation of the government as the most trustworthy defender of the interests of the national community. As a further step in this framing process, some of the people who shared their stories through the Internet were invited to the White House to hear the President speak and the video activated by the YouTube link features their call to other Americans to “speak out on important issues”. Indeed, the participants in the video describe their experiences in “video declarations”, where the eye contact activates a conative-phatic function and demands the receivers’ adherence to the proposed messages (Moschini 2010). Such a visual marker of sincerity functions as a cohesive device that strengthens the semantic connotation of the verb chosen to describe these ‘testimonies’, a verb which is used also in the first sentence of the first interview, that recites: “I’m a perfect example of what speaking out means” (emphasis added). As regards the verbal component of the video, the text is a collection of thirteen interviews, the register of which is colloquial, especially in the first part of the video where people describe their experiences using first singular personal pronouns, verbal contracted forms and lexical items which express their appraisal of the event of having been heard and invited to the White House in affectional terms, thus implicitly exhorting the audience to share their emotional response. Such a positive evaluation is reinforced by the repeated use of the deictic “here” and is balanced by the repetition of adverbs like “really” and “actually” all through the text, which mark the telling of the event as “straightforward statements of fact” (Lyons 1977, 794). In the first part of the video, trust is linguistically created by the recording of the direct ‘testimonies’ of the “regular citizens”, who – at the end of the text – start to engage directly with the viewers by means of the repeated use of imperatives, that perform the conative-phatic function of asking the people to “submit [their] stories through whitehouse.gov” in order to help the government bring change in Washington. In the last statements (quoted below), the exhortations aim at directly engaging the audience and demand adherence to Obama’s electoral promise now turned real, thanks to digital empowerment. Moreover, grassroots participation and social media engagement are directly connected and intertwined with

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a concept of empathy on the model of Obama’s inclusive social narrative (Charteris-Black (2011 [2005]), which is linguistically rendered by the repeated use of an inclusive plural pronoun in a paratactic clause articulation and by making the identity of this community explicit: (3) Ed: We’re all in together. And we all have to look out for one another because we’re American (emphasis added) […] (4) John: Don’t discount your voice. Your voice is important. I never thought that my letter would be read; yet here I am. I encourage you to submit your story because nothing changes without grassroots support. And this is the very definition of grassroots support. It may be done electronically or by tweet in this day and age, but is still the same. You can make a difference... Don’t short sight yourself!

5. Community/Communities in focus Going back to the layout of the social hub page (Figure 9-5), its larger section features the ‘centrifugal’ invitation to take part in the national conversations set up on the different presidential channels/profiles on social media. The request to join this ‘dispersed’ institutional community is realized by a chain of directive illocutionary acts that belong to the semantic area of social media discourse and by the personal pronoun “us” that is used here to refer to the community that includes the White House and its ‘followers’ (“follow us”/“like us”/“add us”/“join us”/“subscribe”). Indeed, the verbs describe the “actions” that have to be undertaken in order to access the many accounts on the different social platforms, with both the logos and the exhortations working as “performative interactive signs” (Adami 2015). As far as the compositional meaning is concerned, this section is divided into frames, each of which is attributed to a single digital platform: it is a layout that presents the different social media as if they were “separate unit[s] of information” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006 [1996], 203), where continuity is vehicled by the homogeneous nature of the represented objects, which is considered an item of shared knowledge. Furthermore, the spatial disposition of the frames confers salience to the three social network entries that are positioned in the first scroll of the page: the Twitter account, the Facebook profile and the YouTube channel. However, only two of them – namely, Twitter and Facebook – are updated almost daily and usually offer similar messages “remediated” (Bolter and Grusin 1999) and “resemiotized” (Kress 2000; Iedema 2001) on the different social networks according to the textual rules of the digital platform.

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The upper part of the social hub feaatures also a llink to anotheer internal webpage, named “comm munities in focus”, that aim ms at reprodu ucing the diversity off the communities of inteerest in termss of gender, age and ethnicity, suuch as Africcan American ns, Women and Girls or o Young Americans (Figure 9-6). This component was nott present in the t “Stay Connected” box (Figuree 9-4), which h only featurred links to the most famous sociial media like Facebook or Twitter, but w was ideally part of the “Obama Eveerywhere” secction, that presented connecctions to platfforms like Black Planeet, the African-American on n-line communnity or Eons, the t social networking site marketed towards baby y boomers. Along w with being ann additional im mplementationn of Obama’ss original electoral webbsite, this disccursive choicee might be connsidered anoth her step in the ‘Obamiffication’ proceess mentioned above, as it trries to settle th he conflict between self-interest andd the common n good (that iis a structurall national fracture), byy picturing a society s where the whole annd its parts in ntersect in their socio-ppolitical/social media engageement (Miller 1993, 155).

Figure 9-6.W WhiteHouse.gov Communities in i Focus Page https://www.w whitehouse.govv/engage/comm munities, retrieveed February 2016.

Indeed, oone of the main pillars of Obama’s O rhetooric is the “retu urn to the original fram mes of the Fraamers […]”: a rhetoric that “seeks for ‘bipartisan’ support beyoond political affiliations” a an nd that advoccates for “social as well as individuaal responsibiliity” (Lakoff 2009). 2 Indeed,, as Lynn Hun nt (2007) has shown, those valuess, empathy in ncluded, lie hhistorically beehind the human rightts expressed in the Declarration of Indeependence and d the US Constitutionn. The result is an inclusiive social narrrative that features f a

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concept of unity based on empathy, a founding American value, which – according to Obama – can potentially overcome divisions, as he declared in his famous DNC Keynote Address (2004), where individuals and the community are bound together by the conceptual metaphor NATION IS FAMILY: (5) I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. That makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum”. Out of many, one.

Such a social narrative appears to be instantiated in the description of the “Office of Public Engagement” - which the “Communities in Focus” section is linked to - that is defined, through personalization and overlexicalization, as “the embodiment of the President’s goal of making government inclusive, transparent, accountable and responsible” (emphasis added). The framing of the Government website and of the Office of Public Engagement as the key places where citizens can discuss “issues that matter the most”, together with the centralizing stance of the social hub as a hierarchical node in the digital domain, may suggest a parallelism between the White House Engage and Connect page and the “Meeting Place” of Puritan origin. Indeed, in the ideal puritan town, which aimed at reproducing the perfection of the divine architecture, the “Meeting Place or House” (which is the exact translation of the Hebrew “bet kneset”, synagogue) was the place where people convened and met (Moschini 2007, 259). Such a building was the focal point of the city and was used for public gatherings as well as for worship: indeed, the “Meeting House” was the place where all the members of a community could conduct religious ceremonies and engage in town meetings (Bryan 2004), thus constituting an original and foundational model of grassroots participation.

6. Final remarks Summing up, the paper features the analysis of the “Social Hub” page of the White House institutional website, identified as the locus of Obama’s call for public engagement through social media, which has been one of the main pillars of his rhetoric, both as candidate and as President. Such a call integrates a range of differing elements, from the will to create a “more transparent government” to the necessity “to reach beyond the halls of government”, as stated in one of the 2009 Weekly Addresses. The

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call appears also to be the structural element upon which the White House website has been designed by the Obama administration. As a matter of fact, the restyling of the institutional website primarily revolves around a horizontal and conceptual layout that reflects a shift from a hierarchical relationship to a more open and participatory stance. In addition to that, the participation of users is constantly solicited and promoted throughout the digital text both verbally and iconically, with a special emphasis on the “Stay Connected” box, which originally represented the portal to the newly created institutional social media pages/channels/ profiles. This box can be considered the predecessor of the “Social Hub” page and is ideally linked to the “Obama Everywhere” section of the 2008 electoral website, on which it appears to be modeled, thus highlighting (along with the layout and the chromatic composition) a process of ‘Obamification’ of the institutional webpage. Such a personalizing process is testified also by the post on the White House blog where the web page restyling is introduced paraphrasing Obama’s Election Night Victory Speech. In the same message, the new version of the website is metonymically linked to the nation, while Obama’s commitment towards the country is ‘sealed’ by his previous experience as community organizer. In this rhetorical scheme, the engagement of the social media and the newly enhanced interactivity of the website are represented as necessary activities and are compared to grassroots participation and socio-political commitment, which more or less explicitly contributes to trust building. This can be organically found also in the social hub page, where the concept of ‘engagement’ is visually as well as verbally realized as the prerequisite activity that precedes social media participation. Furthermore, especially in the video entitled “Your Voice Matters”, the concept of ‘engagement’ is framed within the tradition of US political discourse and, more precisely, within the puritan ethics of commitment which helps connoting social activity not only as an opportunity for citizens of “‘geeking’ out for democracy” (Jenkins), but as a true “moral duty”. This interpretation appears to be consistent also with Obama’s vision of America, which highly recalls the primeval version of the American Dream (Brands 2003), deeply imbued with protestant values, and with his “ethics of excellence” (Obama 2008), which echoes the words of John Winthrop (“love is the bond of perfection”) when describing the founding element of a socially responsible and morally committed community (Vergaro 2015, xxxix). Alongside the ‘centrifugal’ call for citizens’ participation on social media, this paper has highlighted a ‘centripetal’ force (which is encoded

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primarily in the hub being a hierarchical network node), that frames the WhiteHouse.gov as the place to engage with the nation “on issues that matter the most”, on the model of the town meetings that were held in congregational meeting places. This description seems to favor the representation of the WhiteHouse.gov, and metonymically of the entire country, as a true polis, that is “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together” (Arendt 1998 [1958], 198).

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CHAPTER TEN KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER, IDEOLOGIES AND TRUST IN PUBLIC FINANCIAL REPORTING CHIARA PROSPERI PORTA SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

1. Introduction This chapter aims to show the relationship between discursive practices, ideology and trust in central banks’ Annual Reports. The thread joining institution-centred knowledge transfer and people’s trust in the European context affects both the process by which discourse comes to be formed and the way in which some EU institutions, such as central banks, promote an accountable identity, so as to deliver a credible performance in the community of practice (Wenger 1998). Previous research (Prosperi Porta 2013, Salvi 2013, Salvi 2014) has shown how the use and effects of power and ideology in the European financial system may support institutional responsibility, take the burden of blame in case of failure or maintain confidence in a trusted identity. In the idea of public finance with one European identity or different national identities, crucial variables affect the perception of banks’ reliability and trustworthiness in the minds of the public readership. In fact, the role of trust and trustworthiness is embedded in the formation and maintenance of relationships among governments, financial institutions and people. Consequently, reliability of written information in the form of annual reports represents a key to policy making, because the report is an instrumental document promoting trust and confidence in the central bank’s activities; at the same time, the financial readership can assume that the information and decisions in the report mirror a credible institutional identity (Malavasi 2010), thus linking trust to positive performance and affecting the public credibility of the authorities. Conversely, it may be that for ideological reasons and actual economic contingencies, institutional

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knowledge can be the vehicle for an untrustworthy identity, with the result of a loss in public trust. It is also possible that the European economic scenario, as shaped by the central banks’ roles, functions and decisions, may be driven by ideological issues and supposedly shared heritage. Bankers can also direct discourse disagreeably to the readership’s understanding of the matter, especially when the latter does not necessarily think of Europe and its economic problems as a concentric identity level (Papathanassopoulos and Negrine 2011, 159). However, economic actions and policies should always be inspired by two main principles that are at the core of EU institutions: the cooperative behaviour and sense of ‘togetherness’ of Member States in the European community. In this way, trust is discursively interconnected with identity, responsibility and credibility and it profoundly relates to institutional processes (Gambetta 1988). Consequently, the idea of a trustworthy/untrustworthy identity can be constructed, constrained or jeopardised in discourse when knowledge is channelled and disseminated (Candlin and Crichton 2013, 10; Kress 2010, 26; Wilson 2003, digital edition). The aim is to investigate how written communication in this genre can maintain or modify the idea of trust that lies behind the single banking institutions, in view of conveying a trustworthy identity, neutralising any potential source of distrust or engaging trust repair. Thus, this study will take into account how the institutional identity/-ies based on trust, or deteriorated into distrust, can be realised by the development of similar or dissimilar financial discourses. Specifically, the approach will compare qualitatively and quantitatively the degree of likeness and unlikeness between the ECB and the national central banks, as well as track specific rhetorical choices from a national and supranational discursive perspective.

2. Theoretical framework: ideology and trust in financial reporting Trust, its discursive realisation and impact in inter-relational practices have attracted the academic attention of scholars (Wenger 1998; Wilson 2003; Hood 2011; Candlin and Crichton 2013) both in terms of ontological conceptualisation and in the exploration of the linguistic strategies used to build a trustworthy relationship between social systems, organizations and individuals. Candlin and Crichton (2013, 9-13) define trust as a cultural category based on intention and choice in discourse, mediated through conscious

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strategic communication, according to the context of reference and unfolding into a multiplicity of interrelated issues such as knowledge, expertise and dissemination. It also involves role, responsibility and all the interactions associated with any type of identity; it embraces credibility and trust-based recognition; it connotes social/institutional influence enabling trustworthiness or depressing it. Candlin and Crichton (2013, 2) also observe that “trust is always associated with expectations about the behaviour of others that may be more or less founded”, and therefore it can affect language use in knowledge production. In the contemporary dissemination process, the EU is still unable to provide a common framework of ideologically harmonised forms of knowledge in different discourse domains, to support the policies promoted by its agencies or institutional bodies. So far, attempts have been made in some sectors, such as finance and healthcare, in order to adapt national reports to supranational documents, at least to attain a more or less standardised format. However, the result has not met, until now, the supposed expectations, as reflected in the variety of reports issued by the different Member States both in terms of style and structure (Prosperi Porta 2013, 95 ff.; Prosperi Porta 2015, 105 ff.). With regard to finance, the Annual Reports published by the ECB and the other central banks represent instrumental forms of writing that are endorsed by financial institutions with the aim of sorting out budgetary problems and faithfully portraying the current state of the economy. In spite of a desirable impartial authorial stance in the release of these public documents, ideology may play a fundamental role, especially when it comes to national and supranational relations. Since its establishment in 1998, the ECB’s discourses and policies have often been perceived in the eye of the public as being Germanycentred or showing an implicit German influence. On the contrary, the Bank of England has been well known for its debating role in dealing with European economic decisions (Prosperi Porta 2013, 104-108). Unlike England and the ECB, the Bank of Greece has been publicly put in a controversial and subordinate position, presumably in need of supranational guidance to get back on track. However, although it is difficult to unveil the extent to which EU monetary policies can be influenced or single-nation oriented, there is enough evidence to say that trust-related or trust-bearing discourses are central to European finance, for constant knowledge dissemination and application in the economic environment. Consequently, trust-related discourse and defence strategies (Hansson 2015, 299) are features deeply interwoven into the EU banking context,

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because they can serve the function of persuading the readership about the fairness of institutional action, thus helping positive self-representation and, if necessary, throwing light on other countries’ failures, so as to give voice to negative other-presentation or otherness (Hansson 2015). As Candlin and Crichton point out (2013, 3): When people place their trust in systems, they implicitly place trust in the experts associated with those systems, and as a consequence this expert status, articulated in the form of specialist knowledge and expertise, becomes a source of power for the system and for some of the actors that inhabit it. However, this expertise status, and the associated invoking of trust in the system as a whole, may be jeopardised if actors and systems fail to deliver expected outcomes.

This position is also sustained by other scholars (Luhmann 1979; Weaver 1986; Wodak 2006; Tilly 2008; Hood 2011) who identify some discursive defensive practices employed by authorities or institutions, such as self-preservation and blame-related defence, when there is the need to prevent the loss of trust and power. In the context of annual reports, a part of the intended readership is represented by the financial community of practice, who is knowledgegrounded; however, as the documents are accessible online to the general public, the reports themselves may discursively invoke institutional reliability and address expectations or even trigger adverse reactions in the audience. In using conscious defensive practices authors endorse public policies and more or less skilfully present financial results in a positive light. In this process, the appeal to credibility that has to be validated by institutional recognition may become a priority, when shaping trust: it follows that institutional image may either correspond to the values of trust and reliability or detach from them, when the institution is unfairly represented or harshly criticised. The national and supranational relations existing between the ECB, the Bank of England and the Bank of Greece involve different dynamics in articulating discourses of trust, in terms of how it is sourced, projected and perceived. The following paragraphs will provide insight into these three institutional identities and their related representations of trust.

3. Corpus and methodology The study is based on a corpus which is made up of Annual Reports, published over a time span of six years (2010-2015) by the European

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Central Bank (ECB), along with the national banks of two EU countries, namely England (still in the EU during the research) and Greece. As a genre, central banks’ Annual Reports represent public informative institutional documentation describing the tasks and activities of the European System of Central Banks supervised by the ECB1 and report on public financial policies to the community of practice as well as European citizens. The ECB formally administers the monetary policy in the euro-zone as an EU institution and its primary objective is to maintain price stability through the implementation of effective measures against inflation. Its prudential supervision over the national state banks and all the functions it performs suggested the comparison with the two Member States mentioned above. The choice of England and Greece rests on the probability that these two countries may reveal different ideas of trust and variously represent identity, when describing themselves or other central banks. The period considered for the analysis runs parallel to the recent financial crisis that has impacted on European countries in different ways. Therefore, the rationale behind this choice takes into account the crisis from two different perspectives: on the one side, the Bank of England with its independent role from the government in British and European finance; on the other, the Bank of Greece and its less operational institutional independence in relation to the ECB’s supervisory function during the current long-lasting crisis and recession. For each country, the quantitative analysis considered the entire reports over the six years, identifying the category of trust through the lexical salience that elicits it, when describing ideology in action. The quantitative results were obtained with the support of the software ConcApp 5 (Grieves 2005). Lexical frequencies were retrieved in order to detect possible relevant content- and context-related forms in the texts. As illustrated in Table 10-1 below, three sub-corpora were obtained and classified according to time span, size and country of reference. As regards the size, for each bank both the total words and unique words are indicated:

1 The first ECB Annual report was published in 1991, following the realisation of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) stage 1 that started 1st July 1990. Stage 1 included a series of goals such as an increased coordination of monetary policies, a progressive independence of the national central banks and the establishment of the European Monetary Institute (EMI).

Knowledge Transfer, Ideologies and Trust in Public Financial Reporting 211 Bank (2010-2015) ECB England Greece

Total words 601,691 278,464 329,394

Unique words 10,019 9,708 8,969

Table 10-1. Size of the corpus. The qualitative analysis, instead, firstly aimed at exploring how the strategies developed by the authors representing the two national banking institutions helped to reveal similarities or differences compared to the ECB model; secondly, it enabled me to postulate the use of possible heterogeneous financial discourses to transfer knowledge within the EU, according to the way in which trust and accountability are marked. My research will also expand the investigation to the evaluative force displayed in language and the legitimation techniques used either to build trust or maintain it by positive institutional action, or to downsize trust loss in case of unpopular measures, so as to escape blame (Hansson 2015).

4. Analysis of the reports In order to analyse the Banks’ reports I will follow Hansson’s classification (2015) of the discursive strategies used in institutional communication to serve positive self-presentation or negative otherpresentation, in view of avoiding blame and trust loss. This classification takes into account different types of institutional strategies that help to transfer knowledge usefully, such as argumentation, framing, denial, representation of social actors and actions, legitimation, as well as manipulation; they represent an instrument often used in texts to escape responsibility. According to this framework, in the circumstances of blame and confidence risk, the author can deliberately refer to negative events using vagueness either in the form of euphemism or discursive ambiguity. Agents and social actors can also be linguistically obscured or suppressed when there is a real possibility of causing discredit among the general public. Hansson also proposes the use of arguments for limiting blame and achieving positive self-presentation and the deployment of other strategies that contribute to trust building and maintenance. Some of them are: keeping a low profile, pre-emptively apologising, denying a problem, burying blameworthy information or changing the subject when institutional trust is really in danger. An alternative strategy considers the possibility to shift

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responsibility onto others by the application of negative characteristics or the choice of framing a target in the organisation to blame and redeem all the others in order to protect institutional conduct. Conversely, authorial intent may opt to legitimise institutional decisions and repair credibility, taking full responsibility and presenting problematic events in a positive way; it may also appeal to ethical issues in operational practices, reward legitimate actions and condemn the non-legitimate ones. Along with the appeal to high moral standards and the restriction of information, the manipulative strategy of mitigating mistakes is also frequently used to persuade the audience.

4.1 Ideology and trust in financial reporting: the ECB In the dissemination of trust discourses, the ECB has certainly played a leading role, either when building or maintaining credibility and confidence, or guiding more or less favourable economic policies for those Member States that have been ruinously affected by the crisis. Given the topic and context, it could be assumed that some words should show a typical lexical salience in the ECB sub-corpus. In fact, the quantitative analysis shows how some specific trust-related nouns, adjectives, or verbs frequently mark the discourse, as in Table 10-2 below. However, trust itself does not present a high number of occurrences, while nouns such as confidence and stability rank very high, along with surveillance, responsibility and ethics; accountability, commitment, efficiency and effectiveness occupy lower profile positions; also adjectives semantically related to trust are used: ethical, entrusted, credible, committed. The high occurrence of the word ethics is a clear discursive projection of institutional morality in operational practices. Lemmas such as interest (1346 occ., 0.2237%), integration (202 occ., 0.0336%), joint (85 occ., 0.0141%) and common (86 occ., 0.0143%) deserve a separate mention, as they represent an ideological projection in language of the cooperative behaviour inspiring European finance. Differently from what one would expect, the word interest does not exclusively entail the literal financial meaning, but also construes institutional involvement. Some specific verbs occupy very high profiles on their own: maintain (88 occ., 0.0146%), enhance (81 occ., 0.0135%) and restore (34 occ., 0.0063%). Maintain and restore commonly collocate with confidence or stability: for example, maintain stability (12 occ., 0.0020%) and restore confidence (8 occ., 0.0013%).

Knowledge Transfer, Ideologies and Trust in Public Financial Reporting 213 word stability confidence surveillance responsibility ethics accountability efficiency commitment effectiveness ethical entrusted credible committed trust

no. occurrences 776 192 128 97 94 81 77 72 52 26 20 20 18 8

% 0.1290 0.0319 0.0213 0.0161 0.0156 0.0135 0.0128 0.0120 0.0086 0.0043 0.0033 0.0033 0.0030 0.0013

Table 10-2. Trust-related nouns, adjectives and verbs (ECB). Unexpectedly, collocations such as enhance confidence (2 occ., 0.0003%) and enhance stability (3 occ., 0.0003%) have a very low occurrence. The quantitative results confirmed their keyness and aboutness and guided me through the qualitative investigation of language features and discourse strategies displayed in these documents. According to its statute, the ECB is responsible for the custody of the Eurosystem of central banks and the fight against systemic risk. For that reason, the Eurosystem is engaged in discourse with a persuasive intent. Hansson (2015, 304-305) argues that the representation of specific institutions by employing legitimation strategies is an instrument for avoiding blame in texts when dealing with problematic issues. This can be traced back to the earliest reports, where the Eurosystem was represented as a social actor, thus having a personal interest in the correct functioning of financial operations, as in (1), exhibited by the collocation with the evaluative adjective strong, as well as performing a custodial stance against any possible risks or imbalances: (1) The Eurosystem has a strong interest in the smooth functioning of securities clearing and settlement systems because failures […] could jeopardise the implementation of monetary policy […] and the maintenance of financial stability. (ECB 2010, 152)

Thus, the relationship existing between the ECB and the Eurosystem is shaped as a double-binding connection: they both need each other to establish trust and recognition and to implement economic policies. In this

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way, the ECB is the operational emissary appointed to supervise the economy and serve it with full commitment. (2) With the aim of reviving the European structured finance market, given its role in the provision of loans to the economy and, consequently, its potential importance for long-term economic growth, the ECB acts as a catalyst with regard to a number of initiatives related to this market segment. (ECB 2013, 142)

Not only is the bank personified here as an entity able to revive the market, therefore to make it healthy and strong again, but it is also associated with the idea of a catalyst. The metaphorical image is clearly borrowed from chemistry, where it usually indicates a substance that helps a chemical reaction to occur faster without changing itself; similarly, the ECB intervenes in the financial market, in view of long-term growth. Here, the catalyst and the revival process create a powerful connection between the institution, trust and the ideology promoting the Eurosystem. Another trust-bearing image for the ECB is represented by the stability metaphor (Prosperi Porta 2013, 98) in the form of an anchor, that is solid, firm and hence, trustworthy. Figurative language here is used along with value judgements; sound guidance for EU countries is promoted in all the reports examined, and is bound to ideology, with the aim of supporting sustainable fiscal policies: (3) 2011 was an exceptional year with challenging economic and financial conditions. Within this context, the European Central Bank consistently provided an anchor of stability and confidence. (ECB 2011, 8) (4) On the fiscal side, the Commission’s review confirmed that the Stability and Growth Pact has acted as an anchor of confidence and the strengthened fiscal governance framework has provided sound guidance for the Member States’ conduct of fiscal policies, with a focus on preserving fiscal sustainability. (ECB 2014, 37)

In terms of argumentation, the above mentioned examples confirm Hansson’s classification regarding the ways of framing positive institutional self-representation. In the context of a supranational institution, trust and confidence cannot be separated from commitment and surveillance. The Bank appears with a personified identity, whose objective is deeply rooted in its mission, and like Big Brother, its monitoring is fundamental in order to target nations accurately. In this way, institutional credibility seems to rely on scrupulous supervision, while cooperative relations among Member States are under the watchful eye of the ECB:

Knowledge Transfer, Ideologies and Trust in Public Financial Reporting 215 (5) In the ECB’s opinion, the 2012 European Semester had mixed results. […] At the same time, effectiveness and credibility remain subject to a strict implementation of surveillance. Moreover, there is still a need to more finely differentiate surveillance to match the severity of the challenges. (ECB 2012, 136) (6) Several Member States consulted the ECB on measures for strengthening bank stability and on bank reorganization and recapitalization measures. (ECB 2013, 111) (7) As part of its mandate, the ECB regularly monitors risks to financial stability and assesses the shock-absorbing capacity of the euro area financial system. (ECB 2013, 129)

Sometimes, for ideological reasons, this supervisory role can be discursively lessened and balanced by the “peer” action of the other national central banks. Thus, these banks mutually look after one another, because they interact in a common economic environment. (8) The correspondent central banking model (CCBM) is a mechanism established by the European System of Central Banks with the aim of enabling counterparties to use eligible collateral in a cross-border context. In the CCBM, National Central Banks act as custodians for one another. (ECB 2010, 266)

Since trust depends on identification with the institutions, legitimation becomes mandatory to confidence building and maintenance. Other issues relating to this concept include institutional coherence, transparency and effectiveness. Following this, ideology results in the bank’s actions and communication activities; however, at times, what lies behind some difficult decisions can be masqueraded in discourse, while the use of lexis with a trust-bearing connotation and the use of some defensive strategies are displayed (Hood 2011, 135; Hansson 2015, 300). (9) Our actions have therefore not only been consistent with our mandate. They have been credible, transparent and effective. They are continuing to underpin confidence in the euro, a currency whose attractiveness was confirmed at both ends of 2014. (ECB 2014, 8) (10) Communication is a vital tool to support the effectiveness of the ECB’s monetary policy and to build trust among euro area citizens. The ECB has striven for a high degree of transparency from the outset; it was, for example, the first major central bank to hold regular press conferences after monetary policy meetings. (ECB 2015, 93)

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In view of nurturing credibility in the monetary union, examples (11) and (12) show how the author uses belief in reliable statistical data to mark impartiality and exemption from power influence. At the same time, the ECB intentionally promotes trust and identity through the means of multilingual communication and diversity, thus construing a national plurality that is stated as an inner advantage in the EU. (11) The ECB emphasised that the credibility of budgetary surveillance in the EU – and ultimately the credibility and the sound functioning of Monetary Union – depends on the reliable and timely compilation of statistics relating to the excessive deficit procedure, which should be independent of political cycles. (ECB 2010,122) (12) Building trust among the 338 million citizens of the euro area is a major communication challenge. The ECB operates as of 1 January 2015 across 19 countries using 16 different languages. It deals with this plurality by making use of the inherent advantage of having 19 national central banks in the Eurosystem – that is, having colleagues in each country that can ensure that the ECB’s messages are heard and understood in the local context. The ECB also plays its part in building trust by opening up to the public. (ECB 2014, 98)

Conversely, the development of the financial crisis and its severe implications for confidence can heighten distrust in the currency and in the system, and project a lack of government determination in dealing with it. While discourse here shows a sense of institutional powerlessness, at the same time it counts on the defensive strategy of shifting the responsibility onto a third party represented by the states, in view of avoiding public blame: (13) The lingering sovereign debt crisis in several euro area countries and a perceived lack of determination on the part of governments to address the root causes of this crisis continued to have an adverse impact on economic confidence. (ECB 2012, 13)

Similarly, in the need to endorse the application of strict corrective measures against those countries that have endangered the stability of the euro-zone, such as Greece, the ECB’s author can obfuscate the image of other-institutional trustworthiness, in this way feeding its own trust maintenance. Other-discredit or blame deflection (Hood 2011, 22) takes the shape of Greece’s institutional misdoing, as opposed to the ECB’s trusted performance and watchful guidance in urgent reforms; hence,

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insolvency not only generates public debt but also prejudices trust in the Bank of Greece. (14) In Greece, persistent government deficits and high debt, misreporting of fiscal data up until 2009, as well as a postponement of much needed economic and social reform, severely undermined the credibility of the authorities. (ECB 2010, 72) (15) In particular, the rise in Greek sovereign debt yields created a risk of negative spillover effects that threatened to endanger the wider stability of the euro area. In response, on 2 May 2010 euro area countries agreed to activate, together with the IMF, a three-year financial support programme for Greece. (ECB 2010, 156) (16) The ECB’s second contribution to confidence in 2015 was to address threats to the integrity of the euro area. These mainly concerned events in Greece in the first half of the year. […] The ECB acted in full independence according to its rules. That meant, on the one hand, ensuring that we did not provide any monetary financing to the Greek government and that we only lent to banks which were solvent and had sufficient collateral, and on the other, ensuring that decisions with far-reaching implications for the euro area were taken by the legitimate political authorities. (ECB 2015, 5)

If the bank wants to present a concentric European identity, the message that has to be conveyed will have to unfold very positive values: therefore, supervision and reforms will help to relieve the debt problem, improve public confidence and reduce financial heterogeneity among EU countries: (17) The positive market momentum was supported further by advances in both the design of the single supervisory mechanism (SSM) and the restructuring of the Spanish banking system, as well as by the success of the Greek debt buyback operation in December, with the subsequent approval of the disbursement of aid for Greece. All these factors significantly improved financial market confidence and reduced the fragmentation of financial markets in the euro area at the end of 2012. (ECB 2012, 38)

4.2 Ideology and trust in financial reporting: the Bank of England Since its foundation in 1694, the Bank of England has focused on the UK financial system and its responsibilities have accompanied the

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economic history of the country; its strong public commitment was consolidated soon after World War II, so as to achieve a key role in the government policies in the following period. In the last twenty years Parliament has conferred operational independence on the bank and more recently some regulatory reforms have re-shaped its organisation. The “Old Lady” is certainly considered a trusted financial institution by the British public with dignified and dedicated leadership. Furthermore, its disputatious position has always been acknowledged in the European context as a credible and valuable opinion, especially when debating or disapproving expected common economic targets, because they are aimed at adhering to the stability rules of the Eurosystem. word stability interest credit effective effectiveness efficient trust committed efficiency commitment ethical ethics

no. occurrences 555 397 283 176 47 39 38 37 33 23 6 5

% 0.1993 0.1426 0.1016 0.0632 0.0169 0.0140 0.0136 0.0133 0.0119 0.0083 0.0022 0.0022

Table 10-3. Trust-related nouns, adjectives and verbs (England). Also in this case, the quantitative data in Table 10-3 shows revealing findings, in terms of linguistic choices within the sub-corpus. Nouns such as stability, interest and credit have a very high frequency, as well as the adjective effective. Similarly to some findings in the ECB texts, lemmas such as credit and interest are not only used in their basic banking meaning, but are very often construed in a figurative sense. In contrast, other words, which have a lower occurrence than other keywords in the ECB, such as effectiveness, efficiency, trust, commitment or ethics, here are very relevant. Verbs denoting trust maintenance, loss, or repair did not show particular relevance, except for maintain (47 occ., 0.0169%) which commonly appears in the collocate maintain stability (21 occ., 0.0075%). Again, quantitative data helped me to investigate some discursive features in a qualitative perspective. For example, when the authorial intention is to reinforce a trusted image and recognition of the bank, it pairs the values of

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responsibility with the necessity of being institutionally accountable for the respect of public interest. (18) Appropriate accountability for our performance in delivering financial stability will be a keystone of the new regulatory framework. The Bank must be accountable to Parliament and the public. (England 2011, 3) (19) The Bank will have statutory responsibility for protecting and enhancing the stability of the financial system and - in contrast to the present regime - will have the necessary powers to do so. (England 2011, 21) (20) The Bank is responsible for maintaining confidence in the currency, by meeting demand with good-quality genuine banknotes that the public can use with confidence. (England 2013, 17)

The correspondence between credibility, trust and effective action is frequently displayed, as well as powerful communication equates institutional recognition with legitimacy. In Hood’s description (2011), this is one of the most frequent strategies used for winning an argument. (21) Effective communication is essential to build understanding and trust in the roles and functions of the Bank, in its policy frameworks, and in the Bank’s own effectiveness. (England 2013, 22) (22) We are understood, credible and trusted, so that our policies are effective. (England 2014, iv) (23) The ‘One Bank’ Plan […] defined a unified, diverse and talented institution; one that delivers excellent analysis and outstanding execution; and that is transparent and accountable to Parliament and the public. (England 2015, 3)

In the earliest reports, the former governor had persistently proposed some European reforms on the implementation of macroprudential instruments, in this way marking an evaluative stance that, at times, manifests some disagreement with EU-centred policies governing financial decisions. This position is strengthened by the Bank of England’s independence from the ECB, as well as by the effort to maintain public confidence in the national bank. However, sometimes the author does not show the idea of building trust in the Eurosystem that, therefore, appears to be ‘polluted’ by British criticism. In fact, as shown in (24) and (25), terms playing an evaluative force, like paradox, anomaly and

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overextended are employed to linguistically ward off a new crisis by the evocation of good judgement and firm decisions. The maintenance of credibility involves the strong rejection of decisions considered unacceptable and not beneficial to finance. (24) The Bank has sought to encourage debate around three aspects of reform: the structure of the system, regulation and resolution. At the heart of this debate is the paradox that in our market economy we have banks that are too important to fail’. We cannot allow that anomaly to continue. (England 2010, 3) (25) We must play our part in restoring to health an overextended banking system suffering because of its exposure to the euro area. And we must play a central role in implementing the reforms that are necessary to prevent such a costly financial crisis from happening again. (England 2012, 3)

Noticeably, accountability also guides all the duties to be fulfilled in the public interest and explained before the nation; desirably, it is also subordinated to the bank’s primary mandate and may involve the responsibility of other agencies in institutional machinery. As Hansson (2015, 312-313) and Hood (2011, 54) argue, more or less explicitly, public discourse can be designed to justify and excuse any possible error deriving from some actions or decisions, thus marking unintentional institutional misconduct and trying to regain credit. (26) The Bank will also play its part in promoting an open and internationally competitive financial centre in the United Kingdom, using its expertise to help make the UK financial system more efficient, where such efforts would be in the public interest and provided that they do not conflict with its primary responsibilities or those of other agencies. (England 2011, 1) (27) We must carry out our new responsibilities with openness and transparency, and be held accountable for them to Parliament and the public, just as we are for monetary policy. (England 2012, 3)

(28) We have responded to failures of our infrastructure and to troubling instances where our conduct has not met the high standards the public justifiably expect of the Bank. We have addressed the challenge, quickly dealt with comprehensive processes that draw on independent evaluations and advice, and we have learned lessons and taken swift and decisive actions to address shortcomings. (England 2015, 3)

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In very recent years trust and confidence in the bank have been partly damaged and in need of repair, also by discursive means. Institutional dedication implies credibility and keeps promoting trust in its restoring the proper functioning of the economy: (29) At the same time, we have continued, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, to promote price stability, build a resilient financial system and deliver a sustainable recovery in the UK economy. […] But to support an improvement in credit conditions and ensure that recovery, confidence in our financial system must be restored. (England 2013, 3)

Supporting confidence in the institution has been traditionally essential to the Bank’s role, in the past as well as at present, in order to shape a never-fading trustworthy image. (30) By doing so, we will be pursuing the goal first given to the Bank of England in its founding charter in 1694 but still relevant today: to promote the good of the people of the United Kingdom. (England 2014, 4) (31) To maintain public support and trust, the Bank must be sensitive to the concerns and interests of its many stakeholders, must be representative of the community it serves, and must hold itself and all its staff to the very highest ethical standards. (England 2015, 68)

4.3 Ideology and trust in financial reporting: the Bank of Greece As from 2001 the Bank of Greece has been an integral part of the Eurosystem, therefore sharing common financial objectives with other Member States. The Bank of Greece’s position in the Eurosystem is bound by the European rules of finance, but at the same time occupies a special place in the country’s institutional landscape, as regards the performance of transparent and trust-building tasks. Like other national central banks, it is responsible for safeguarding the country’s economic stability, enjoys institutional and operational independence and is accountable to Parliament. The crisis and recession that started in 2008 and continued during the following years have impacted very badly on trust in the Bank and on the lives of the Greek people. Interestingly, the quantitative analysis has highlighted the prominence of unexpected vocabulary to discursively shape trust in this corpus, as illustrated in Table 10-4 below.

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222 word stability effective efforts confidence progress efficiency collective common efficient responsibility committed entrusted ethical ethics

no. occurrences 154

104 91 97 84 54 53 42 36 34 18 6 5 4

% 0.0468 0.0316 0.0276 0.0294 0.0255 0.0164 0.0161 0.0128 0.0109 0.0103 0.0055 0.0018 0.0015 0.0012

Table 10-4. Trust-related nouns, adjectives and verbs (Greece). Nouns such as stability, efforts, confidence and progress appear very often in the texts; other nouns record a lower occurrence, although still quite significant for the qualitative investigation: efficiency and responsibility. The first group can collocate with some verbs indicating trust repair or credibility maintenance: for example, while collocations like maintain stability (4 occurrences, 0.012%), enhance confidence (2, 0.0006%) or enhance credibility (2, 0.0006%) register a very low profile, other expressions such as restore confidence (10, 0.0030%) or safeguard stability (22, 0.0257%) rank quantitatively higher, thus showing a discursive stance of the Bank that needs to establish a positive institutional image in these reports. The focus is also on adjectives describing shared European purposes, such as collective, effective, common and efficient, when associated with European values, behaviours and objectives. The statistical divergence between efficient and effective (the latter ranking nearly three times higher) has qualitatively confirmed the discursive need to represent the institution as sound and able to heal the national economy. Unlike the ECB, but similarly to the Bank of England, Greece very rarely appeals to ethics when dealing with finance. In this respect, the Bank presents itself as committed to public finance and entrusted with responsibilities, but severely tried by long-lasting difficulties: (32) In 2010, the Bank of Greece pursued its mandate with efficiency and commitment in all areas of responsibility, within the scope of its

Knowledge Transfer, Ideologies and Trust in Public Financial Reporting 223 participation in the Eurosystem and in accordance with its Statute. Indeed, during the year, the Bank was entrusted with new duties as regards the supervision of private insurance companies (as from 1 December 2010) and the management of the financial assets of social security funds. (Greece 2010, 15) (33) […] a strict framework of national budgetary rules, coupled with the European rules and institutions currently in force, if properly complemented with an independent national fiscal body entrusted with the observance of country-specific fiscal obligations, will contribute to a sound management of public finances and will help avert the risk of a future fiscal derailment. (Greece 2013, 116) (34) In the past few years, we have covered some very rough ground at tremendous cost to the whole of Greek society. If we can address the relatively few issues still pending […] we will then be able to move on to the next phase, in which the growth potential of the economy will be considerably enhanced. Rapid growth will enable the implementation of more effective policies for restoring social cohesion, which has been eroded by the crisis. (Greece 2014, 14)

Inevitably, Greece’s adherence to supranational policies brings to the fore the necessity to re-affirm and repair institutional trust that has been damaged in the eyes of the public. In order to cope with this problem and discursively reinforce credibility (Candlin and Crichton 2013, 13), the author presents an economic picture, separating past events from the current state and figuratively emphasizing changes that have been in progress to improve the situation. As shown in (35) and (36), the choice of powerful metaphors, such as water or war types, marks the speed of economic achievements, associating them either with the image of a watershed and the flow of fresh, no longer stagnating water, or with a war that has been won but needs to be consolidated. The fresh and, therefore ‘new’ force from the Bank, a newborn rigour and vigilant stance against the crisis, are in some ways trust-embedded and help trust building. (35) Today, the Greek economy is at a watershed. Progress with adjustment has been made, but is still too slow considering the debt dynamics. What is now needed is a strong re-launch of our efforts, to make up for the delays and give fresh impetus to reform policies. (Greece 2010, 29) (36) Thus, a dangerous phase of the crisis comes to a close - at great social cost, but without any devastating effects - and we now find ourselves at a promising new starting point. A battle has been won, but not the war. This

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When quick action is necessary to restore economic stability and institutional credibility, the illness type image is used. (37) Greece has been plagued by serious investment inertia. […] Underlying this disinvestment are anaemic demand, political and economic uncertainty, as well as financing constraints. The prompt rebound of business investment expenditure is key to sustainable growth. […] The restoration of economic and political stability that would strengthen investors’ confidence, […] and initiatives from the financial system to ease financing constraints are deemed necessary. (Greece 2015, 16)

In (37) disinvestment is associated with a severe blood disorder, that has been caused by the system and inevitably has generated economic fatigue and affected investors’ confidence. Re-launching business investment would be ‘healing’ not only for the economy, but also for the Bank. In all three examples above, the discourse attempts to repair credibility and reinforce public confidence by appealing to the country’s big efforts and accepting forms of finance that unfortunately require sacrifices, even though they are the only possible way to get out of the recession. For the sake of trust in the Bank it also considers the possibility of loosening financial constraints so as to encourage investment in the future. However, blame for the government is clearly signalled, even if this creates division in public opinion and leads to institutional distrust. This strategy helps to shift responsibility onto institutional forces that are external to the Bank, while the author is more or less explicitly blaming the Government for the economic recession. (38) In the current context, growth requires the mobilisation of the private business sector; this cannot be achieved as long as the state continues to dominate the economy. Nor can it happen as long as the fiscal deficit and public debt are persistently high. Moreover, there cannot be growth as long as there is a climate of uncertainty and distrust about the prospects of the economy. (Greece 2011, 20) (39) Today, as we are near the end of a protracted recession, a national policy that will lead us safely out of the crisis and onto a path of sustainable growth is required. To be effective, such a policy calls for consensus building and compromise. Both, however, are difficult to

Knowledge Transfer, Ideologies and Trust in Public Financial Reporting 225 achieve in a polarised climate, which acts only to amplify differences and thwarts the convergence of views. (Greece 2013, 21)

In this sub-corpus, ideology also plays its part, but in an unexpected way. In spite of the recurrent appeal to the efforts made by the Greek people to deal with reforms since the onset of the crisis, the Bank seems to have matured self-awareness of its past financial errors, and accepts the ECB’s surveillance. The ECB again is seen as a thinking body and its advice should help to ensure sustainability in all Member States. However, there is criticism against the ECB’s credibility in the implementation of European policies, because a mandatory rather than discretionary application of rules would have harmonised public accounts in all countries, thus preventing or at least limiting economic imbalances. Although the Bank of Greece is responsible for its past unwise management of finances, it tries to present facts at a level of institutional abstractness (Hansson 2015, 305), as if human action were not involved, so as to lessen the perception of blameworthiness by the audience. Predictably, Greece cannot escape the European course of finance, because it becomes a priority to trust building and maintenance: (40) According to the ECB, there is room for a non consistent implementation of rules, which diminishes credibility in the new frameworks before their actual implementation, given that, among other things, the recent past has demonstrated that the exercise of discretion from EU institutions in the operation of the Stability and Growth Pact did not manage to ensure the sustainability of public finances in all Member States. (Greece 2010, 52) (41) As far as Greece is concerned, the institutional improvements to the EMU architecture will ensure that past mistakes in fiscal management are not repeated and will contribute in the long run to economic stability, while the banking union is expected to boost confidence in the banking system. (Greece 2013, 20) (42) The priorities of these policies should be geared towards reducing unemployment and correcting inequality [….] For this to happen, we must remain firmly committed to the country’s European course and soon come to an agreement with our partners that will secure that course. (Greece 2014, 14) (43) The worst was avoided with the agreement reached at the Euro Summit of 12 July 2015 […]. The agreement confirmed the country’s will to remain on its European path. […] If this broad alignment can be maintained despite the differences in approaches and views between the

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5. Concluding remarks This chapter has aimed at exploring the connection between ideology, trust and discursive shaping in central banks’ reports. In order to understand the dynamics under which trust originates, changes or fades, the three different contexts in which the texts were formulated have been analysed and compared in relation to the ideology that promotes a concentric European identity. The quantitative and qualitative investigations offer divergent results: the first, in terms of language salience, the second, regarding the way institutional knowledge and the various expressions of trust are displayed in the texts to transfer institutional ideology. Dissimilar institutional images and ideas of trust have been identified in all three sub-corpora and have been described according to the different degrees of credibility enjoyed by the three banks during the crisis. In fact, trust and distrust have proved to be deeply affected by performance, and accordingly, have empowered, bridled or exposed to risk the single banks in their discourses. As a result, while the ECB sub-corpus has shown how ideology prominently constructs a trustworthy image of the Bank, it has also pointed out some authorial defensive strategies used to shift responsibility and discredit onto others, avoid blame and feed trust maintenance. This has also been linguistically confirmed by the lexical salience of the word ethics that in the ECB marks the idea of institutional morality more often than in the other two banks. To help this discourse channelling, the ECB has also frequently resorted to powerful metaphorical images, as well as to evaluative lexis, especially when downsizing incipient trust loss. Unlike the ECB, the Bank of England’s dignified credibility does not need to emphasize trust in its reports. Therefore, the author has more often focused on the legitimacy and maintenance of recognition, rather than on trust building. This sub-corpus has also revealed the use of linguistic patterns having an evaluative force, so as to sometimes imply criticism of EU-centred financial policies. Finally, trust has appeared to have been jeopardised and seriously damaged in the Bank of Greece’s reports, although occasionally, the authorial intent has tried to neutralise existing distrust or has sometimes engaged in trust repair with the readership, although the need to restore confidence or to maintain financial stability has been frequently

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understated. Similarly to the ECB sub-corpus, Greece has displayed the efficacy of metaphorical language when connecting ideology and trust. These findings offer interesting developing paths for further research, particularly extending the analysis of this genre to the roles of power hierarchy and the impact of relations among Member States in other contemporary knowledge domains that involve trust-related issues.

References Candlin, Christopher N., and Jonathan Crichton. 2013. “From ontology to methodology: exploring the discursive landscape of trust.” In Discourses of Trust, edited by Christopher N. Candlin, and Jonathan Crichton, 1-18. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gambetta, Diego. 1988. Trust. Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. New York: Basil Blackwell. Greaves, Chris. 2005. ConcApp 5 software tool. http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/ concordance. Hansson, Sten. 2015. “Discursive strategies of blame avoidance in government: A framework for analysis.” Discourse & Society 26 (3), 297-322. Hood, Christopher. 2011. The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy and SelfPreservation in Government. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality. A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge. Luhmann, Niklas. 1979. Trust and Power. Chichester: John Wiley. Malavasi, Donatella. 2010. “The multifaceted nature of banks’ annual reports as informative, promotional and corporate communication practices.” In Discourse, Identities and Genres in Corporate Communication: Sponsorship, Advertising and Organizational Communication, edited by Paola Evangelisti Allori, and Giuliana Garzone, 211-234. Bern: Peter Lang. Papathanassopoulos, Stylianos, and Ralph Negrine. 2011. European Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Prosperi Porta, Chiara. 2013. “ ‘Unity in Diversity’: The shaping of identities in the annual reports of the ECB and EU member states’ central banks.” In Space, Time and the Construction of Identity, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 91-118. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2015. “On the state of public health: discourse and sharing practices in annual medical reports.” In The Dissemination of Contemporary

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Knowledge in English, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 99-120. Bern: Peter Lang. Salvi, Rita. 2013. “Space and time in the construction of identity in institutional discourse.” In Space, Time and the Construction of Identity. Discursive Indexicality in Cultural, Institutional and Professional Fields, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 21-45. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2014. “Exploring political and banking language for institutional purposes.” In Corpus Analysis for Descriptive and Pedagogical Purposes, edited by Maurizio Gotti, and Davide S. Giannoni, 241-261. Bern: Peter Lang. Tilly, Charles. 2008. Credit and Blame. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Weaver, R. Kent. 1986. “The politics of blame avoidance.” Journal of Public Policy 6 (4), 371-398. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, John. 2003. “Political discourse.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton. Blackwell Reference online. Retrieved 24 October 2015 http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnnode.html?id=g978 0631205968_chunk_g978063120596821. Wodak, Ruth. 2006. “Blaming and denying: pragmatics.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.), edited by Keith Brown, 59-64. Oxford: Elsevier.

Websites http://www.ecb.int/pub/annual/html/index.en.html http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/annualreport/default.aspx http://www.bankofgreece.gr/Pages/en/Publications/GovReport.aspx

CHAPTER ELEVEN PAST IN PRESENT: DISSEMINATING CREDIBLE HERITAGE KNOWLEDGE ONLINE CHRISTINA SAMSON UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE

1. Introduction The growing significance attributed to the past has been witnessed in both interest and concern for heritage by a variety of groups, such as local communities, governments, academics, owners, business entities, developers, tourists and others identified as heritage stakeholders, users or markets of heritage. The “ubiquitous reach” (Lowenthal 1998) of heritage derives from it being perceived as human centered, socially constructed, more of a public than a private good and a common legacy belonging to all mankind (Loulanski 2006). Such a perception has gradually centre staged heritage dissemination while it is becoming an important aspect of economic development. Heritage, though, cannot be thought of as a commodity in the conventional sense, as it has to be credible when presenting visitors with something they will consider authentic. Thus, when heritage is represented and promoted in online guidebooks the latter not only provide cultural, historical representations of a destination (Samson 2016a), they also build and disseminate heritage knowledge. But can such representations be considered credible? To date, a plethora of studies has examined several issues regarding website credibility, including site design features (Fogg et al. 2001; Flanagin and Metzger 2007; Palmer et al. 2000), cross-media comparisons (Kiousis 2001), source attributions (Sundar and Nass 2001), and the role of users’ reliance on web-based information (Johnson and Kaye 2000, 2002). However, the diversity of information on the web suggests further

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research, in particular of those websites that might be highly relevant for academic and professional ends as, for instance, the many heritage communication websites. Thus, this chapter aims to extend extant research by analysing the repeated use of clusters, that is, the multi-word combinations occurring within a corpus of online heritage guidebooks of Florence (OHGFLO). Moreover, the examination of how the clusters are implemented can reveal which discursive strategies are adopted to represent, maintain and disseminate credible heritage knowledge on the Web. For this purpose, I seek to answer the following questions: x Which are the most frequent clusters emerging in a corpus of online heritage guidebooks of Florence (OHGFLO)? x How are the recurring clusters used to maintain and disseminate credible heritage information in OHGFLO? The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. Paragraph 2 defines the concept of heritage. Paragraph 3 discusses prior research on guidebooks and website credibility. Paragraph 4 describes the corpus and explains the methodology used, paragraph 5 presents and analyses the findings and in paragraph 6 the concluding observations are discussed.

2. Heritage Heritage has undergone significant conceptual changes that have led it to be considered a complex and contested term in extant literature as well as in institutional practice. A number of assumptions inherent in its continued use have generated contrasting views over it. For instance, Hewison (1987) considers heritage a word without definition, Tivers (2002) sees it as a synonym of ‘inheritance’ of mostly material manifestations of the past, whilst Dragoni and Montella (2010) argue it is a dynamic and elastic term without a univocal meaning. In addition, most of the definitions have been increasingly recognised as problematic because they ignore the polysemous and controversial nature of tangible, intangible (Kidd 2011) and, I would add, e-heritage. Recently, a number of scholars have placed less emphasis on material culture per se and have, instead, allowed more distinct understandings of the term to emerge. Chastel (1986) sees tangible heritage as an important part of the cultural heritage of towns and cities, since the term includes a large range of goods whose definition changes over time and space as, for instance, the variety of symbolic, cultural, national identity-oriented, social and suchlike dimensions. Benhamou (2011) argues that heritage can be

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seen as a social construction whose boundaries are unstable and blurred with a twofold source of extension: historical additions and an enlargement of the concept towards other entities, such as gardens, industrial buildings, and so on. As such, objects become a starting point not an end in and of themselves, and heritage becomes reconceptualised as a ‘process’ of passing on and receiving memories, not just the artefacts themselves (Smith 2006). Heritage is, thus, viewed as the wealth of knowledge in its different forms of cultural capital and skills transmitted from one generation to the next (UNESCO); it embodies a community’s social, historical, or cultural dimension (Throsby 2003) and, as such, it is not only about tangible material artifacts and/or intangible forms of the past, but it is also about the meanings placed upon them, the representations created for them (Smith 2006). Heritage is therefore seen as an integral part of the identity of a region or of a cultural destination (ICOMOS 2002). The main controversy, though, in defining heritage seems to derive from it being a cultural and economic subject, possessing both cultural and economic values, and performing both cultural and economic functions (Loulanski 2006). Merriman (1991) claims heritage is understood, on the positive side, as culture and landscape that are cared for by the community and are passed on to the future to serve people’s need for a sense of identity and belonging; but, on the negative side, heritage is considered equal to the heritage industry, which has become a synonym of manipulation (or even invention) and exploitation of the past for commercial ends. However, it is erroneous to disregard or underestimate either one, no matter how distant these perspectives may be. Such features are both present in guidebooks (Samson 2016b) and demand an updated and expanded vision of heritage.

3. Guidebooks and credibility For long guidebooks have been neglected, despite their crucial role and widespread use. Such limited interest might derive from considering these texts as ‘agents of blindness’ (Barthes 1957) or superficial and formulaic, “a debasement of an earlier and more sophisticated travel literature of the Enlightenment” (Koshar 1998, 324). From this viewpoint, guidebooks have repeatedly been seen as a key instrument of the death of the ‘active’ traveller and the development of the modern ‘passive’ tourist who, as Gilbert (1999, 282) claims, follows “a prescribed route through a landscape of selected and ready-interpreted sites and monuments”. However, guidebooks have also played an emancipatory role. On the one hand, they offer an essential aid to autonomous travellers; on the other,

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they contribute to distinguish their users from package tourists who are the most important group of travel guides’ non-users (Nishimura et al. 2007). Recent research has mostly focused on the actual use of guidebooks (Jack and Phipps 2003), on their contribution to construing generic histories of tourism (Bruner 2005) or on people’s narratives about their travelling experiences (Beck 2006). Guidebooks have also been at the centre of studies on genre (Denti 2012), on textual and visual content analysis (Bhattacharyya 1997), on verbal descriptions of built heritage spaces (Samson 2016a), on the use of common and proper nouns (Samson 2016c), on the construal of heritage identity within a corpus linguistic approach (Samson 2011) or on the popularisation of tangible and intangible heritage on the Web (Samson 2014). According to the literature, guidebooks are considered to be responsible for the truthfulness1 of their content (Salvi et al. 2005), even though they generate specific meanings from particular ideological positions (Saarinen 2004). Their authority in presenting a certain idea, or image of a place, is seen as masking the fact that their descriptions are not a straightforward depiction of reality, but a highly selective socially constructed representation (Bhattacharyya 1997). Thus, guidebooks are considered interpretive, as they build expectations while providing a framework for experiencing a destination (Lew 1991), and helpful in shaping the destination behaviour of tourists, since they seek to create (in this case) a wide restorative experience through interactions with heritage for knowledge, enjoyment and recreation. In a similar vein McGregor (2000, 47) concluded that “these texts provide lenses for viewing the world” and they play a role by encouraging the formation of place images, even where no actual visitation occurs. By such means, guidebooks facilitate the creation of a context for readers, when depicting what a place is like and what is worth seeing and experiencing and simultaneously build and disseminate a certain level of knowledge of the place. Indeed, by enacting such processes of inclusion and/or exclusion, guidebooks lead to the highlighting of particular features of an area that will become known or will remain unknown, even though the extent to which these

1

Baedeker in 1832 was the first to abolish the author’s name from the text as well as from the guidebook’s cover as the publisher’s reputation was sufficient to guarantee the guidebook’s quality. Thomas Cook with his 1875 edition of Cook’s Tourist’s Handbook for Southern Italy and Sicily is the first example of a guidebook in the modern sense of the word wherein Cook felt a moral obligation towards his clients, thus contributing to build trust in his organisation and person (Salvi et al. 2005).

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perspectives will be accepted will only depend on the traveller’s individual interests and needs. Most of the information found in guidebooks is produced by external groups of writers/contributors not residing in the destination described and published by international companies (Nelson 2012). Ultimately, though, there is a growing number of local online guidebook writers that provide less stereotyped information and more in-depth knowledge about a destination and its culture (Samson 2016a). This is an essential feature to consider since, as mentioned, online guidebooks are not viewed as neutral vehicles for communication, but sites in which social meanings are created, reproduced, and social identities are formed. Therefore, these texts should not be seen as static markers of cultural traits but as dynamic agents that have the power to shape, alter, and reify meanings associated with places and ways of seeing those places (McGregor 2000). While shaping meanings across their webpages, though, guidebooks need their propositional assertions to be characterized by credibility. Credibility has been described by Fogg and Tseng (1999) as a perceived quality composed of multiple dimensions; Newell and Goldsmith (2001) define credibility as a construct that has evolved from research in the area of source credibility, which broadly defines it as one aspect of message sources (persons, groups, or organizations) that influences the persuasiveness of a communication (Petty and Wegener 1998). More specifically, source credibility refers to the state of being perceived as expert and trustworthy, and thereby being seen as worthy of serious consideration by others (Kelman 1961). As to this point, Pornpitakpan (2004) argues that credibility consists of two dimensions: expertise and trustworthiness. Expertise refers to the ‘perceived ability’ of a source to provide precise information (Petty and Wegener 1998), while trustworthiness refers to its ‘perceived willingness’ to provide accurate information (McCracken 1989). Moreover, Metzger et al. (2010) claim that the credibility of website expertise may be reflected in site informativeness, that is, the display of the appropriate credentials or the site sponsor’s reputation. Trustworthiness may be communicated through explicit policy statements or a lack of commercial content, whereas attractiveness or dynamism may be communicated through various dimensions of the website’s appearance (e.g. layout, graphics, font, color). Thus, in many respects, websites may be considered to be analogous to individuals or organizations that act as information sources whose characteristics engender greater or lesser credibility. Credibility, then, can be seen not as a characteristic of the information or source, but as a property that is judged by the receiver of

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the information. However, Metzger et al. (2010) underline that credibility judgements may be influenced by objective properties of the information or its source and it is this definition that the present chapter draws on.

4. Corpus and methodology The data of the current study, in line with Ghadessy et al. (2001) and Coniam (2004), form a small corpus of online heritage guidebooks of Florence in English (OHGFLO) published by Tuscany’s Regional Tourism Agency. The English version of these guidebooks was taken into consideration because English is considered the lingua franca of tourism and it allows a destination to be positioned in a globalised market (Maci 2012). Thus, representing Florence in English implies the city has globally achieved a prestigious status within the tourism sector. The corpus was compiled by downloading the guidebooks, indicated in Table 11-1, describing Florence’s heritage sites, specifically the main monuments, museums, places, public figures and artists of the city. All the webpages describing Florence’s heritage were first saved as txt texts, in order to be then processed by Wordsmith Tools 0.5 (WST) (Scott 2010), a commercial computer software. Although the corpus is small, it presents the advantage of being homogeneous, as regards time of publication (2013-2014), genre and, as Coniam (2004), Ghadessy et al. (2001) and Sinclair (2001) note, a small corpus, properly constructed, can be viewed as a body of relevant and reliable evidence. OHGFLO also reflects Swales’s (2009) notion of an occluded corpus, that is, a narrow focus on a specific genre. name Virtual Florence APT Museums of Florence Musei Civici of Florence APT Florence

words 12,099 9,223 4,500 921

Table 11-1. Online heritage guidebooks of Florence - OHGFLO. The methodology adopted in this study is a mixed one. It starts with a corpus-driven approach wherein the linguist is committed to the integrity of the data as a whole and the descriptions of language emerge from the corpus itself (Sinclair 2004). The corpus is not seen as a repository of examples that back pre-existing theories, but provides the evidence that reflects and supports directly the theoretical assumptions. Examples are,

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therefore, not adjusted to fit pre-existing categories of the analyst; recurrent patterns and frequency distributions are instead expected to form the basic evidence for linguistic categories and the absence of a pattern is considered potentially meaningful (Tognini-Bonelli 2001). Wordsmith Tools 0.5 (2010) was used to generate a Word list OHGFLO, as shown in Table 11-2, in which the most frequent words are closed-class ones. OHGFLO the of and in to

Table 11-2. OHGFLO word list. The word list was compared with a reference corpus DATA2 (approx. 700,000 words) to obtain a Keyword List. Keywords are words that appear substantially more frequently than expected (positive keys) in a corpus, or substantially less than expected (negative keys) in a given corpus than in a comparable reference corpus. That is, a corpus, as Scott and Tribble (2006) claim, which is much bigger than the corpus studied and that is constructed to be a sample of the language the corpus being studied contains. Keywords provide a useful way to characterise a text or a genre especially when their recurring clusters are searched. These are, broadly speaking, stretches of language consisting of two or more words forming multi-word units frequently occurring in a given corpus and that play a particular role in a given register (Hunston 2011). Multiword units of meaning (Sinclair 1991) are, in other words, flexible word sequences showing mostly consistency in meaning and some in form (Hunston 2011). Recurring clusters can be scrutinised in concordances derived from the Concord function which runs through the corpus and returns a search word in numerous contexts and with co-texts to the left and right. The point of this is to work out characteristic lexical patterns (Scott 2010) deriving from the similarity of items occurring in proximity to a node item. 2

DATA is a reference corpus which includes files of entire texts collected by the author during her participation in national interuniversity research groups sponsored by the Ministry of Education, University and Research of Italy. DATA is formed by files of published written economics lectures, industrial products, surgery products, EU and non-EU museum descriptions, collections, exhibitions, narrative guidebooks.

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Furthermore, since frequency is not seen as self-explanatory, but as data that needs to be explained, a qualitative discourse analysis integrates the interpretation of the recurring clusters across the corpus.

5. Findings and analysis The first three relative most frequent key words in OHGFLO are century, building and the proper noun Medici, as listed in Table 11-3. N 7 10 19

key words century Medici building

frequency 804 515 346

Table 11-3. OHGFLO key words. By carrying out a Concordancer statistical count per 1,000 words, the most frequent collocations of century, Medici and building were identified, as shown in Table 11-4. century me rare examples from the 16th century. The rooms, equipped remains after the seventeenth century alterations. Along w

Medici ceiling among the most admired in the Medici residence. built by Michelozzo for Cosimo de Medici, where a considerable

isters, built in the 16th17th century by Ammannati and his of civic memories. In the 19th century the church received a er the period between the 18th century and the present-day.

of Man, commissioned by the Medici, which represented the the buildings also contain the Medici chapels with their crypt Furniture and textiles from the Medici collections and those

building signed to him in the meantime. Building proceeded slowly the whole way up giving the building a considerable feeling of continuity where Vasari was charged with building the main State buildings Once most of the building had been completed a a monumental u-shaped portico building, a real masterpiece

Table 11-4. Concordances of key words: century, Medici and building. The repeated collocations of the key common noun century in OHGFLO highlight its semantic preferences which are linked to two or more words within a short space of each other. In Table 11-4, these mainly

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refer to the interior space of museums or churches, the historical changes Florentine built heritage underwent, the collections of most famous Renaissance artists or the development of specific areas of the city in a period of time. The concordances, thus, point at the nodes’ typicality or uniqueness (Scott 2010) within the corpus. The semantic preferences of the proper noun Medici refer to the buildings, tombs, churches commissioned by and built under the Medici family or to the architectural style of and the art collections housed in the Medici buildings. The key word building is used as a noun as well as a verb. The noun refers prevalently to the architectonic style and/or shape of buildings, whereas building as a verb recurrently underscores the processes involved in constructing buildings during the Medici period.

5.1 ‘century’ To examine more in depth the semantic preferences of the key common noun century, a 4-word cluster search of the concordances in Table 11-4 was undertaken. The most frequent cluster emerging is shown in Table 11-5: N 1

Cluster THE END OF THE

Frequency 59

Table 11-5. Most frequent 4-word cluster: century. The cluster THE END OF THE and its discourse functions were identified by looking at its proximity to a consistent series of collocates that beyond the cluster share its semantic preferences. The qualitative interpretation of THE END OF THE shows it is repeatedly used with referential expressions to identify an entity or to single out some particular attribute of that entity as especially important (Biber and Barbieri 2007) with the scope of underscoring the value of the sites promoted in the online guidebooks. In examples 1, 2 and 3, THE END OF THE is most frequently used in impressionistic descriptions to present phenomena from the point of view of the encoder’s subjective impressions of positions, directions in space, relations, and qualities (Werlich 1983, 47).

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In the above examples, the cluster refers cataphorically to nouns (aisle, corridor, room) which horizontally define a building’s internal space. The orientational features of language are expressed through deixis (Werlich 1983) which, in this case, includes the use of expressions directing the browser’s gaze through the interior space (At the end of the right aisle, at the end of the corridor, at the end of the room) of a museum, church or cloister. In addition, the descriptions portray also the content of the spaces (Arks, altarpiece, Cloister) by specifying their attributes (two-tone in glazed terracotta, large), while evaluating them (fine) for someone not sharing the same visual experience (Smyth 2008). Moreover, the spatial references are integrated by fictive motion verbs (leading, gives access, leads) that express no explicit motion or state change, but include a mental simulation (Matlock 2004) which in guidebooks have a crucial role in construing representations of a destination3 (Samson 2016b). The use of repeated spatio-orientation references have more than one function. They guide the traveller’s gaze through the Florentine heritage buildings by stimulating vivid visual representations and the historic context in the recipient’s mind who, in this way, will feel as if s/he is already on the spot. They foreground the guidebooks’ expertise, accuracy and educational role within an asymmetrical relationship. In addition, the recurring accurate context descriptions, which the traveller might visit in future, help to build trustworthiness which, according to Selin (2006), is a two-way street down which all must travel to reach amiable ends. In this case, online guidebooks have to be willing to provide accurate information whilst travellers have to possess positive expectations about the guidebooks’ motives. The cluster THE END OF THE has a time reference function which classifies items by locating them in time (15th century, 13th century), while characterizing them against other works in a historical narration of

3

For the construal of heritage representations in guidebooks see Samson (2016a).

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art characterised by the use of past tense (were painted, were invited)4, as in the following example. (4) Towards the end of the 15th century two important frescoes were painted for the church by Domenico Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi. (Santa Maria Novella txt)

Furthermore, in (4), (5), (6) and (7) the cluster refers to historic/factual phenomena within action recording sentences (Werlich 1983, 21) which characterise narrative text types wherein the events are repeatedly portrayed through temporal circumstances (two important frescoes were painted, the Umiliati were invited, Santa Croce church reached its maximum extension and importance, Via Larga was seen pre-eminently as the street of the Medici): (5) By the end of the 13th century the Umiliati were invited to become members of the public administration. (Cenacolo di Ognissanti txt) (6) At the end of the fifteenth century Santa Croce church reached its maximum extension and importance. (Santa Croce txt) (7) At the end of the fifteenth century, Via Larga was seen pre-eminently as the street of the Medici. (Palazzo Medici Riccardi txt)

The factual phenomena are further underscored by the use of evaluative adjectives (important), artists’ names (Domenico Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi), the name of those granted the honour of becoming members of the Florentine public administration (Umiliati), the name of the church (Santa Croce) and of the most trendy street in Renaissance Florence (Via Larga). By doing so, the guidebooks explicitly boost their know-how image, their authority and credibility online, including their trustworthiness, by engaging with the incomplete knowledge-base (Hyland 2010) of the nonspecialist traveller.

5.2. ‘Medici’ A cluster search was also undertaken for the key proper noun Medici and the relative most frequent cluster emerging is indicated in Table 11-6.

4

For the use of verb tenses in guidebooks see Samson (2016b).

240 N 1

Chapter Eleven Cluster OF THE MEDICI FAMILY

Frequency 42

Table 11-6. Most frequent 4-word cluster: Medici. The cluster OF THE MEDICI FAMILY is repeatedly used to underline the importance and power of the Medici family in Florence. This is not expressed by factual descriptions of battles, or any other specific activity the various members of the Medici family were engaged in, but through the description of how any space related to the family was used, as shown in example 8. (8) The church buildings also contain the Medici chapels with their crypt, in which lie the remains of 50 members of the Medici family. (Basilica of San Lorenzo txt)

The use of background historical information on the buildings constructed for the Medici in Florence are based on phenomenonidentifying sentences (Werlich 1983) which correlate with time references (in the early 17th century, from 1865) and with verbs in the past tense that, as in the previous examples, increase online guidebook credibility. Such accurate information is further supported by the evaluation of spatial dimension (fourteen magnificent rooms) which, on the one hand, reflects the power of the Medicis, but on the other, helps to condition the travellers’ decision to eventually visit the places described on the basis of trust in the guidebooks. (9) The Chapel of the Princes was begun in the early 17th century to become the mausoleum of the Medici family grand-dukes. (Medici Chapel txt) (10) The Royal Apartments consist of fourteen magnificent rooms which were the home of the Medici family and, from 1865, of the king of Italy. (Pitti txt)

Although the exposition is transparent, that is without the use of the personal pronoun, the narration includes a homo-diegetic narratee, the would-be tourist to whom the text is addressed, who is consistently inscribed in the text and is the privileged point of view for space narrative. This is foregrounded when OF THE MEDICI FAMILY is used to focus on how art was one of the media used by the Medicis to show off their power and wealth, as shown in the following examples:

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(11) Michelangelo sculpted this statue between 1502 and 1504; this was the most commonly portrayed Biblical character in the Renaissance, because he symbolises astuteness winning over brute force. The statue became the symbol of the city right from the time of the Medici family. (Accademia Gallery txt) (12) The allegorical paintings on the ceiling and the walls narrate the triumphal Return of Grand Duke Cosimo I to Florence, illustrate the possessions of the Medici family and the Stories of the Conquest of Pisa and Siena. (Salone dei Cinquecento txt)

5.3 ‘building’ The cluster search of the key word building highlighted that it is most frequently used as a gerund and its most repeated cluster is indicated in Table 11-7. N 1

Cluster THE BUILDING OF THE

Frequency 21

Table 11-7. Most frequent 4-word cluster: building. THE BUILDING OF THE is frequently linked to architectural nouns, as listed in Table 11-8, which have the function of specifying what was built in the past. Nouns dome cupola structure complex passageway church basilica

Table 11-8. Architectural nouns. The cluster THE BUILDING OF THE is used not only to specify the massive parts of the buildings constructed, but also to underline the difficulty of such endeavours in past centuries, while attributing value to the constructions. By choosing to describe realistic aspects of the Renaissance life in Florence, the guidebooks enhance their know-how and

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informative role. The latter is characterized by expositions of factual phenomena that overlap with descriptions and evaluations which are educational and promotional at the same time. This clearly emerges in examples 13, 14 and 15 with the repeated use of expressions cumulatively construing positive evaluations of the enterprises undertaken by artists and builders in Renaissance Florence (one of main building enterprises, a new attitude, they were different, one of the most important, enormous, for dozens, even hundreds of years). (13) Renaissance men were aware they were different: in less than twenty years, starting from the building of the Brunelleschi Cupola, a small group of artists in just one city, brought about one of the most important revolutions in cultural history, and not only Italian. (Brunelleschi’s dome txt) (14) The dome had to wait till 1420, the year in which Brunelleschi won the competition for the building of the enormous structure. (Cathedral txt) (15) Works often went on for dozens, even hundreds of years making it impossible to forecast and control all the building of the cathedral. (Brunelleschi txt)

The evaluations included in the recurrent overlapping of narrations and expositions have the purpose of highlighting the uniqueness of Florence’s heritage with the aim of distinguishing it from what can be found in other cities, or from what is conventionally encountered in everyday life. Furthermore, the constant time references (twenty years, 1420, dozens, even hundreds of years) contribute to reinforce the historic narration of Florence’s heritage as well as the willingness to convey accurate information which is a fundamental property of trust and credibility.

6. Concluding observations This study, by adopting a corpus driven approach, has highlighted the three most frequent clusters used in a corpus of online heritage guidebooks of Florence (OHGFLO), that is, THE END OF THE, OF THE MEDICI FAMILY and THE BUILDING OF THE. The cluster THE END OF THE is repeatedly used with referential expressions to identify an entity or to single out its particular characteristics with the scope of underscoring its value and making the information provided in the online guidebooks credible. Through its use in descriptions and expositions, the cluster helps to underline particular features characterising

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interior spaces, the value of artworks and artists belonging to a specific period of time or relevant historical events. The purpose is, on the one hand, to engage potential travellers by involving their senses in and out of the ordinary dimension with the typical push-and-pull promotional strategy. On the other hand, the aim is to disseminate Renaissance knowledge while preserving an asymmetrical position which typifies the expert-layman/traveller relationship. The expert role of the guidebooks emerges in the descriptions which are impressionistic, that is, they provide the encoder’s perspective in directing the traveller’s gaze through space while using fictive motion verbs. The latter allow to construe credible trustworthy mental simulations which are relevant for educational purposes as well as for promotional ones. The cluster OF THE MEDICI FAMILY, by contrast, has the function of conveying the connotation of power of the Medici family. The cluster’s extended units of meaning referring to spatial descriptions provide the traveller with knowledge on the richness of the building materials implemented, the artistic representations commissioned by the Medici and the sense of power and wealth that the artworks still convey. The cluster has thus the function of shedding light on the Medicis while displaying the trustworthy know-how of the guidebooks. The repeated use of THE BUILDING OF THE, unlike the previous clusters, is not related to spatial descriptions but to expositions. These are characterized by temporal events frequently referring to the many architectural transformations the Florentine buildings underwent over the centuries and to the artistic features of the buildings which help to underline the precise information in the guidebooks. This, with the recurring use of evaluative adjectives, foregrounds an image of uniqueness which typifies a highly promotional strategy. In sum, the repeated use of clusters in OHGFLO suggests that online guidebooks are a key instrument for viewing, appreciating and learning about Florence’s heritage, as they facilitate the creation of a context for travellers by depicting what a place is like and what is worth seeing and experiencing. Online guidebooks should, therefore, be considered dynamic agents that by using specific clusters, on the one hand, shape, alter, and reify meanings associated with places and ways of seeing those places as extraordinary within a constant binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary (Urry and Larsen 2011). On the other hand, they disseminate credible knowledge based on accurate information which reinforces and bolsters a trustworthy relation with their recipients.

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CHAPTER TWELVE REPAIRING TRUST: A CASE STUDY OF THE VOLKSWAGEN GAS EMISSIONS SCANDAL JUDITH TURNBULL SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

1. Introduction In knowledge dissemination, trust in the source of information is absolutely essential. Without trust the information will be unconvincing and probably disbelieved or ignored. Inversely, when trust has been violated or lost, information, and the way it is transferred and communicated, will play a leading role in repairing and re-establishing that trust. This chapter investigates the recent and, as of yet, unresolved scandal involving Volkswagen (VW) and the supposed non-compliance with gas emission standards both in the US and Europe. The economic costs of the scandal in the short-term amount to the immediate correction of the irregularities, but in the long term the repercussions on the credibility of the company may be inestimable. When news of the scandal broke, sales of affected cars were halted in the United States and the company’s stock value plummeted. The need to repair the trust lost was of paramount importance and urgency. On September 23, 2015 Volkswagen’s CEO had announced that the company was immediately starting a “process of clarification and transparency”, which was undoubtedly intended to reassure a number of stakeholders of the reliability and trustworthiness of the company, but in October 2015 VW posted its first quarterly loss in at least 15 years. The reputation of a company rests on years of success, reliability and trust. Indeed, time is an essential aspect of trust; it takes years to build it up, a brief moment to break it and a very long time to rebuild it (Turnbull

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2013). Trust relations have two main actors, the trustee and the trustor, who, in the case of VW, are multiple stakeholders, such as customers, employees, investors, governmental regulators, politicians and the general public (Benoit 1997, 178). When trust is broken, it needs to be repaired, a process which is even more difficult than building the trust originally, because not only do the positive expectations of trustors need to be reestablished, but also the negative expectations have to be overcome (Kim et al. 2004, 104). According to Mayer et al. (1995), trustworthiness is assessed on the basis of three criteria: ability, integrity and benevolence. Trust-repair discourse may address all or some of the three components of trustworthiness, although information and transparency will be essential elements in re-establishing trust after it has been violated. As the VW CEO communicated on the company’s website, “Only when everything has been put on the table, when no single stone has been left unturned, will people begin to trust us again” (Oct. 10, 2015). Scandals involving companies which have violated the trust of their customers, their investors and the public hit the headlines quite frequently. How companies actually deal with the scandal and manage events, criticisms and attacks from the media has been the subject of many studies. Benoit described five broad categories of strategies that companies can adopt in response to a crisis to repair image, namely denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action and mortification, which were further sub-divided into 14 elements (1997, 179). More recently, Kim et al. (2004) claim that companies may respond to a trust violation by apologising or denying, though apologising for a violation of trust is considered more effective if it is a question of ability, whereas denying responsibility is more effective for a violation of integrity. Ferrin et al. (2007) suggest that a third type of response, reticence, is also possible and frequently adopted by companies. However, the study showed that silence or reluctance to give information is, in fact, a less effective strategy. In any case, the trustee needs to provide relevant and valid information to the trustors so that the latter may gauge the situation and circumstances. Most research on communication strategies in crisis management has followed a context-oriented approach (Benoit 1997; Coombs 2007; Coombs and Holladay 2010; Gillespie and Cornish 2014) within the field of corporate communication, but there have been a few studies focusing on the linguistic resources used to implement the various strategies (Breeze 2012; Fuoli and Paradis 2014; Rafdal 2016). This study will follow in the linguistic line of analysis to investigate how VW communicated through press releases and other official statements published on its corporate

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website to inform stakeholders and trustors about developments during the crisis in an attempt to win back their trust.

2. Corpus and theoretical background The data for the analysis consists of the official statements referring to the gas emissions scandal that were posted in the news section of the Volkswagen Group’s corporate website (www.volkswagenag.com) in the period from September 2015 to December 2015 in response to the evolving events. On September 18, 2015, the EPA (the American Environment Protection Agency) issued a Notice of Violation of the Clean Air Act to Volkswagen AG, Audi AG, and Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. alleging that model year 2009 – 2015 Volkswagen and Audi diesel cars equipped with 2.0 litre engines included software that circumvents EPA emissions standards for nitrogen oxides. A second Notice of Violation was issued to Volkswagen AG, Audi AG and Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., as well as Porsche AG and Porsche Cars North America on November 2. These five companies are collectively referred to as Volkswagen. The Notice of Violation alleges that Volkswagen developed and installed a defeat device in certain diesel vehicles equipped with 3.0 litre engines for model years 2014 through 2016 that increases emissions of nitrogen oxide up to nine times EPA’s standard. On November 19, Volkswagen officials informed EPA that the defeat device has existed in all of its U.S. 3.0 litre diesel models since 2009. The small corpus (19,749 words) is comprised of 41 posts of varying length, often just brief statements of a few hundred words, though occasionally stretching to almost 3,000 words. The total number of posts in that period amounted to more than 130 news items, published at irregular intervals, sometimes more than one on the same day, other times days apart. The analysis will be made using the model of trust-repair discourse proposed by Fuoli and Paradis (2014), which is based on Mayer et al.’s model of trust (1995). Fuoli and Paradis identify two fundamental discourse strategies available to the trust-breaker, namely neutralizing the negative and emphasizing the positive, in order to restore trust in the ability, integrity and benevolence of the trustee. This is a simplified version of Benoit’s model, but focuses on how the various strategies are realized through linguistic resources. The trustee may engage with and respond to the discourses about the cause(s) of the distrust or reject them to neutralize the negative, whilst emphasizing the positive by discursively

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constructing a trustworthy image and identity to overcome the negative aspects (Fuoli and Paradis 2014, 58). These strategies are implemented through the use of dialogic engagement and evaluative/affective language respectively (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Martin and White 2005). Dialogic engagement involves the expression of speakers’ stance on the topic and their position in relation to alternative viewpoints and potential responses from their interlocutors. This may be achieved through the use of epistemic modals, markers of evidentiality, expressions of attribution, adversative discourse markers and negation/denial (Fuoli and Paradis 2014, 59). Emphasizing the positive is realised through evaluation and affect. Evaluation involves the personal positive and negative assessments of people, objects or events and can be realised through a range of expressions. Similarly, affect, which refers to the linguistic expression of emotions of both the speaker and third parties, can be realized through a number of language resources. It is important for establishing empathy and communicating proximity with the interlocutor (Fuoli and Paradis 2014, 60). Fuoli and Paradis’s model of trust-repair discourse draws heavily on Martin and White’s Appraisal theory (2005). The model refers to evaluation and affect as separate entities, whereas in the Appraisal theory Affect is one of three subcategories of Attitude, the others being Judgement and Appreciation. For the purpose of this study I will make a more specific classification of evaluation by focusing on and distinguishing the two components of Judgement, namely social esteem and social sanction (Martin and White 2005, 52-3). Social esteem has to do with normality, capacity and tenacity, the latter two of specific interest in this paper, whereas social sanction is concerned with veracity and propriety. These two subcategories of Judgement clearly reflect Mayer et al.’s (1995) criteria of trustworthiness, ability and integrity, elements which we will see become particularly relevant in the analysis of VW’s response to the scandal. Fuoli and Paradis applied their model to BP’s Deepwater Horizon crisis, which broke after the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The gas emissions scandal is comparable only in part, because the issue did not directly cause death and injury and the impact on the environment is hard to quantify. Nevertheless, in the past VW had always enjoyed an excellent reputation of efficiency, as often quoted in the posts, and suffered a serious loss in trust as a consequence of the scandal.

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3. Analysis As time is an important factor in the unrolling of a scandal and the gradual emergence of details and responsibilities, the analysis will take into consideration three different phases: Phase 1 - September 20 - September 23, 2015 Phase 2 - September 25 - November 23, 2015 Phase 3 - November 25 - December 16, 2015 The first includes the announcement of the problem and the initial responses of VW; the second covers the statements concerning what the company was doing about the scandal and the last, the publication of technical solutions and updated reports on the scandal, in which the first explanations for the violations were given.

3.1 First phase: Position taken by VW to the scandal After the announcement of the EPA on September 18, VW had no option but to acknowledge the EPA’s accusation about engines including software, called a “defeat device”, that circumvents emissions standards for nitrogen. The first response of VW came two days later on September 20 in a statement issued by the CEO on behalf of the company which took note of the US authorities’ investigation and accusations: (1) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board (EPA and CARB) revealed their findings that while testing diesel cars of the Volkswagen Group they have detected manipulations that violate American environmental standards. The Board of Management at Volkswagen AG takes these findings very seriously. I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public. We will cooperate fully with the responsible agencies, with transparency and urgency, to clearly, openly, and completely establish all of the facts of this case. Volkswagen has ordered an external investigation of this matter. We do not and will not tolerate violations of any kind of our internal rules or of the law. The trust of our customers and the public is and continues to be our most important asset. We at Volkswagen will do everything that must be done in order to re-establish the trust that so many people have placed in us, and we will do everything necessary in order to reverse the damage this has caused. This matter has first priority for me, personally, and for our entire Board of Management. (Sept 20, 2015)

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In its statement the company falls short of an actual admission, as it says the EPA revealed their findings and they have detected manipulations, where the 3rd person possessive adjective and pronoun position the company in opposition to the EPA. VW then announces that it has ordered its own external investigation. These markers of evidentiality infer the company believes there is a need for some validation of the findings. An expression of Affect, I personally am deeply sorry communicates proximity with the reader (Fuoli and Paradis 2014, 60), showing the concern of the company, but at the same time VW emphasises the positive, by showing how responsibly the company is behaving because it will do everything necessary to repair this loss of trust. It is not an admission of fault, just the intention to clear up matters. Two days later VW made an official statement that encapsulates its trust repair strategies : (2) Volkswagen is working at full speed to clarify irregularities concerning a particular software used in diesel engines. New vehicles from the Volkswagen Group with EU 6 diesel engines currently available in the European Union comply with legal requirements and environmental standards. The software in question does not affect handling, consumption or emissions. This gives clarity to customers and dealers. (Sept. 22, 2015)

Here we can see a mixture of first emphasising the positive, working at full speed and comply with legal requirements and environmental standards, both expressions of positive Judgement, tenacity and propriety, but then the statement goes on to neutralise the negative by minimizing the seriousness of the irregularities (Benoit 1997, 180), does not affect handling, consumption or emissions. The paragraph ends with what appears to be a gesture of goodwill, this gives clarity to customers and dealers. In the wave of negative publicity following the outbreak of the scandal, VW continued to adopt a strategy of emphasising the positive in order to mitigate the negative effects. As is standard practice, it thanked the CEO for his towering contribution in the past and his responsible attitude in view of his resignation, which is praised as illustrious, all of which evokes propriety and integrity: (3) […] for his towering contributions in the past decades and for his willingness to take responsibility in this critical phase for the company. This attitude is illustrious. (Sept. 23, 2015)

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In the announcement of his resignation the CEO himself uses Affect that expresses his surprise (shocked, stunned) and therefore implying he was totally unaware of the manipulations. In this way, it aligns him with VW’s stakeholders and distances him from the cause of the scandal. Positive evaluation of his behaviour is realized through Judgement, in particular propriety, as he claims he is standing down in the interests of the company: (4) I am shocked by the events of the past few days. Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group. As CEO I accept responsibility for the irregularities that have been found in diesel engines and have therefore requested the Supervisory Board to agree on terminating my function as CEO of the Volkswagen Group. I am doing this in the interests of the company even though I am not aware of any wrong doing on my part. Volkswagen needs a fresh start – also in terms of personnel. I am clearing the way for this fresh start with my resignation. I have always been driven by my desire to serve this company, especially our customers and employees. Volkswagen has been, is and will always be my life. The process of clarification and transparency must continue. This is the only way to win back trust. I am convinced that the Volkswagen Group and its team will overcome this grave crisis. (Sept. 23, 2015)

The same day that the CEO’s resignation was announced, a statement was issued by the company about the conclusions reached in a meeting of the Executive Committee. All except one of the nine numbered paragraphs begins with The Executive Committee and sets out the plans for the corrective actions of the company. This is in contrast with the previous posts in this first phase where VW seemed to be on the defensive and had used vague language, such as irregularities, as opposed to the term manipulations used by the US authorities and a particular software (2): (5) 1. The Executive Committee takes this matter extremely seriously. The Executive Committee recognizes not only the economic damage caused, but also the loss of trust among many customers worldwide. […] 6. The Executive Committee have decided that the company will voluntarily submit a complaint to the State Prosecutors’ office in Brunswick. In the view of the Executive Committee criminal proceedings may be relevant due to the irregularities. The investigations of the State Prosecutor will be supported in all form from the side of Volkswagen. 7. The Executive Committee proposes that the Supervisory Board of Volkswagen AG create a special committee, under whose leadership further clarifying steps will follow, including the preparation of the necessary consequences. […]

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By positioning the company repeatedly as the subject of the sentences VW wants to show that it is taking the situation into hand. This is reinforced by the use of action verbs like have decided, proposes, will work and the very positive self-evaluating description of the company as magnificent bolsters the image of the company (Benoit 1997, 180).

3.2 Second phase: keeping the public informed After the outbreak of the scandal, VW drew its forces together and presented a common front. The announcement of the new CEO’s appointment was made on September 25. By engaging other voices, albeit internal to the company, from the interim Chairman of the Supervisory Board to the Chairman of the Group Works Council representing the employees, the text endorses the decision of the company. Direct quotes add to this approach: (6) The interim Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Volkswagen AG, Berthold Huber, underscored: “Matthias Müller is a person of great strategic, entrepreneurial and social competence. He knows the Group and its brands well and can immediately engage in his new task with full energy. We expressly value his critical and constructive approach.” […] Bernd Osterloh, Chairman of the Group Works Council, commented: “When it comes to leadership appointments the Volkswagen Group does not need hasty decisions. We know and value Matthias Müller for his determination and decisiveness. He does not work on his own, rather he is a team player. That is what Volkswagen needs now.” (Sept. 25, 2015)

At this point, however, VW begins to take up a defensive position, distancing itself from the whole question of the irregularities. Social sanction of the scandal is strongly expressed in (7), absolutely no excuse, but Affect is frequently used to convey the company’s reaction to the situation. In the same example, surprise or rather shock gives the impression that the company was totally unaware of the manipulations and therefore dissociates itself from the misdeeds, whilst concern expressed in (8) aligns the company with the reader, whether s/he be customer, investor or employee, once again depicting the irregularities as unknown and hidden to the company that have only been found by accident. Lastly,

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regret (9) seems to hint at remorse, but probably just expresses disappointment. In this way the company presents itself as an understanding organization and tries to create empathy: (7) The Volkswagen Supervisory Board consulted intensively on the current situation at its meeting today. There is absolutely no excuse for the manipulations which have deeply shocked Volkswagen. The company will leave no stone unturned in getting to the bottom of this, will call those responsible to account, and take the necessary actions. (Sept. 25, 2015) (8) The Supervisory Board is deeply concerned by the discovery of irregularities found when determining CO2 levels for the type approval of Volkswagen Group vehicles. (Nov. 3, 2015) (9) “The Board of Management of Volkswagen AG deeply regrets this situation and wishes to underscore its determination to systematically continue along the present path of clarification and transparency.” (Nov. 3, 2015)

In this phase VW emphasises the positive by focusing specifically on the ability and expertise of the company and on the future. As early as September 25, VW announced a restructuring of the Group, the purpose of which was to strengthen, harmonize, become faster and more agile, become streamlined, scaling back the complexity. Here highly evaluative verbs and adjectives are used to project a positive image for the company. For most of the post no reference is made to the scandal. Only towards the end is the reorganisation said to be part of an ongoing process, so that it has not been prompted by the manipulations issue, though in a veiled and vague manner it says the developments of the last few days had underscored the urgency of this project. At the same time VW deals with the question of integrity by distancing itself from the manipulations and misdeeds to neutralize the negative and emphasises its will and determination to discover the truth and therefore rehabilitate the company: (10) Matthias Müller is exactly the right man at the right time to make a fresh start and to drive clarification of the current crisis that has hit our company … (Sept. 25, 2015)

The cause of the crisis is externalised and the transitive verb hit suggests that the company is a victim of circumstances. In the following example we can see that the distancing from the misdeeds continues by restricting the responsibility to a number of engineers and technicians

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involved in engine development, reinforced by evaluation (Judgement: social sanction) to define their behaviour as unlawful: (11) Berthold Huber, Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board, said: “The test manipulations are a moral and political disaster for Volkswagen. The unlawful behavior of engineers and technicians involved in engine development shocked Volkswagen just as much as it shocked the public. We can only apologize and ask our customers, the public, the authorities and our investors to give us a chance to make amends.” The Supervisory Board today commissioned an American law firm to assist in further clarification and in preparing the necessary steps. (Sept. 25, 2015)

Affect is used again here to align the company’s reaction with the general public’s reaction, shocked Volkswagen just as much as it shocked the public and at the same time dissociate itself from the scandal. There follows an apology, the only time in the three months of posts under examination. A few days later the new CEO Müller addressed VW employees at a works meeting in Wolfsburg and deployed different attitudinal resources to reassure them. He used social sanction (propriety) to condemn those responsible for the misdeeds, no excuse, but social esteem (capacity) to compliment those workers who were present, by inference ‘honest’, as the best automobile team. Affect is used to show his solidarity with them, impatient, and is always reported in the 1st person to give a sense of commitment: (12) He said that what had happened went against everything the Group and its people stand for and that there was no excuse. At the same time he encouraged employees to take heart: "We can and we will overcome this crisis, because Volkswagen is a group with a strong foundation. And above all because we have the best automobile team anyone could wish for." […] The CEO asked employees for their understanding, saying that he, too, did not yet have the answer to many questions: "Believe me – like you, I am impatient. But in this situation, where we are dealing with four brands and many model variants, care is even more important than speed." (Oct. 6, 2015)

Similarly, although it is the integrity of the company that is at stake, Müller shows his own veracity and tenacity and therefore by reflection the company’s:

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(13) “[…] To be perfectly frank: this will not be a painless process.” However, he also gave employees reassurance: “We will do everything we can to ensure that Volkswagen continues to stand for good and secure jobs in the future.” (Oct. 6, 2015)

The ability and integrity of VW are once again underlined by Müller during a visit by the Lower Saxony Prime Minister to the company’s main plant in Wolfsburg. It is interesting to note how the company affirms and proclaims its ability drawing on its past reputation, Volkswagen continues to stand for innovation and outstanding technology, thus sidestepping the present scandal. When the CEO actually does refer to the crisis, it is in the context of the company’s tenacity, working intensively on finalizing the technical solutions, and propriety, efforts to uncover the full truth of what had happened: (14) Müller went on to say: “Our tour of e-Golf production also demonstrated that Volkswagen continues to stand for innovation and outstanding technology – particularly as regards new drives, connectivity and digitization.” The CEO reiterated his assurance that Volkswagen was working intensively on finalizing the technical solutions for its customers as quickly as possible. He added that efforts to uncover the full truth of what had happened were being systematically pursued. Müller commented: “That is the only way to learn the right lessons and avoid such misconduct in future.” (Oct 21, 2015)

The text then moves forward in time towards a positive and renewed framework for the future of the company, which can be built up through the capacity and tenacity of the workforce, thus emphasising once again the positive through ability: (15) At the same time, the visit by the Prime Minister also touched on “how we can fundamentally realign Volkswagen: with leaner structures, with a new, open culture of cooperation, and with technologies for the mobility of the future. These issues will decide the future of our industry and the future of our Group. This is where we must not and will not let up”, Müller said. […] At the end of the visit, the CEO commented: “The workforce here in Wolfsburg and at all the other sites works with great commitment and skill to develop and build the best vehicles for our customers. We are proud of that. And it is the foundation for making sure that Volkswagen continues to be a strong and successful company in future.” (Oct. 21, 2015)

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Indeed, in this phase ability is continually emphasised in the statements published, focusing especially on the technical aspects of plans for the future: (16) CEO Dr. Herbert Diess announced major product decisions: a reorientation of the diesel strategy with the most advanced technologies, the development of a standardized electric architecture for passenger cars and light commercial vehicles, and a new approach for the next generation of the Phaeton. […] “The Volkswagen brand is repositioning itself for the future. We are becoming more efficient, we are giving our product range and our core technologies a new focus, and we are creating room for forward-looking technologies by speeding up the efficiency program.” (Oct. 13, 2015)

Time is an essential factor as Müller announced five key steps to ‘realign’ the company. “We have to look beyond the current conditions for Volkswagen’s successful further development” (Oct. 28, 2015). However, this process of ‘leapfrogging’ the present to distract from the crisis was interrupted by the arrival of a second Notice of Violation. VW responded with an intricate use of Engagement and Graduation. It does not actually start its statement with the notification, but rather from the point when the remedial arrangements are already in place, once again projecting VW beyond the present crisis. It positions the company as the subject, supposedly in control of the situation, as it will revise, document in detail, and resubmit for US approval, even though they have to follow the instructions of the EPA that are the result of discussions: (17) Audi will revise, document in detail, and resubmit for US approval certain parameters of the engine-management software used in the V6 TDI 3 liter diesel engine. That is the result of the discussions held between a delegation from AUDI AG and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB). (Nov. 23, 2015)

VW minimizes the force of the violation by saying the device was not sufficiently described and declared, using passive forms to avoid agency and then goes on to give an explanation. It boldly and almost brashly proclaims, confirmed, that not just one but three devices were not declared. By including the guilty default device with two other innocent devices, whose extremely technical details are given, VW seems to be suggesting that it could almost be an oversight:

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(18) The latest discussions focused on a notice of violation of November 2, in which Audi was informed that AECDs (Auxiliary Emission Control Devices) were not sufficiently described and declared in the application for US type approval. That will now be done with the updated software and the documentation. Audi has confirmed that three AECDs were not declared in the context of the US approval documentation. One of the AECDs relates to the temperature conditioning of the exhaust gas cleaning system. The other two AECDs are for the avoidance of deposits on the Ad-Blue metering valve and of HC poisoning of the SCR catalyst with unburnt hydrocarbons. One of them is regarded as a defeat device according to applicable US law. Specifically, this is the software for the temperature conditioning of the exhaust-gas cleaning system. (Nov. 23, 2015)

As the text continues (19), once again Audi becomes the subject, collaborating with the authorities as if it were a joint undertaking and not the VW fulfilling its responsibilities to the EPA: (19) Audi has agreed with the environmental authorities on further steps of cooperation in which the concrete measures to be taken will be specified. The company has committed to continue cooperating transparently and fully. The focus will be on finding quick, uncomplicated and customerfriendly solutions. The voluntary sales stop for models with the V6 TDI diesel engine, which the three affected Group brands had provisionally decided upon, has been extended until further notice. (Nov. 23, 2015)

3.3 Third phase: explanations The technical measures to be adopted as corrective action in Europe were finally announced on November 25, two months after the start of the scandal and two days after the second Notice of Violation. In the following example the present continuous tense reinforces the idea of the company taking action now and working intensively on the solution. VW shows benevolence towards consumers by providing the least imposing measures, maximum customer-friendliness. It adopts a hedging strategy with the use of the adversative still to indicate that they have not completely resolved the problem, but once again, in the face of adverse conditions, VW emphasises the positive by presenting solutions as the result of advances and improved simulation, thus inferring praise of the ability of the company:

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Chapter Twelve (20) Technical measures for the EA 189 diesel engines affected presented to the German Federal Motor Transport Authority The clarification and solution of the diesel issue is progressing. The Volkswagen Group has presented specific technical measures for the EA 189 engines affected with a displacement of 1.6 and 2.0 litres to the Federal Motor Transport Authority. This means that correction measures have been fixed for the majority of the vehicles affected. In the development of the solutions, the focus was on maximum customerfriendliness. After implementation of the technical measures, the vehicles will comply with the applicable emissions standards. The final technical solution for the 1.2-litre diesel engine will be presented to the Federal Motor Transport Authority at the end of the month and is expected to comprise a software update. (...) Thanks to advances in engine development and improved simulation of currents inside complex air intake systems, in combination with software optimisation geared towards this, it has been possible to produce a relatively simple and customerfriendly measure. (Nov. 25, 2015)

Eventually, on December 10 VW presented an explanation for the gas emissions scandal. Three factors were earmarked. The blame was shared out between the company and individual employees held directly responsible for the misconduct. The company shoulders the responsibility for the failure in ability, competence and expertise concerning organizational issues, whilst attaching the blame on individuals for the lack of integrity. The terms misconduct and shortcomings reflect the legal and moral aspects of a few employees’ behaviour, i.e. their integrity, whereas other failures are accounted for as inherent in the system, weaknesses in the process, thus depersonalising the failures and therefore diminishing the responsibility: (21) Group Audit has identified process weak point As reported on Wednesday, extensive internal investigations, which were subject to external independent review, did not confirm the suspicion of irregularities during the CO2 certification process. Now, the first significant findings in the investigation of the nitrogen oxide (NOx) issue are available. Group Audit’s examination of the relevant processes indicates that the software-influenced NOx emissions behavior was due to the interaction of three factors: • The misconduct and shortcomings of individual employees • Weaknesses in some processes • A mindset in some areas of the Company that tolerated breaches of rules. (Dec. 10, 2015)

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In the following example the weaknesses in the process are described at length, as a justification. Interestingly the word deficiencies, in the sense of weaknesses, is used four times in this extract, for the first and only time, to refer to shortcomings in the organisation and decision-making, therefore reiterating the question of ability and expertise, rather than integrity. The positive verbs and comparative adjectives and adverbs are used to evaluate what VW is going to do to correct its operations, more transparently and systematically, more sharply defined, further sharpen, with greater efficiency and transparency: (22) It is clear that, in the past, deficiencies in processes have favored misconduct on the part of individuals. This is true, for example, for test and certification processes affecting our engine control devices, which were not suited to preventing use of the software in question. Group Audit has suggested specific remedies to correct this. We are concentrating on structuring these processes more transparently and systematically. For example, in the future, software for engine control devices will be developed more strictly in accordance with the 4-eyes principle. In addition, the bodies responsible for the release of such software are being reorganized. They will be given more sharply defined and binding powers and responsibilities. Deficiencies were also found in reporting and monitoring systems. The main problem there was that responsibilities were not sufficiently clear. Volkswagen will now further sharpen them. Group Audit also found deficiencies in some areas of Volkswagen’s IT infrastructure. These deficiencies will also be remedied. Volkswagen will introduce IT systems that allow individual processes to be monitored with greater efficiency and transparency. This will simultaneously reduce our dependence on individuals when problematic processes have to be identified and, if necessary, escalated. (Dec. 10, 2015)

VW offers solutions to the problems in organisation and procedures, and also an explanation as to how the whole issue started. Without explicitly denying responsibility for the scandal, VW presents the circumstances as if nothing could have been done to avoid it. The starting point was the company’s own decision to promote diesel vehicles in the USA, though a bare, impersonal assertion immediately proclaims it proved impossible to have the EA 189 engine meet by legal means the stricter nitrogen oxide requirements in the United States within the required timeframe and budget. This simple statement of cause-effect presents it as an almost inevitable consequence, thus trying to legitimise the use of software that circumvented gas emission standards:

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What amounts to all intents and purposes to an admission of guilt, nevertheless, tries to dissociate the company from the misdeeds. The total absence of agents and the frequent use of the passive form in this example neutralizes the negative and reduces the responsibility, a chain of errors were allowed. Even a strategic decision, which was the starting point for the chain of errors, avoids being accredited to the company specifically through the use of the indefinite article. Events seem to roll on, one after another, like a snowball gathering momentum. Similarly, in the following example, the clear assertion made by Hans Dieter Pötsch, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board, remains impersonal, almost ‘anonymous’, a general statement that does not acknowledge responsibility, but rather loads it onto some unnamed employees. However, it is also a moral statement that most, if not all, stakeholders would immediately agree with, thus aligning the company with them: (24) Hans Dieter Pötsch stressed that, “No business transaction justifies overstepping legal and ethical bounds.” As a first step, nine managers who may have been involved in the manipulations were suspended. (Dec. 10, 2015)

In spite of all that has been said and the very negative publicity, VW still tries to bring out the positive, just as the saying goes, “every cloud has a silver lining”. Here the silver lining consists in the valuable findings that will help the company never to commit the same mistakes in the future and even explicitly makes the appeal for renewed trust:

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(25) As Pötsch stated: “Group Audit’s investigation is producing valuable findings, which will help us create a structure that, rather than favoring breaches of regulations, will prevent them, or at least allow them to be detected early on.” The Company has already drawn a key conclusion based on Group Audit’s findings, namely that its testing practice must undergo comprehensive changes. Volkswagen has decided that in the future emissions test will be evaluated externally and independently. In addition, randomly selected real-life tests to assess emissions behavior on the road will be introduced. Chairman of the Supervisory Board Pötsch stated: “We hope that this will help Volkswagen regain lost trust.” (Dec. 10, 2015)

4. Discussion and conclusion The analysis has shown how the main strategy adopted by VW is emphasising the positive, especially the technical ability of the company. In early statements it did so by referring to the capacity of workers and the company in order to boost the morale of workers and remind stakeholders of the company’s value. This is, in some ways, rather ironic, since it was exactly because of their inability to meet the strict US standards for gas emissions that the whole issue arose. When explanations for the scandal were finally given, VW was willing to accept a negative evaluation of capacity as far as organizational matters are concerned, because it could no longer deny and avoid some kind of responsibility for the scandal. Acknowledging what happened inside the company through organizational failure, rather than a violation of integrity and propriety was a second-best option, but nevertheless safer. Whilst weak internal organisation, in spite of its serious consequences in this scandal, can be remedied by restructuring, honesty and integrity are more difficult to rectify, especially in the eyes of stakeholders. Accepting organizational failure is the lesser of two evils when trying to safeguard reputation and repair trust loss. At the same time, by shifting blame for the illegal manipulations onto a few employees who remain anonymous, the company satisfies, at least in part, the trustors’ need to know who are the guilty parties, or at least know they have been identified. However, these employees serve as scapegoats for the company which weasels its way out of the greater moral and ethical issues, denying responsibility for what was happening inside its own offices. Fuoli and Paradis propose Engagement as a tool for neutralizing the negative. However, apart from a few references to the US and European Federal transport authorities and acknowledging the accusations and

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investigations, the posts are basically monoglossic. They do not take on or attempt to respond to external criticisms. They present the view of the company and any ‘other’ voices, often expressed as direct quotes, are internal and complement, consolidate and confirm the ‘official’ voice of the Group, as we saw in (6). Neutralizing the negative is done primarily by avoiding the issue for as long and as much as possible, by delaying information and statements or emphasising the past expertise and projecting into the future. VW ‘skims’ over the scandal by using vague expressions to refer to it, as for example, the developments of the last few days, a challenging situation, a critical phase for the company, when times are tough to downplay the seriousness of the situation. It adopts what must almost appear to many stakeholders as a ‘hiding your head in the sand’ attitude: (26) The sales figures are very mixed as regards the various markets and brands. Müller explained, “Overall, the situation is not dramatic, but, as was to be expected, it's tense.” (Dec. 10, 2015)

The way VW tries to neutralise the negative through vagueness is not explicitly accounted for in Fuoli and Paradis’s model. The term is used here to refer to the use of generic words to deliberately tone down the force of certain expressions. For example, the word manipulation(s) would imply a deliberate violation of integrity, whereas irregularities suggests an anomaly and deficiencies a failure in ability. In contrast, the word issue is general. The table below shows the distribution of these words in the three phases discussed in the analysis (drawn up with the use of ConcApp software Greaves 2005) and clearly illustrates the strategy adopted by VW to diminish in time the apparent gravity of the accusations. Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

manipulation(s) 3 0.0276% 4 0.0310% 1 0.0178%

irregularities 3 0.0276% 13 0.1008% 2 0.0355%

22 13

issue(s) 0.1705% 0.2311%

deficiencies 4 0.0711%

Table 12-1. Frequency of manipulation(s), irregularities, issue(s) and deficiencies. In the first phase of the scandal the word manipulation(s) is used 3 times (with a frequency of 0.2676%), in the second phase four times (0.0310%) and in the last phase just once (0.0178%). There is a gradual move away from the more incriminating manipulations and irregularities towards the neutral issue(s) and blame-taking deficiencies, but blame-

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taking only as far as ability is concerned. The only occurrence of manipulations in phase 3 is used with reference to those individuals guilty of violating the integrity of the firm: (27) As a first step, nine managers who may have been involved in the manipulations were suspended. (Dec. 10, 2015)

Although the analysis has highlighted the strategies adopted by VW to repair the trust lost through the scandal, it obviously cannot show how successful they have been. However, external sources and measures may give an indication. For example, The Financial Times published an article on Dec. 2 entitled “Volkswagen blunders through communications over emissions scandal” by Richard Milne. It suggested that “the mismanagement of the crisis will be a classic case study in business schools around the world” because VW gave insufficient and misleading information and the lack of clarity over which models were involved antagonised customers. Indeed, it even led to deceit at times. In a statement at the beginning of November VW declared: (28) Volkswagen AG wishes to emphasize that no software has been installed in the 3-liter V6 diesel power units to alter emissions characteristics in a forbidden manner. (Nov. 2, 2015)

But on Nov 23, 2015, as we saw in (17), (18) and (19), it had to admit that it had been installed. The effects of the failure to restore trust are perhaps best reflected in sales figures, which the BBC reported as having risen 4.1% in May 2016, compared to the same month the previous year, but that they were growing much more slowly than those of other European automobile manufacturers (June 26, 2015). As emerged from the analysis, VW frequently describes the actions being taken to show that the company is not just talking, but also doing something about the problem. The actions include finding a technical solution, as well as projecting the company into the future with a new organisation and new managers to avoid or reduce the risk of other mistakes in the future. But as Gillespie and Cornish point out (2014, 81): […] actions and situations that they create may be taken by an audience as much more important communications than verbal statements. […] Equally, intentional proclamations about the future can become almost bereft of communicative significance if they do not coincide with an evolving interpretative frame. In short, when things get serious actions often speak louder than words.

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The VW adopted strategies to repair trust by primarily emphasising the positive about the company. This would appear to be a somewhat blinkered approach, focusing on the internal organizational issues. They failed to develop communication prioritising stakeholders’ interests and expectations. Clear and complete information was needed, but as we have seen there was often a lack of real transparency and sincerity behind the words. And without that, language alone cannot repair trust.

References BBC. 2016. “VW plans huge investment to become electric cars leader.” Available at http://www.bbc.com/news/ business-36548893, retrieved June 30, 2016. Benoit, William. 1997. “Image repair discourse and crisis communication.” Public Relations Review 23 (2): 177-186. Breeze, Ruth. 2012. “Legitimation in corporate discourse: oil corporations after Deepwater Horizon.” Discourse and Society 23 (1): 3-18. Coombs, William T. 2007. “Crisis management and communications.” Available at http://www.instituteforpr.org/topics/crisis-managementand-communications, retrieved March 2, 2016. Coombs, W. Timothy, and Sherry J. Holladay. 2010. The Handbook of Crisis Communication. Malden: MA: Wiley-Blackwell. De Rycker, Antoon, and Zuriadah Mohd Don. 2013. Discourse and Crisis. Critical Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fuoli, Matteo, and Carita Paradis. 2014. “A model of trust-repair discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 74: 52-69. Ferrin, Donald L., Peter H. Kim, Cecily D. Cooper, and Kurt T. Dirks. 2007. “Silence speaks volumes: the effectiveness of reticence in comparison to apology and denial for responding to integrity- and competence-based trust violations.” Journal of Applied Psychology 92 (4): 893-908. Gillespie, Alex, and Flora Cornish. 2014. “The Northern Rock bank run: an analysis of communication within a distrust sequence.” In Dialogical Approaches to Trust in Communication, edited by Per Linell, and Flora Cornish, 79-100. Charlotte NC: Informative Age Publishing. Greaves, Chris. 2005. ConcApp 5 software tool. http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/ concordance. Hunston, Susan, and Geoffrey Thompson. 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

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Kim, Peter H., Donald L. Ferrin, Cecily D. Cooper, and Kurt T. Dirks. 2004. “Removing the shadow of suspicion: The effects of apology versus denial for repairing competence- versus integrity-based trust violations.” Journal of Applied Psychology 89 (1): 104-118. Martin, James R., and Peter R.R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan: London. Mayer, Roger C., James H. Davis, and F. David Schoorman. 1995. “An integrative model of organizational trust.” Academy of Management Review 20 (3): 709-734. Milne, Richard. 2015. “Volkswagen blunders through communications over emissions scandal.” Financial Times, Dec. 2, 2015. Available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b9f35440-98ed-11e5-bdda-9f13f99fa654. html#axzz4EglARicU, retrieved 27/6/2016. Rachfal, Edyta. 2016. “Towards a linguistic model of crisis response. A study of crisis communication in the phone hacking scandal.” Journal of Language and Politics 15 (2): 215-236. Turnbull, Judith. 2013. “Building, enhancing and defending reputation in a corporate website”. In Space, Time and the Construction of Identity. Discursive Indexicality in Cultural, Institutional and Professional Fields, edited by Rita Salvi and Janet Bowker, 293-317. Bern: Peter Lang.

PART IV TRUST IN MEDICAL COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE CONSTRUAL OF TRUST THROUGH RELEVANCE: PATTERNS OF EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE IN MEDICAL WRITING RENZO MOCINI SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

1. Introduction Medical writing, as an instance of academic discourse, is not just about conveying scientific findings but also about constructing authoritative personae. As Hyland (2005, 173) states, “Over the past decade or so, academic writing has gradually lost its traditional tag as an objective, faceless and impersonal form of discourse and come to be seen as a persuasive endeavour involving interaction between writers and readers.” The intentional exploitation of linguistic resources plays a fundamental role in this ‘persuasive endeavour’ as emerges from a corpus of journal articles published online by medical researchers. Therefore, this study seeks to explore the interpersonal dimension of medical writing by highlighting how these specific writers exploit linguistic resources and discourse devices to assume a stance and express judgements. It also examines how they position themselves within their scientific community as scholars capable of evaluating data as ‘relevant’ while asserting their trustworthiness and credibility. A great deal of research conducted with a variety of methodologies has investigated the semantics of evaluation in different discourse domains, particularly in various written and spoken academic texts. But few studies (Lemke 1998; Bondi 2011, 2015; Deroey and Taverniers 2012; Partington 2014; Deroey 2015) have focused specifically on evaluation realised along a relevance parameter. Thus, the first part of this analysis deals with patterns of evaluation directly inscribed in discourse by means of the explicitly evaluative word

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significant, while the second investigates more covert ways of conveying relevance, that is, by means of focusing adjuncts.

2. Corpus and methodology In recent years, a new approach to medical practice, which has highlighted the inadequacy of traditional medical education, has begun to assert itself. It holds, in fact, that clinical decisions can no longer be based exclusively on personal experience and pathophysiological knowledge applied to clinical issues. This new interpretational paradigm, called Evidence-Based Medicine (henceforth EBM), combines what a clinician has acquired through experience and practice with the best available clinical evidence, meaning methodologically valid, state-of-the-art information provided by medical studies. This is an approach that is widely employed and referred to by the vast majority of medical researchers when publishing their findings. The present study, which belongs to a broader-ranging project concerning the language of EBM, is based on a corpus of medical-journal articles (henceforth EBM corpus) which adopt the study designs typical of/applied in EBM: cross-sectional study, randomised control study, case report, cohort study, systematic review, and meta-analysis. The articles used to compile this corpus were downloaded from PubMed.1 Table 13-1 displays the details of the EBM corpus: Number of files 566

Tokens 2,105,861

Types 48,862

Type/token ratio 2.52

Table 13-1. EBM corpus details. Taking as a starting point Hunston and Thompson’s definition of evaluation as “the broad cover term for the expression of the speaker’s or writer’s attitude and stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about” (2000, 5), this study adopts a theoretical framework combining Systemic Functional Linguistics (especially Halliday 1978; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and the Local Grammar of Evaluation. As Hunston and Sinclair (2000) and other scholars (Gross 1993; Barnbrook and Sinclair 1995) claim, the Local Grammar approach may be particularly useful when dealing with specific 1

PubMed is a free public interface to MEDLINE. It contains over 24 million biomedical references from the MEDLINE database.

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areas of language, rather than language as a whole. Evaluation is a case in point in that it does not possess a grammar of its own but is parasitic of other linguistic structures. Local Grammar uses transparent category labels to refer to functional categories. Bublitz (1996, 9) suggests that “the linguistic environment of an item is best, and, arguably, only revealed by applying computational methods to large corpora of discourse”. Therefore, I decided to analyse the chosen corpus using the WordSmith Tools 6.0 software (Scott 2012) to find the most recurrent evaluative items used by the authors and explore all their concordances to identify recurrent patterns of evaluation, by means of which medical writers convey their stances in terms of ‘relevance’. With this in mind, I have adopted Hunston and Francis’s notion of ‘patterns’ consisting in “all the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and which contribute to its meaning. A pattern can be identied if a combination of words occurs relatively frequently, if it is dependent on a particular word choice, and if there is a clear meaning associated with it” (2000, 37).

3. Overt expression of relevance The analysis of the EBM corpus wordlist (Table 13-2), carried out with the aid of the above-mentioned software, shows that very few openlyevaluative lexical items are actually used and that these few are mainly associated with evaluation as expressed by means of a relevance parameter. Item significant significantly important severe healthy effective relevant clear strong importance

Frequency 2,284 1,592 1,045 740 641 566 558 312 308 248

% 0.14 0.08 0.05 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.01 0.01 0.01

Texts 445 359 371 231 167 221 237 176 171 147

% 78.76 63.54 65.66 40.88 29.56 39.12 41.95 31.15 30.27 26.02

Table 13-2. The most frequently recurring openly-evaluative items. The most frequently recurrent evaluative word is the adjective significant which, therefore, deserves special attention and represents the core of this study.

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3.1 What is evaluated The exploration of the right-hand co-text of the node word significant (Table 13-3) reveals that it collocates mainly with words expressing a relationship of comparison in an explicit or implicit way: Node word significant significant significant significant significant significant significant significant significant significant

Right-hand collocate2 difference association reduction increase improvement heterogeneity correlation interaction change decrease

Occurrences 487 239 77 65 64 53 52 50 41 40

Table 13-3. The most frequently recurring right collocates for the word significant. Comparison appears to be explicitly lexicalized through a word like difference or, more frequently, incorporated in the meaning of a word. In fact, words like reduction or increase/decrease entail a certain degree of contrast between two or more entities in relation to values of equality (no increase/reduction/decrease) or non-equality (a certain increase/reduction/ decrease). The implicitly comparative nature of these words may be underlined by the presence of comparative references (e.g. compared to) in the surrounding discourse which renders the basis of the comparison explicit: (1) We have identified a significant increase in sera NGF and BDNF levels in SLE patients compared to a healthy control group. (PlOn)3

2

The number of occurrences includes both the singular and the plural forms of the word (e.g. difference/s). 3 All the quotations are numbered in order of appearance, including those displayed in the tables. Each one is followed by a shorthand code indicating the source. Full names of the sources are provided in a section at the end of the study. Journals bearing a single-word title are referred to using the entire word.

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Alternatively, the comparative frame may be easily retrieved by the reader. It is up to the person interacting with the text to infer the basis of comparison from the broader context: (2) Age is an important factor for both the donor and the recipient because there is a significant increase in the diversity and stability of gut microbiota over the first years of life. (JoA&CI)

Here, increase refers to a comparison established between a certain value (presence of gut microbiota) found during the first years of life and another recorded after this period. Likewise, the words improvement in (3) and (4) or change in (5) and (6) may be read as conveying the notion that a given condition is being relativized with respect to a previous situation, with the first term referring to something which has grown better or has failed to grow better than before, while the second term indicates a fact/situation/condition different (or not different) from what it was before: (3) In addition, a significant improvement was obtained in various blood parameters (CRP:18 mg/L, CK: 102 IU/L), with a stable glycemic profile. (InMe) (4) There was no significant improvement in KI values in the sham group. (Springerplus) (5) That is, despite significant changes in weight status and significant changes in anxiety symptomology, these two factors were not associated. (JoED) (6) This study subsequently found no significant change in uremic toxin levels between the two interventions. (IJoN)

The word heterogeneity actually contains a comparative semantic element as it implies the diverse qualities of a set of items or of the different parts or elements of a single item: (7) In the gallstone studies, despite stratifying the data into subgroups based on study design, study location, study quality, and gender, significant heterogeneity was still detected. (PlOn)

As a result, the collocational profile of the word significant shows that it is primed for evaluating comparative relationships. By the same token, even though the core meaning of words like association, correlation, or interaction is not, strictly speaking, comparative but belongs, primarily, to

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the semantic domain of causation or existence, these words may, however, be considered capable of evoking comparison since they conjure up a comparative frame which is often revealed by means of co-occurring statistical devices such as odds ratio, relative risk, p value, percentages, etc. which are, in turn, inherently comparative: (8) The analysis indicated that CD117 had significant association with poor OS of osteosarcoma (OR=1.36, 95% CI=1.03-1.79, I2=0%, fixed model) and renal carcinoma (OR=4.86, 95% CI=2.72-8.67, I2=0%, fixed model). (IJC&EP)

An odds ratio (abbreviated OR), for example, is a statistical device used to qualify an association, conveying whether a certain event (disease, disorder, etc.) occurs comparatively with the same likelihood over two or more groups. OR can actually express three types/degrees of comparison: equality, where an odds ratio of 1 indicates that a given event is equally likely to occur across groups; majority, where an odds ratio of more than 1 implies that the event is more likely to affect one than another group; minority, where an odds ratio of less than 1 implies that the event is less likely to occur in the first group. The p-value (abbreviated P) also works on a similar comparative basis. It is employed, in fact, to measure the probability that, given a particular set of data, the observed result may be due to chance: the lower the p-value, the more likely it is that an event has happened by chance and therefore the stronger the evidence for rejecting the null hypothesis: (9) We found no significant interaction for anxiety (P=0.48), depression (P=0.75), or insomnia (P=0.99). Further adjustment on these variables did not markedly alter the results. (BMJ)

This quotation is taken from an article dealing with the association between the use of benzodiazepines and different conditions. A p-value of 0.48/0.75/0.99 means that the probability of the interaction between the use of that drug and anxiety, depression or insomnia having occurred by chance is 48%, 75% and 99%, respectively. The interaction values are, therefore, far greater than the threshold value known as ‘significance level’, which is traditionally 5% or 1%, hence a negative evaluation in terms of relevance (no significant interaction). On the basis of this implicit comparison, which expert readers are definitely capable of decoding, it appears clear that the comparative valence of the word interaction, rather than being an inherent property, arises from the discourse context in which the term is used.

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On the one hand, it is exploited ideationally, performing an explanatory function, describing findings in terms of how they resemble or contrast with others. On the other hand, it is employed by writers to orchestrate interpersonality through ‘proximity’, providing the grounds for trustworthiness by positioning themselves in relation both to the material presented and to their scientific community. Here, I employ the term ‘proximity’ to refer, with Hyland (2010, 116), “to a writer’s control of those rhetorical features which display both authority as an expert and a personal position towards issues in an unfolding text”. Indeed, comparison may act as a rhetorical device to achieve ‘proximity of commitment’, since writers assume a position towards the topic, “producing evidence for claims to persuade specialists of the reliability of their interpretations and the rigour of their methods” (Hyland 2010, 119). At the same time, it is often employed to carry evaluations of entities that may be considered as relevant evidence. This way writers realise also ‘proximity of membership’ as they position themselves as disciplinary experts endowed with the authority to point out what is important and capable of engaging readers with the topic.

3.2 How evaluation is realised As the foregoing quotations illustrate, what is evaluated as significant is mainly a relationship which occurs or fails to occur between two or more entities. To illustrate the lexico-grammatical realization of this specific type of evaluation, in line with Hunston and Sinclair (2000, 74101), I use the terms evaluative category, hinge, entity evaluated, evaluator, and restriction on evaluation,4 which are then mapped onto the structural elements of the clause. As suggested by the experiential and logical analysis displayed in Table 13-4 (third and fourth light grey lines, respectively), the nature of the relationship being evaluated is explained in the immediate right-hand co-text of the noun group. The adjective significant acts as epithet and premodifies the entity evaluated in terms of relevance, which, in turn, is realised by means of a noun group functioning as a conflation of head and thing, followed by a postmodifier, or a qualifier in terms of experiential meaning. Postmodification provides details of the evaluated entity, adding new information about the head noun and thus identifying the particular relationship referred to as significant. Restriction on evaluation may be 4

Hunston and Sinclair used the term ‘thing’. Given the abstract quality of what is evaluated here, I prefer the term ‘entity’. I also use the label ‘restriction on evaluation’ to refer to the specification of the relationship in question.

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realised by means of one (10), or multiple prepositional phrases, either representing one postmodifier embedded in another (11) or a series of postmodifiers affecting the head noun which are realised through extremely dense sequences of prepositional phrases, including –ing (12) and –ed participle clauses (13).

(10)

Evaluative category Adjective group Premodifier Deictic Epithet A significant

Entity evaluated Noun group Head Thing association

(11)

A

significant

reduction

(12)

No

significant

difference

(13)

A

significant

increase

Restriction on evaluation Prepositional phrase Postmodifier Qualifier between hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and B-cell lymphoma. (WJoG) in the incidence of HIV in circumcised males. (PlOn) in the extent of motion (x/y/z/pitch/yaw/roll) between individuals with ASD and typically developing subjects in Experiment 1. (Brain) of the originally-diminished brain activity in the oxytocin session compared with placebo [t(19) = 2.716, r2 = 0.28, P = 0.007, onetailed]. (Brain)

Table 13-4. Experiential and logical analysis of evaluations of relevance. In keeping with Halliday’s view, “if we want to explore how semantic features are represented in the grammar, we look primarily at the clause” (1994, 19). In fact, the semantics of evaluation of relevance is not only encoded in a nominal group but involves the structure of the entire clause. The study of clause structures carrying evaluative meanings may, therefore, provide insights into the most recurrent evaluative patterns employed by writers to construe relevance. When it comes to signalling a certain aspect of their own research or certain important results obtained by others, medical writers make choices within the transitivity structure of the clause to frame evaluation in such a way as to achieve a certain rhetorical effect. Clauses of different process types may construe relevant knowledge in various ways. Since the process

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is the core of the transitivity system which involves the other functional constituents of the clause, I explored the EBM corpus to identify the most frequent verb collocates for the word significant which may function as processes in the transitivity system. A window of 7 words i.e. a span of 3 x 3 (three words to the left of the node, the node itself, three words to the right of the node) was used as a reasonable amount of co-text for this type of information retrieval. The findings are visualized by the lemmatised frequency list in table 13-5 below. Occurrences of a special type of clause (the existential) which, in Halliday and Matthiessen’s words, “expresses the mere existence of an entity without predicating anything of it” (2004, 175), were retrieved by searching the word there + verb be. Verb collocates (there) + be show be observe remain report have reveal indicate demonstrate

Frequency of left collocation 418 201 78 24 63 58 64 43 31 27

Frequency of right collocation 4 50 3 8 11 14

Total 418 204 78 74 69 66 64 43 42 41

Table 13-5. The most frequently recurring verb collocates for the word significant, including there + be. What is available to medical writers is a set of choices as to how the experiential domain may be represented at clause level, also with a view to creating interpersonal relationships with the readership, building confidence and credibility and, therefore, trust. Writers may manipulate the strength of commitment to their claims by opting for structures which permit them to lessen their visibility as authors. In quotations (14) and (15), for example, although the evaluation is averred by the writers themselves, the authorial presence remains unexpressed. The use of agentless passives in mental clauses of cognition avoids the need to mention the agency. What is evaluated is the Phenomenon which is construed as impinging on writer’s implicit consciousness and by way of reflection the reader’s. The human participant involved in this type of clause, the Senser, is left unexpressed due to the writer’s intent to retreat from interpersonal intervention by masking her/his voice and

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strengthening the objectivity of the evaluation. The Phenomenon is spread over the whole clause and contains the entity evaluated, the evaluative category and a double restriction on evaluation. Writers may exploit the linking verb acting as a hinge to strengthen the objectivity of the evaluation. The use of a factive verb (15) serves this interpersonal purpose. Evaluative category Phenomenon

Entity evaluated Phenomenon

(14)

No significant

negative associations

(15)

No significant

associations

Hinge Mental process were observed

were found

Restriction on E 1 Phenomenon

Restriction on E 2 Phenomenon

between increases in leptin levels and age

and between increases in leptin levels and changes in glucose levels. (CJoP)

in women. (PsGE)

Table 13-6. Relevance in mental clauses with unexpressed Senser. Following Kiparsky and Kiparsky, the use of factive verbs “presupposes that the embedded clause expresses a true proposition” (1971, 348). Factive verbs represent the default option in mental clauses where Sensers are explicitly mentioned (Table 13-7), either when the evaluation is self-attributed (16), or when ascribed to an external source (17): Evaluator

Hinge

Senser

Mental process found

(16)

We

(17)

McDuffie et al.

found

Evaluative category Phenomenon

Entity evaluated Phenomenon

Restriction on evaluation Phenomenon

no significant

difference

significant

improvement

between groups for this outcome (1.2, 0.9 to 1.5). (BMJ) in ASD symptomatology with age. (JoA&DD)

Table 13-7. Relevance in mental clauses with expressed Senser.

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The evaluator may be explicitly lexicalized by employing an authorial reference such as we (16). This choice foregrounds the information source rather than the cited information. Hyland claims that “The decision to front a clause with a first person pronoun gives it special focus, representing it as a significant aspect of the message and signalling the overt presence of the writer” (2001, 218). As a result, writers align themselves with their claims and speak as an authority. In order to legitimate their claims writers opt for the factive verb found as the hinge and corroborate their evaluation by providing undisputed numerical evidence (16): “Numbers and statistics are the primary means in our culture to persuasively display objectivity. They represent the facts against mere opinion and impression” (van Dijk 2000, 222). Conversely, authors may choose to align themselves with the evaluation attributed to an external source (17). In this case, too, framing the proposition through a factive verb represents a valid expedient for presenting the evaluative statement as a datum considered valid, correct and well-grounded by the expert community (Mocini 2015). The transitivity system offers other resources to express evaluative meaning in an impersonal, objective and factual way. As Halliday puts it “in many registers – various kinds of scientific writing, for example relational processes tend to be the most frequent and perhaps the most informative of the primary clause types” (1985, 123-124). Relational clauses are employed to characterise and identify. More specifically, in the attributive mode (Table 13-8), an evaluative Attribute is assigned to the Carrier, or the entity which ‘carries’ the Attribute: Entity evaluated Carrier

Restriction on evaluation

Hinge

Carrier

(18)

Differences

(19)

Changes

between CR-CBZ and LTG (p = 0.15), or LTG and LEV (p = 0.36) in RCT conduct

Relational process were not

have

Evaluative category Attribute significant. (Epilepsia) significant advantages. (JAMA Ps)

Table 13-8. Relevance in relational clauses of the attributive type. In (18), no action is performed and the function of the process be is simply to signal an abstract relationship between two concepts: a quality (not significant) is assigned to an entity (differences between…). This type

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of relationship may also be expressed in terms of ownership by means of a possessive process like have (19), since, as Thompson points out “something possessed can be seen as a kind of attribute” (2004, 121). In both cases, there is no explicit Evaluator, but it is clear that the statements are averred by the writer, who stays in the background remaining the only one responsible for the evaluation. A different type of evaluative pattern occurs in a variant of the relational clause which centres around an identifying relational process (Table 13- 9). Here, too, a semiotic relationship is established between two entities embodied in the two parts of the clause: one half of the clause (Identifier) is used to identify the other half (Identified) by providing a gloss or an interpretation. Token and Value are the functional labels for the two elements involved in this type of clause:

(20)

(21)

Evaluator

Hinge

Evaluative category

Entity evaluated Value/ identifier improvement

Token/ Identified A pooled analysis of 6 observational studies

Relational process showed

significant

The subgroup analysis based on gender

indicated

a significant correlation

Restriction on evaluation Value/ indentifier in meanoxyhemoglobin saturation with oxygen compared to air (SMD 2.45, 95% CI 1.49 to 3.4). (JoCSM) between smoking and CP for both sexes. (PlOn)

Table 13-9. Relevance in relational clauses of the identifying type. Despite the apparent dominance of experiential meaning, this type of clause may also be exploited interpersonally. Indeed, the absence of agentive participants creates the impression that facts speak for themselves, “shifting the attention from those engaged in the evaluating or reporting process to the research itself” (Hyland and Polly 2005, 133). In particular, this evaluation is not easily open to challenge since it appears to emanate from inanimate entities themselves (pooled analysis / subgroup analysis). This strategy helps reduce the interpersonal potential of evaluative negotiability, since responsibility is attributed to non-human

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evaluators: “[…] removing the writer as the source of an evaluation is regarded as a strategy to strengthen a claim as it simultaneously removes any implication of personal interest from the comment and adds rhetorical credibility” (Hyland and Polly 2005, 133). By the same token, the attribution of agency to inanimate entities reinforces credibility and trust by virtue of ‘replicability’, meaning that whoever collects data in the same way, performing the same data analysis, would arrive at the same conclusion and assessment. A highly frequent pattern of relevance evaluation is provided by existential clauses, especially those expressing a negative polarity. They are used, typically, to introduce new information into the discourse, hence the frequent use of the indefinite determiner: Hinge

(22)

There

Process was

Evaluative category Existent no significant

(23)

There

was

a significant

Entity evaluated Existent improvement difference

Restriction on evaluation Existent in the colistin-treated patients. (ERJ) between perforated and non-perforated patients about the rate of complications (52% vs. 17%). (IJoS)

Table 13-10. Relevance in existential clauses. As shown by the transitivity structure in Table 13-10, the word there has no representational function, as “it serves to indicate a feature of existence, and is needed interpersonally as a Subject” (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, 257). Since “existential clauses typically take as their starting point the simple fact that some entity exists” (Thompson 2004, 161) and require no agency specification, they are employed by medical writers to provide their evaluations with the power of objectivity. This device permits authors to downplay their presence, even more so because the evaluated entity is simply said ‘to exist’, thus permitting writers to overcome the epistemic safeguards of the potential readership and present their viewpoint as an established fact which is more likely to be accepted and believed.

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4. Relevance through focusing adjuncts As explained above, writers adopt different solutions to justify their claims and make their evaluations appear more or less objective. In all cases, a relationship frame is established. As far as this point is concerned, I have examined evaluations of relevance directly inscribed in discourse availing of the item significant. Besides this modality, medical writers may use more covert ways to convey relevance, particularly terms such as ‘distinctiveness’ or ‘unexpectedness’. This function is frequently performed by focusing adjuncts like only, even, especially, in particular, focalizing a certain element of the clause: “the item selected for being focused is generally ‘new’ information” (Quirk et al. 1985, 604). The most frequent are displayed in Table 13-11. Focusing adjuncts only even particularly especially in particular

Occurrences 2,800 522 499 399 168

Table 13-11. Occurrences of the most frequent focusing adjuncts. The function performed by these focusing adjuncts consists in signalling that a particular entity (condition, event, result, etc.) is deemed relevant due to the fact that it possesses a feature which distinguishes it when compared with a set of other entities. Therefore, in this case too, evaluation is achieved by comparing two or more things – the item being contrasted with a given yardstick. A set of entities, explicitly mentioned in discourse and given prominence by means of the focusing adjunct, stands in contrast with a set of alternatives that is recoverable from the context by the reader: (24) To date, there are few long-term studies of cardiac function after HCT (hematopoietic cell transplantation) in childhood. Only one previous study which extends beyond 5 years after HCT has been published [14]. We present here a study of cardiac function after HCT in childhood with a median follow-up time of 18 years. (PB&C)

Here a study of cardiac function after HCT is implicitly compared with the set of similar studies carried out up to that moment. Thus, writers construct the relevance of their present study in terms of “duration of the

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follow-up”, that is in terms of time, by claiming a longer follow-up period for their study in contrast to similar research in the same area. (25) Table 3 compares the 10-year CV risk of our population at baseline using both the FRS and the pooled cohort risk score. For those with pooled cohort risk score of 7.5-9.9%, 98.8% of them have FRS •10%. Whereas in those patients with pooled cohort risk score 10–19.9% and •20%, 99.6% of them have FRS •10%. Hence, we conclude that more than 98% of patients with pooled cohort risk score •7.5% have a FRS of >10%. In those with pooled cohort risk score of 10%. Only 13.4% (124/922) have low risk in both risk scores. (BMJ) (26) Only a very small number of individuals with these PIDs have been described to date world-wide, however, and their overall contribution to IPD susceptibility is unknown. (PlOn)

In the two foregoing examples, what is signalled as relevant is a quantitative difference which, in the first example (25), is between the percentage of patients reporting low risk on two-risk scores against the implicit overall population suggested by the context, while the second example (26) compares the proportion of individuals with PIDs (primary immunodeficiencies) described against the background of the overall number of individuals suffering from these chronic disorders. In the two previous quotations, the focused element is realised by a definite numerative (13.4%) acting as head (25) or by a nominal group with the head pre-modified by an indefinite numerative (a very small number of) (26). However, other lexico-grammatical realizations are possible, for example by means of an adverbial group (27) or a prepositional phrase (28): (27) The immunohistochemical study shows strong reactivity to glial fibrillary acidic protein in malignant gliomas, with nearly 100% sensitivity as a glial differentiation marker 11. Only seldom does a brain tumor lead to direct occlusion or vascular dissection causing acute cerebral infarct in the corresponding arterial territory. (NJ)

What is relevant here is the frequency with which a brain tumour leads to direct occlusion or vascular dissection compared to other types of tumour. By way of contrast, in the following quotation (28) what is relevant is the circumstantial information contained in the prepositional phrase indicating that a property (an increased OR) of a focus set (thyroid autoantibody negative patients who presented with colorectal, uterus, kidney and ovary cancers) is not shared by an alternative set (the implied

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group of patients who presented with colorectal, uterus, kidney and ovary cancers but were thyroid autoantibody positive): (28) An increased OR for melanoma, breast and hematological malignancies was observed in both TPOAb and/or TgAb autoantibody negative and positive patients, while colorectal, uterus, kidney and ovary cancers showed an increased OR only in thyroid autoantibody negative patients. (PlOn)

Data can also be signalled as relevant in terms of ‘unexpectedness’ by marking a contrast between knowledge and expectation. This function may be performed through the focusing adjunct even which “has the additional function of marking the focused element as being low on a scale of alternatives ranked in terms of likelihood, thereby signalling that what is being described is somewhat surprising” (Filik et al. 2009, 678): (29) Even in cognitively normal children and young adults, evidence of neurofibrillary tangle formation may be present, so it is unusual to find an aged brain, even one with a clinical dementia rating (CDR) of 0, without some molecular pathology. (Neuropathology)

The focusing adjunct even constructs relevance in terms of ‘unexpectedness’ since neurofibrillary tangle formation may be present also, and surprisingly, in cognitively normal children and young adults. In the following quotation, the beneficial effects of glucocorticoids are related not only to hemodynamic changes, pancreatic oedema formation, etc. but also, and unexpectedly, to survival: (30) Some earlier studies supported the beneficial effects of the prophylactic or therapeutic use of glucocorticoids with regard to hemodynamic changes, pancreatic edema formation, histological changes in the pancreas, and even survival. (IJC&EP)

By the same token, the following example reports the association between NAFLD (Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease) and a hepatic manifestation of metabolic syndrome, a connection which is generally unlikely to occur: (31) NAFLD has been associated with insulin resistance, and even considered a hepatic manifestation of metabolic syndrome. (JoG&H)

The presence of the focusing adjunct even creates ‘significance’ within a comparative environment, by establishing an ordering scale of

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events/results in terms of probability whereby metabolic syndrome ranks lower in probability than other events associated with NAFLD, such as insulin resistance. As a result, the presence of even conjures up a comparative and evaluative frame, by signalling the relevance of new and unexpected data/results. Here, writers negotiate ‘proximity of membership’ by establishing relevance in terms of novelty and unexpectedness. In fact they gain credit for themselves within their community by focusing the attention of the readership on novelty as a fundamental trait of scientific research: “Selecting a topic and arguing for its novelty and relevance is thus critical in securing colleagues’ interest and in displaying membership credentials” (Hyland 2010, 120). This way, the writer’s trust, as a credible member of the community, is also attained by weaving the relevantly new into the previously consolidated and engaging in a kind of dialogue between what is novel and what has already been accepted in the field.

5. Final remarks As the EBM corpus investigated here reveals, evaluations of relevance tend to cluster around more or less explicit forms of comparison. This seems to confirm Hunston’s statement that “[…] where an experiment is involved, the persuasion takes place by evaluating the experiment and its knowledge-claim outcome as superior to rival claims. Each part of the traditional experimental research article uses evaluation in order to carry out part of this persuasion” (Hunston 1994, 192-193). New data are introduced into discourse by means of comparison and evaluated as ‘significant’ in that they confirm, contradict or integrate information already available. The transitivity system offers a spectrum of lexico-grammatical resources for the construction of evaluative meanings, allowing for different degrees of authorial intervention or impersonal distancing. What medical writers consider relevant depends mostly on evaluation against some kind of yardstick. It appears that a datum may be deemed ‘significant’ only if it stands the test of being viewed in the light of previously acquired knowledge or experience. Indeed, knowledge that counts as evidence appears to be primarily situated within a comparative framework. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of evaluative patterns and discourse strategies allow one, thanks to a bottom-up procedure, to derive a tacit definition of the knowledge represented in the text, which is the fundamentally comparative-based epistemological perspective underlying and shared by the medical community. Therefore, comparison helps construe the credibility and authority of medical writers, not only because

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it permits them to select and signal the most relevant aspects of an observational or experimental study but, in accordance with the epistemological paradigm of evidence-based medicine, it provides the medium capable of bestowing value, reliability and trust upon writers’ assessments. Indeed, it is within this community-shared epistemological stance framed by comparison that writers can establish their authority as a persona capable of contributing new knowledge to the field. Thus, experienced medical writers acquire trust because they situate their results and observations within a comparative framework that is capable of persuading the scientific community to accept their claims. As Hyland (2000, 8) puts it, “notions of what counts as convincing argument, appropriate theory, sound methodology, impressive logic and compelling evidence are all community specific”.

References Barnbrook, Geoff, and John M. Sinclair. 1995. “Parsing COBUILD entries.” In The Languages of Definition: The Formalization of Dictionary Definitions for Natural Language Processing, edited by John M. Sinclair, Martin Hoelter and Carol Peters, 13-58. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community. Bondi, Marina. 2011. “It is important to note: marking significance in academic discourse.” In Marqueurs discursifs et subjectivité, edited by Sylvie Hancil, 151-173. Rouen: Presse Universitaire de Rouen. —. 2015. “Probably most important of all. Importance markers in academic and popular history articles.” In Corpora, Grammar and Discourse. In Honour of Susan Hunston, edited by Nicholas Groom, Maggie Charles, and Suganthi John, 161-182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bublitz, Wolfram. 1996. Semantic Prosody and Cohesive Company: Somewhat Predictable. General and Theoretical Papers 347. Duisburg: L.A.U.D. Deroey, Katrien L.B. 2015. “Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and textual orientation.” Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 51-72. Deroey, Katrien L.B., and Miriam Taverniers. 2012. “Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures.” English for Specific Purposes 31 (4): 221-233. Filik, Ruth, Kevin B. Paterson, and Simon Liversedge. 2009. “The influence of only and even on online semantic interpretation.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 16 (4): 678-683.

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Gross, Maurice. 1993. “Local grammars and their representation by finite automata.” In Data, Description, Discourse, edited by Michael Hoey, 26-38. London: Harper Collins. Halliday, Michael A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold. —. 1985. Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. —. 1994. “The construction of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientific discourse, with reference to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species”. In Advances in Written Text Analysis, edited by Malcolm Coulthard, 136-156. London/ New York: Routledge. Halliday, Michael, and Christian M. Matthiessen. 2004. Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Hunston, Susan. 1994. “Evaluation and organization in a sample of written academic discourse”. In Advances in Written Text Analysis, edited by Malcom Coulthard, 191-218. London/New York: Routledge. Hunston, Susan, and Gill Francis. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpusdriven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hunston, Susan, and John Sinclair. 2000. “A local grammar of evaluation.” In Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, edited by Susan Hunston, and Geoff Thompson, 74-101. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunston, Susan, and Geoff Thompson. 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyland, Ken. 2000. Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. London: Longman. —. 2001. “Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles.” English for Specific Purposes 20 (3): 207-226. —. 2005. “Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse.” Discourse Studies 7: 173-192. —. 2010. “Constructing proximity: relating to readers in popular and professional science.” English for Academic Purposes 9 (2): 116-127. Hyland, Ken, and Polly Tse. 2005. “Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts.” English for Specific Purposes 24: 123135. Kiparsky, Paul, and Carol Kiparsky. 1971. “Fact”. In Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, edited by Danny D. Steinberg, and Leon A. Jakobovits, 345-369. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lemke, Jay L. 1998. “Resources for attitudinal meaning: evaluative orientation in text semantics.” Functions of Language 5 (1): 33-56. Mocini, Renzo. 2015. “Evidential devices in English medical journals.” In The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English, edited by Rita Salvi, and Janet Bowker, 73-97. Bern: Peter Lang. Partington, Alan. 2014. “Evaluative prosody”. In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, edited by Karin Aijmer, and Christoph Ruhleman, 279-303. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Scott, Mike. 2012. WordSmith Tools version 6.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software Ltd. Thompson, Geoff. 2004. Introducing Functional Grammar. London: Hodder Education. van Dijk, Teun A. 2000. “The reality of racism: on analyzing parliamentary debates on immigration.” In Festschrift für die Wirklichkeit, edited by Guido Zurstiege, 211-225. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag.

Medical-journal references (1) PLoS One. 2013. 8 (11): e79414. (2) Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 2015. 135 (1): 3-13. (3) Internal Medicine. 2014. 53 (18): 2091-2094. (4) Springerplus. 2014. 3: 141. (5) Journal of Eating Disorders. 2015. 3: 7. (6) International Journal of Nephrology. 2012: 1-20. (7) PLoS One. 2014. 9 (10): e109733. (8) International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Pathology. 2014. 7 (3): 1012-1021. (9) British Medical Journal. 2014; 349: g5205. (10) World Journal of Gastroenterology. 2014. 20 (32): 11054-11061. (11) PLoS One. 2015; 10 (5): e0125436. (12) Brain. 2014. 137: 3073-3086. (13) Brain. 2014. 137: 3073-3086. (14) Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. 2015. 60 (3): 26-34. (15) Psychiatric Genetics. 2014. 24 (2): 52-69. (16) British Medical Journal. 2015. 350: h1225. (17) Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 2015. 45 (9): 28162832. (18) Epilepsia. 2015. 56 (3): 450-459.

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(19) JAMA Psychiatry. 2014. 71 12): 1409-1421. (20) Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. 2013. 9(3): 271-279. (21) PLoS One. 2015; 10 (4): e0124075. (22) European Respiratory Journal. 2002. 20 (3): 658-664. (23) International Journal of Surgery. 2007. 5 (3): 192-197. (24) Pediatric Blood & Cancer. 2015. 62 (1): 143-147. (25) BMC Cardiovascular Disorders. 2014. 14: 163. (26) PLoS One. 2015. 10 (4): e0123532. (27) Neuroradiology Journal. 2014. 27 (1): 85-90. (28) PLoS One. 2015. 10 (3) : e0122958. (29) Neuropathology. 2015. 35 (4): 390-400. (30) International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Pathology. 2014. 7 (7): 3647-3661. (31) Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. 2015. 30 (11): 16661672.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE DISSEMINATION AND DOCTOR-PATIENT TRUST: A MULTI-MODAL ANALYSIS DANIELE FRANCESCHI UNIVERSITY OF PISA

1. Introduction Spoken medical English has been investigated from three main perspectives so far (Salager-Meyer 2014 and references therein). One avenue of research has dealt with the analysis and development of oral skills in non-native health professionals working or intending to work in an English-speaking context. This approach is pedagogical in nature in that it aims at improving competences as well as ESP teaching methodologies and materials. A second line of research, which also has an applied component to it, has focused on a less interactive type of spoken discourse, i.e. the language of medical conference presentations, investigating a number of different aspects, such as the juxtaposition of the verbal with the visual (e.g. slides), the question-answer phase following the speech, the differences between oral and poster presentations, etc. A third research strand has specifically studied doctor-patient interactions, as well as communication between patients and a range of other health professionals including nurses, physiotherapists, alternative practitioners etc. (references in Adolphs et al. 2004), mainly from a socio-linguistic perspective, taking into consideration, among other aspects, how cultural and status differences or gender diversity may result in conflictive encounters (also Gotti et al. 2015). The present paper examines doctor-patient conflict in an English L1 context and how it may be resolved through the adoption of certain strategies by the doctor himself/herself, which, on the one hand, facilitate comprehension of medical information and, on the other hand, manage to

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create empathy and rapport between the parties. The latter elements have been shown to play a fundamental role in improving the patient’s health and medical care in a broad sense (Duffy et al. 2004). The analysis is based on what can be regarded as representative examples of appropriate and successful doctor-patient communication. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the data and the methodology used. Although the dynamics of doctor-patient interaction have been widely investigated in the literature, research has traditionally followed a mono-semiotic (verbal) approach, neglecting the bigger picture of how meaning and trust are built in context (Candlin and Crichton 2013 for a thorough illustration of the concept of trust). Hence, the multi-modal perspective of analysis adopted here. Section 3 describes those linguistic elements in the dialogues under investigation, which appear to enhance the effectiveness of the exchange between doctor and patient. Interestingly, the three dialogues examined, albeit different in a number of ways, present some common features at the lexical-semantic and pragmatic level, resulting from deliberate decisions on the part of the doctor to ease communication on important issues. Section 4 considers the non-verbal, i.e. extra-linguistic, factors that also play a significant role for a better understanding of medical information and, eventually, for the construal of trust. The approach followed is thus multi-semiotic, since not only language but also facial expressions, hand gestures and body movements are observed and considered as contributing to meaning. Section 5 briefly summarizes the results of the study and suggests possible future research directions.

2. Data and methodology Before plunging into the study, let us consider more in detail the type of data analysed and the methodology used for its transcription/annotation. The three doctor-patient dialogues examined were chosen from a precollected database available on-line,1 consisting of video-recorded conversations aimed at improving patients’ knowledge about the various

1

The database was prepared by Caring Ambassadors Program Inc., Oregon City, OR (http://hepcchallenge.org), to give hepatitis C patients free access to doctorpatient interviews with useful information about screening, diagnosis, treatment and disease management. Many thanks to Lorren Sandt, Executive Director of Caring Ambassadors Program Inc., for allowing me to use the interviews and some images for my research.

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options available to treat their medical conditions.2 The reason why these three conversations in particular were chosen is because they appeared as the ones that best fit my research goal, i.e. showing how the adoption of certain communicative strategies may improve doctors’ counselling skills and consequently have a positive impact on the outcome of their consultations with patients (Fong Ha and Longnecker 2010 for a review of the literature on doctor-patient communication). To address this specific research objective, a very small specialized spoken corpus consisting of approximately 6,650 words was created by manually transcribing and annotating the conversations between three different doctors and one patient who is initially refusing to start therapy for hepatitis C. Although the data only makes up a mini-corpus,3 it provides interesting evidence of “what works” for effective medical communication and patient engagement. Both the doctors and the patient in the videos are native speakers of American English. The conversations were studied in minute detail from a multimodal perspective. First, they were digitized into computer-readable form and printed out in order to get a general feel for the data and to start developing the analysis. At a purely linguistic level, the most interesting features of discourse are the lexical-semantic and pragmatic choices that the doctors make to gear conversation to the patient’s needs, while at the same time maintaining their firmness and consistency of purpose. Therefore, all the relevant words, phrases and expressions used by the doctors to achieve this aim were assigned tags in order to mark their functions. Since the analysis brought to light both hypothesised phenomena as well as a number of unforeseen items, especially with respect to extra-linguistic usages, the study may be considered as both corpus-based and corpus-driven (Tognini-Bonelli 2001). As for the nonverbal elements that accompany and reinforce speech, they were also included in the transcription of the data, following the technique proposed by Baldry (2000), Thibault (2000) and Baldry and Thibault (2006), which brings together verbal text and visual image in addition to a description of 2

I personally contacted one of the doctors involved in the project, Dr. Lyn Patrick (Medical Director at Progressive Medical Education, Irvine, CA, www.progressivemedicaleducation.com), to know whether the conversations had been prepared before filming them and whether the patients appearing in the videos are really affected by the condition(s) described. I was assured that the interviews were spontaneously conducted and that the interviewees are all patient advocates who have (or had in the recent past) hepatitis C. 3 For reasons of space, it has not been possible to include the full dialogues here, which are, however, freely accessible on-line at http://hepcchallenge.org.

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the function of non-verbal behaviour (see Tables 14-1, 14-2 and 14-3 in Paragraph 4). The mark-up of the transcripts includes punctuation in order to make the conversations easier to read and analyse, and those paralinguistic elements, e.g. stress, pace and tone of voice, as well as extra-linguistic factors, e.g. hesitations, pauses, smiling, etc., which are considered to be relevant for the study.4 Finally, the decision to limit the observation and the analysis to a small corpus was not just motivated by the need to examine the three chosen conversations in the greatest detail possible. It was also dictated by the nature of the transcription task itself, which is extremely labour-intensive and time-consuming. It has been estimated that an hour of recording may take up to ten or even twenty hours to transcribe (McCarthy 1998; Creer and Thompson 2004). As a matter of fact, for the transcription, manual inspection and annotation of 36 minutes of video-recorded conversations I required approximately 12 hours. More time was then needed for the analysis of the results.

3. Speaking to the patient: the verbal mode This section examines those verbal elements used by the three doctors in the dialogues, which have proved as particularly effective for successful communication and good patient management. The two latter elements are directly related and consequent to the doctors’ ability to build trust between themselves and their patients. Trust, however, must be regarded as a discursive practice that needs to be continually negotiated. In other words, it is not constructed all at once, but rather through the use of conscious and strategic communication practices in interaction. Most of the linguistic strategies used to facilitate comprehension and to build rapport are of a lexical-semantic and pragmatic nature. Syntactic and prosodic structure appears to play a less important role, instead. The three doctors appear to have a similar communicative style with respect to a set of features discussed in the following sections.

4

The transcripts, however, are not completely “objective”, because there is other information that may potentially be annotated, but which in fact is not because it is not pertinent to my particular research aim. Transcripts are never complete and, to a certain extent, may be viewed as an interpretation of the communicative exchange (Bucholtz, 2000). Contact the author ([email protected]) for samples of the annotated transcriptions.

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3.1. Simplification, reformulation and informality A lot of medical terminology in English has Latin origins, because Latin was the language of science until the beginning of the 1700s. Most, if not all, medical texts during the 18th century continued to be written in Latin. Under the influence of Andreas Vesalius’s work on human anatomy,5 many technical words referring to the human body and to clinical conditions remain in Latin even today, with no changes in the original (e.g. abdomen, apparatus, fistula, etc.), or are derived from Latin (e.g. cerebrovascular, hepatic, jaundice, etc.). Latin is also very influential at the level of word formation processes, as can be observed in the use of prefixes, combining forms and suffixes (Ten Hacken and Panacová 2015). Words of Latin origin, however, are considered as formal or technical and are not always easy to understand for the layperson. Therefore, in the three dialogues examined they often tend to be replaced by their AngloSaxon counterparts, which come across as clearer and more natural. There are several instances of such a process of simplification or reformulation (Gülich 2003). Let us take a look at some examples of how the doctors try to avoid ‘medicalese’ with their patient:6 (1) We have not seen the remission, in other words the getting rid of the virus, just with alternative medicine. (2) And I’m wondering if you know anybody that has gone through standard of care treatment with the, we call it ‘adjunctive’, meaning “in addition to” standard of care, these ‘adjunctive’ treatments. (3) The fluid in the abdomen is called ‘ascites’. (4) What our therapies can do is help minimize the toxicity or side effects of standard of care therapy. (5) There are some good studies that show that with weight loss and exercise that can be reversed. […] there are good studies that show that that can be turned around.

5

Andreas Vesalius (1543), De humani corpori fabrica. The Latin-based terms are in bold, while their Anglo Saxon “versions” have been underlined. It is also interesting to note that these reformulations are often introduced by a word or phrase signalling that we are faced with a paraphrase, transposing technical expressions into more popularized/ordinary ones. These words or phrases have been italicized.

6

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The doctors either use technical terms immediately followed or preceded by the explanation of their meaning, as in the examples above, or completely avoid medical jargon and resort to plain language that their patient can quickly understand:7 (6) And the things that can happen with cirrhosis include turning yellow. (7) The whites of your eyes turning yellow. (8) Another thing that can happen is you start accumulating fluid all over your body.

What is being talked about in (6) is a condition known as ‘jaundice’, while in (7) the doctor obviously refers to the ‘scleras’ of the eyes and in (8) to a complication of cirrhosis, i.e. ‘ascites’. When the need for clarity is strong as when trying to educate the patient about a surgical procedure, which may scare him, the style of the conversation becomes particularly informal. In (9), for instance, all the verbs used by the doctor are phrasal/prepositional verbs describing in a very direct and simplified way how a liver biopsy is performed. Such style is supposed to soften the perception of fear and danger associated with the procedure in question: (9) Your liver is up here under the ribs. We numb up the area of the skin and we put the needle directly into the liver, we suck up a little piece of liver and take it back out. […] And the piece of liver that we take out, it’s about as thick as the lead in the lead pencil, not the pencil itself, just the lead.

This is a good example of ‘recipient-tailored’ language use (Brown and Fraser 1979), aimed at reaching doctor-patient alignment and, ultimately, patient’s compliance. The style of the dialogues is often rather chatty and characterised by colloquialisms (10), onomatopoeic phrases (11) and even slang expressions (12)8 that have the effect of reducing, or even cancelling at times, the patient’s feeling of “asymmetry” with the doctors. This is because through the adoption of such speaking style they put themselves on an equal footing with him:

7

Since the patient uses primarily a colloquial register and informal words, e.g. docs for “doctors”, bellies for “abdomens”, the doctors may feel the need to adapt to his speaking style in order to avoid comprehension failure. 8 They have been put in bold in the examples provided.

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(10) Well, turns out, if you get rid of the hepatitis C with treatment, there’s a good chance that your risk of cancer is gonna go way down. (11) The biopsy itself, the needle is in there less than a second. Boom boom, it’s done! (12) Why the heck would you want treatment?

As a consequence, the patient feels at ease and sometimes even decides to start ironic exchanges leading to laughter: (13) Terry: Alright. Well, I wanna think about these things. Doc: I, I would expect you would and I would definitely talk to your wife about it. And I would… Terry: [laughing] You’ll talk to my wife or I talk to my wife? Doc: Well, I can’t talk to her unless you give me permission. But I’d be happy to talk to her. Terry: No, I won’t give you permission to do that [laughing].

The ability on the part of the doctor to tune in with the patient, also at the language level, appears to play a fundamental role in gaining the patient’s trust and in stimulating his willingness to undergo treatment, which culminates in his decision to accept the doctors’ advice (see Paragraph 3.7 below).

3.2. Repetition All the three doctors have a marked tendency to rely on the use of synonyms and paraphrases in order to explain a certain concept in the best way possible and to make sure that the patient understands what they are talking about. This often results in the use of doublets (14) as well as of lists of several items (15) that essentially express the same idea: (14) Some patients with genotype two can even take fewer weeks of therapy, but because you have significant fibrosis and scarring […]. (15) You know, working out in the farm, where you get injuries and sores and cuts and bruises and scrapes, that’s ways of again transmitting blood between people that would be minor and nothing that you would pay attention to, but potentially could have occurred […].

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Repetition often takes the form of extended descriptions,9 in order for the patient to understand what behaviours are to be avoided (16) and what justifies treatment (17): (16) […] when you have underlying, active sores, if you will, the hepatitis, then the alcohol is much more damaging than it would be to a normal liver. (17) Some of them already have very advanced disease, cirrhosis, which would be at the one extreme of severe scarring damage to the liver.

The patient needs to be informed of the fact that hepatitis presupposes that there are sores in the liver tissue and that drinking for a person with hepatitis is like pouring alcohol on an open wound (16), i.e. it causes inflammation and makes the wound worse. Similarly, the doctor in (17) is indirectly warning the patient about the possible risks of refusing therapy. The message here is delivered in a rigorous yet courteous and professional manner, but there is a constant swing between this style and a more sympathetic and less straightforward mode.

3.3. Hedging Doctors often need to attenuate the full semantic load of a certain expression or the force of a speech act. This rhetorical strategy, known as ‘hedging’ (Lakoff 1972), may be used to mitigate the emotional impact of a diagnosis, to make suggestions in a tentative manner so as not to be perceived as too invasive, to communicate that there is no full commitment to what is said, and so on (Frazer 2010 and references therein). In the conversations examined, the doctors are trying to convince the patient that standard of care therapy is the best option for his present condition, despite the possibility of a number of side effects that he may experience while on treatment. The patient fears, for instance, that the use of medication for hepatitis C will aggravate his PTSD and depression, for which he is also being treated. Therefore, the doctors have to find a way of encouraging this reluctant patient to follow their advice, while at the same time dealing with his worries and taking his requests into consideration. This results in what may be described as “cautious communication”, i.e. characterised by a number of features aimed at softening the impact of what is being said: 9

These descriptions have been underlined, while the conditions they refer to are in bold.

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(18) Well, the interferon side effects make you feel like you have [pause] the flu, to some extent. Erm, you may have some loss of appetite, may lose a little weight on treatment. Erm, the ribavirin might give you, oh, sometimes a little funny taste in the mouth, sometimes a little soreness, maybe some rash.

This answer to the patient’s question about whether he will be sick, should he decide to do therapy, presents different types of hedges. Although the initial well suggests that there is indeed a likelihood of side effects, such verbally unexpressed message is mitigated by the use of the two modal verbs may and might, the adverbs sometimes and maybe, and the expression a little. The interjections (erm, oh) and the pause also seem to attenuate the bluntness of the reply, because they give the doctor time to think and to present his thoughts on the matter in a less direct way. The modal items in particular introduce optionality and help to minimise the ‘threat’ inherent in the doctors’ statements. There are also several instances of a subtype of hedge phrases in the dialogues, known as ‘shields’ (Prince et al. 1982), which enable the doctors to “protect” themselves while presenting objective data reflecting the truth about the patient’s condition. Through the use of these ‘shields’ the doctor acquires more freedom in conversation and avoids being held fully responsible for the statements he/she makes: (19) It also looks like being stage three, which you’ve seen the model of the liver and how the next stage is cirrhosis, which is the worst, you know, stage that you can get to, kind of the final stage with hepatitis C, that your condition which it sounds like you have had for a while, you know, that case scenario was non-A non-B was hepatitis C from what we can tell. (20) […] there was a recent study with acupuncture that actually just showed that this is the case in people with hepatitis C.

Hedges do not just have an impact at the propositional level by affecting the truth-value of what is said. Some of them also contribute to the production of a performative effect: (21) Now, I think it’s time for you to consider [pause] getting the hep C treated and trying to get rid of that infection. (22) […] I’m strongly recommending that you consider the treatment.

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I think and I’m strongly recommending that, for instance, support the doctor’s commitment to the patient’s health and serve the function of reinforcing the act of convincing and advising him, respectively.

3.4. Speech acts The analysis of the data shows that the three doctors use verbal elements to perform acts going beyond the communicative level (Austin 1962; Searle 1975). Doctors’ primary aim is usually that of advising patients about what is “best” to do. It is interesting to observe, however, that in the conversations examined there is also a constant attempt at achieving goals other than those associated with the final act of convincing and advising the patient, as we have seen with examples (21) and (22) above. It might be argued that there are a series of pre-speech acts working towards convincing the patient to get treatment, but which are per se not directly associated with this function. The first step on the road to convincing the patient that he should commence treatment is praising him about all the good things he has already done for his health: (23) You’ve done some great things to control the other aspects, the mental health, the alcohol.

This appears to be an important step for different reasons. First of all, it acknowledges the patient’s efforts and increases the likelihood of such behaviour occurring again. Secondly, being praised is a flattering feeling that may consolidate relationships. In a medical context praising potentially strengthens rapport between doctors and patients. And this is exactly what happens in the case under scrutiny here. Another speech function identified in the conversations is that of encouraging and giving hope: (24) I think you’re gonna do well. (25) Doing that will definitely help your liver. (26) So that’s something that is in your control for the most part in terms of […].

Similarly, the doctors pay a lot of attention to reassuring the patient that his condition is something they are familiar with and thus able to address or that the testing procedures are painless and easy to perform:

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(27) […] that’s again quite typical of the patients we see. (28) […] that’s simple blood test, like you’ve had many times before.

However, there is an alternation between praising/encouraging and warning/scaring, as if the doctors carefully mixed the right dose of confidence and frustration in order to get the patient started with treatment: (29) Hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis. And once you get to that stage [pause] then you start having many problems. Right now you feel well. But when you develop cirrhosis you’ll be well for a while, but as the cirrhosis worsens [pause] there’s many things that can happen to you and your body. It can take away your life. And the things that can happen with cirrhosis include [pause] turning yellow. (30) […] the amount of scar tissue in your liver is substantial.

The ultimate goal of the three conversations, therefore, is that of empowering the patient to have control over his condition.

3.5. Figurative language Speaking “figuratively”, i.e. by means of metaphors, metonymies and similes,10 is another recurrent strategy used in the dialogues to increase message clarity. The instances of figurative language use identified in the data, however, are limited to the conversations between the patient and the male doctors. The following example is an interesting case of men’s talk (Coates 2003), in which the doctor compares viruses with different types of cars:

10

A metaphor is a rhetorical device based on a cognitive operation consisting in making an implicit comparison between two unrelated domains, so that one domain (source) allows us to understand and reason about the other (target) (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999 and Lakoff 1987, 1993). A metonymy, by contrast, relies on a domain internal mapping, whereby the source domain is used to provide access to the target, for which it stands (Kövecses and Radden 1998; Ruiz de Mendoza 2000). A simile requires the explicit use of a comparative particle, such as like or as, but is inherently a metaphor.

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Chapter Fourteen (31) Cos hepatitis C is more than one virus, if you will. There are different subtypes, just like Ford has different kinds of cars, they are all Fords, but one’s a truck and one’s an SUV etc. Hepatitis C has different subtypes.

Hepatitis C is then associated with a fire and drinking alcohol is considered to be as dangerous for the liver of a person with hepatitis C as pouring gasoline on fire (32). The hepatitis C virus is also metaphorically referred to as a “friend” when it remains dormant and does not cause any complications (33). This meaning is activated by the phrasal expression to get along alright together, which is normally used to refer to people who are on good, friendly terms: (32) The combination of alcohol with active hepatitis, I look this as kind of putting alcohol on a fire or putting gasoline on a fire, it just makes the fire worse. (33) […] and their disease never progressed anywhere very seriously. So for some reason their body and the virus are kind of getting along alright together, without major damage occurring.

Metonymies are also productively exploited for reasons of conciseness, since information in them is compressed, thus allowing the doctor to evoke a certain frame by naming it only partially: (34) The normal liver, it doesn’t really like alcohol […].

This is a part-for-whole metonymy thanks to which the NP normal liver economically encapsulates the idea of ‘a person with a normal liver’. It is the verb like here that works as a cue for conceptual connectedness.

3.6. Empathy, trust and convergence By empathy we mean the ability of a person to identify with the feelings, thoughts and attitudes of another. In a medical setting, when a doctor manages to understand his/her patient’s condition and the emotions associated with it, without being overwhelmed by them, there is a good chance that he/she will then be able to adopt a suitable communicative style to address such condition and try to resolve it. This is exactly the case in the three conversations analysed, in which the language that the doctors use always shows respect, attention and care for their patient. The first step towards building trust involves attentive listening, so as to gain an insight into the patient’s concerns and sources of distress. There

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are several expressions in the dialogues signalling that the doctors are indeed on the patient’s “wavelength”: (35) Terry: That’s my…one of the biggest concerns I have. Doc: I hear you. I think that I’m not gonna take your alcohol away from you right this minute, but […]. And so, I hear you, I hear that this is really important for you and that you’re not ready to give it up, but if you are willing to talk about alternatives I can certainly help you in that, in that way. (36) But right now I’m concerned about you.

The next step is that of tentatively trying to help the patient to shift the focus of his attention to possible alternatives, while at the same time reminding him about the facts: (37) And so what I’m talking about is you, if you ever choose to do this, this is completely up to you, standard of care therapy with a combination of traditional Chinese medicine […]. (38) Is this something that you’re willing to entertain or be educated about? (39) We have not seen the remission, in other words the getting rid of the virus, just with alternative medicine. (40) […] what I tell my patients is if there was an alternative to standard of treatment I would suggest it, believe me, because it is like chemotherapy.

The three doctors try to make their advice authoritative through depersonalisation, i.e. they “anchor” what they say to external sources supporting their opinions. Published medical literature is typically regarded as the main source of authority that gives credibility to their statements: (41) […] I think that all the published information in the medical literature will bear that out.

This is a recurrent technique that the doctors use to seek their patient’s compliance. What they are implicitly saying is that their positions are officially recognized and accepted in the scientific community and are therefore trustworthy.

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There is then a constant invitation to convergence on the part of the doctors, i.e. they actively encourage the patient to agree with and perform the course of action they recommend: (42) I don’t want you to continue progressing and getting to a situation where […]. (43) I mean, you’re stage three now. We don’t want you to get cirrhosis or any of those complications. (44) You and I can work together in terms of addressing dietary factors and get you on a very specific exercise programme that can help reverse that.

This is a laborious process, because the patient is not leaning towards treatment for his hepatitis C at all, fearing the possibility of side effects. But, finally, after a detailed and pondered description of what he may experience while on interferon, the patient finally decides to be treated: (45) Doc: But I think you’re gonna do well, because you’ve done some great things. One is you’re taking care of yourself, with the mental health and the counselling you’re getting there and the second thing is you’ve made a decision to control that alcohol. So I think, I think you’re ready. I think you should consider… Terry: So is there anything we have to do before I start or and when can we start?

The construal of trust in the case under scrutiny must thus be seen as a complex and dynamic process, which involves the development of faith on the part of the patient both in the single doctors and in the medical profession as a whole. Put differently, it is a micro-macro phenomenon that eventually leads to the establishment of different but interrelated orders of trust.

4. Non-verbal behaviour in doctor-patient interaction This Section presents a microanalysis of non-verbal communication by focusing on a video fragment of the interaction between Dr. Lyn Patrick, who uses the most pronounced gesturing, facial expressions and body movements of all the three doctors, and Terry, the patient referred to in this paper. Because this minute analysis is extremely time-consuming, it could not be extended to the whole conversation or to other segments of the dialogues involving the other two doctors. For this reason, the findings

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are clearly llimited and onnly indicativee of how non--verbal behav viour may both replicatte semantic coontent and som metimes even carry key ind dependent meanings. In the ffirst part of the t video fraagment analyssed (Table 14-1), Dr. 11 Patrick rem mains mostly silent while Terry is pressenting his problem. p After askingg him why hee came to con nsultation, thee doctor simp ply listens and shows hhim both verbbally and with h her attentivee gaze as welll as with her noddingg that she is following wiith interest w what he is say ying. The verbal compponent is redduced to a minimum m heree and comm munication develops maainly through the non-verbaal cues that thee doctor uses. Image frrame

Verb bal text

1

So, teell me why you are here h

2

Ok

11

Nonn-verbal behav viour & interrpretation h Sligghtly shaking head (doeesn’t know wh hy pati ent is there), slightly s worrried gaze (waaits for pressentation of sym mptoms), holdiing open handds together with finggers intertwineed (we lcoming attitu ude)

Noddding (shows undderstanding), lo ooking straiight into patieent’s eyes (shoows attention and interrest), slightly worried gazee, holding han nds togeether with fing gers interrtwined (show ws willlingness to waait and listeen)

I have inccorporated imaage frames intto the multimoodal transcriptiion of the exchange, foollowing Baldryy (2000), Thib bault (2000) an and Baldry and d Thibault (2006), but I have not incluuded the patient’s turns, sincee the focus heree is on the strategies useed by the doctorr to enhance com mmunication annd rapport.

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Ok

4

5

Noddding, smiling g (shows undderstanding and sym mpathy)

Smiiling (shows conffidence) and looking l straiight into patieent’s eyes (shoows interest) holding h handds together with finggers intertwineed (shoows willingness to waitt and listen)

C So, Can…, Let me… m There’s a really y impo ortant piecee of information I need your help with.

Steeepling (as if beegging for aan answer), sq quinting (loooking for an an nswer thatt may not be easy to findd for the patien nt), head slighhtly turned to the right

Table 14-1. A multimod dal transcription of a doctoor-patient intteraction segment – L Listening to the patient. Her faciaal expressionss and hand gesstures are iconnic and metaphoric and may well suubstitute wordds at this initiaal stage. She iis obviously worried w at the very begginning (imagge 1). The no odding later suuggests that she s either understands the patient’s point of view or agrees witth him (image 2 and 3). The fact thaat her gaze iss fixed on hiis face and iss never distraacted also

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shows the ppatient that hiis narration iss worth listenning to. Holdiing hands together witth fingers inteertwined (imaage 2 and 4) iis iconic for the t act of waiting, so the patient gets g the message that it iss his turn to speak. In addition, thee doctor’s sm miles communiicate that she is feeling com mfortable in the patiennt’s presence and her upright position eexpresses streength and confidence iin dealing witth a potentiallly difficult sittuation that th he patient may be in. The use of metaphorric/iconic pictographs and kinetographs becomes more system matic as the coonversation prrogresses (see Tables 14-2 and a 14-3) and the docctor starts asking questions and explainiing medical isssues and options to tthe patient. Steepling (fing ger tips touchhing each oth her as the hands are pplaced out in front formin ng a church ssteeple-like structure), s which resembles the act a of prayin ng, appears to have a question reinforcemeent effect. At the same tim me, she is carrefully lookin ng for the right wordss to frame thhe question, as a is suggesteed by her looking up (image 6). Image frrame 6

7

Verrbal textt Can n you tell me whaat’s gon ne into you ur deccision not to do treaatment?

Nonn-verbal behav viour & inteerpretation Firsst steepling theen movving both hands togeether vertically (as if beggging for an an nswer), lookking up (as if looking for tthe right way of phraasing the quesstion)

Wh hat’s hap ppened to you y or whaat you u’ve seen n hap ppen to otheer peo ople…

ft hand separatting from Left righht hand along horiizontal line (supports conncept of ‘otherr peoople’), body slightly movving forwardss (preepared to take answer on bboard)

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…th hat’s mad de you deccide you u do not wanna do treaatment?

d Movving left hand verttically (supporrts conncept of ‘not wanting’) w

Table 14-2. A multimod dal transcription of a doctoor-patient intteraction segment – R Requesting in nformation. The horiizontal movem ment of the do octor’s left hannd, instead, strresses the concept of ‘other people’ and is perforrmed exactly w while those tw wo words are being utttered. She alsso moves forw wards as to suuggest that shee is ready and open too get the answ wer from her patient (imagge 7). Finally y, her left hand starts moving up and down vertically, som mehow mimiccking the behaviour of cutting something, s which w has tto be metap phorically understood here as makinng a ‘clear-cu ut decision’. T This gesture is indeed performed w while using the t verb deciide (image 8)). It looks ass if body language woorked as a meeta-discourse here h to emphaasize the impo ortance of what is beinng said. As the conversation moves m on and the doctor neeeds to explain n medical information and terminollogy to the paatient (Table 14-3), the usee of nonverbal elem ments is more frequent and d consistent. H Hand gesturess become very importtant vehicles of expression. They tendd to accompaany those words that are particularrly salient in the context oof the utterance or the ones that thhe doctor beliieves require additional claarification. In n order to give credit to the truth of the statem ments she maakes, for instaance, she emphasises the word puublished by suddenly s opeening her han nds, thus metaphoricaally illustratingg the concept of being avaiilable (image 9). 9 Iconic pictographs are often useed to remind the t patient of anatomical feeatures as well (imagee 10 and 11)), while kinetographs seem m to complement the meaning of lexical items through a mo ore detailed ddescription off a certain concept. Thhe idea of makking gradual progress p in reesearch (imagee 12), for example, is better exppressed with h the movem ments of th he hand, metaphoricaally standing for the steps made, than with the phrasal verb come up witth alone. Sim milarly, the terrm adjunctive is best explaained also

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by reproduccing the act off putting someething inside a container (im mage 13). Perhaps we should then speak s of parad discourse to reefer to the usee of these non-verbal eelements, sincce their charaacteristic is thhat of actually y running parallel to annd highlightinng the verbal meaning m compponent. Image frame

Verb bal text

Nonn-verbal behav viour & inteerpretation Sudddenly opening both hannds (reinforcess the conncept of ‘publiished’)

9

[…] I think that all a the publiished inforrmation in the mediical literaature will bear b that out o

10

It alsso lookss like being g stage threee, whicch you’ve seen the modeel of the liiver…

Movving hands ass if holdding somethin ng (she prettends she is ho olding the model of the liver)

11

…an nd how the next n stagee is cirrh hosis […]

me Hannds in the sam pos ition but move to the righht, body leans right (em mphasizing thee concept of ‘nnext’)

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12

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The best b that we w havee been able to comee up with in terms of actuaal reseaarch […] […] stand dard of care treatm ment with the, we call it adjun nctive, mean ning “in addittion to” stand dard of care,, these adjun nctive treatm ments

ft hand moving g to the Left left,, then back, reprroducing the idea i of the steps made (ssupports notiion of ‘coming g up withh’)

Liftting left hand and prettending to putt som mething insidee a conntainer (stressees the conncept of ‘adjun nctive’ or ‘in aaddition to’)

Table 14-3. A multimod dal transcription of a doctoor-patient intteraction segment – E Explaining

5. Conclusions This chaapter has attem mpted to show w the potentiall offered both h by some verbal strateegies and nonn-verbal behaaviours in he lping to build d rapport with “difficuult” patients who w are relucctant to follow w their doctorr’s advice and recomm mendations. Inn the case ex xamined, the ppatient is unw willing to consider meedical therapyy for his cond dition, but is eventually convinced c that the bestt thing to do for him is to be treated ussing a standarrd of care approach, deespite all the possible side effects that hhe fears. Such h decision appears to hhave been faciilitated by a cllear understannding on the part p of the patient of thhe nature of hiis disease and of the possibble solutions to o manage it, in order to potentiallyy get into rem mission. Thiss process has required

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skillful discussions and dialogue, aimed first of all at making sure that the patient understood all the medical information and technical terminology used to talk about his condition. This increased awareness seems to have empowered him to be involved in decisions regarding his care, thus viewing doctors in a less asymmetric way. The feeling of “being on the same level” with the doctors has then led to increased trust and to the resolution of the initial conflict. Given the limited amount of the data analysed, it is not possible to generalise the findings of this study, which however seem to show that a certain communicative style potentially has a significant impact on the level of patient’s adherence to the advice or treatment regime recommended by the doctors. For this reason, future research should focus on the development of more fine-grained guidelines for best communication practice in the medical context, taking into consideration both the verbal and the non-verbal dimension. It would be interesting, for instance, to compare the scenarios examined here with similar ones in which the doctors do not adopt strategies for effective and affective communication and see whether or not, or to what extent, this impinges on the quality of the doctor-patient relationship and, ultimately, medical care. My impression is that the narrower the gap between doctors and their patients, the greater are the chances of achieving the desired therapeutic outcomes. The possibility for the doctor to master conflictive situations may arise from his/her ability to use specific verbal and non-verbal techniques, some of which have been presented above. It is my persuasion that doctor-patient communication can be improved through instructed attention to certain features of both spoken and body language and to how their use is essential if a consultation is to go smoothly.

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Baldry, Anthony, and Paul J. Thibault. 2006. Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. A Multimedia Toolkit and Coursebook. London/New York: Equinox. Brown, Penelope, and Colin Fraser. 1979. “Speech as a marker of situation.” In Social Markers in Speech, edited by Klaus R. Scherer, and Howard Giles. 33-62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, Mary. 2000. “The politics of transcription.” Journal of Pragmatics 32 (10): 1439-1465. Candlin, Christopher N., and Jonathan Crichton. 2013. “From ontology to methodology: exploring the discursive landscape of trust.” In Discourses of Trust, edited by Christopher N. Candlin, and Jonathan Crichton, 1-18. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Coates, Jennifer. 2003. Men Talk. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Creer, Sarah, and Paul Thompson. 2004. “Processing spoken language data: The BASE experience.” Paper presented at the LREC 2004 International Conference, Workshop on Compiling and Processing Spoken Language Corpora, May 26-28, Lisbon, Portugal. Duffy, F. Daniel, Geoffrey H. Gordon, Gerald Whelan, Kathy Cole-Kelly, and Richard Frankel. 2004. “Assessing competence in communication and interpersonal skills: the Kalamazoo II report.” Academic Medicine 79 (6): 495-507. Fong Ha, Jennifer, and Nancy Longnecker. 2010. “Doctor-patient communication: a review.” The Ochsner Journal 10 (1): 38-43. Frazer, Bruce. 2010. “Pragmatic competence: The case of hedging.” In New Approaches to Hedging, edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch, and Stefan Schneider, 15-34. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. Gotti, Maurizio, Stefania Maci, and Michele Sala (eds.). 2015. Insights into Medical Communication. Bern: Peter Lang. Gülich, Elisabeth. 2003. “Conversational techniques used in transferring knowledge between medical experts and non-experts.” Discourse Studies 5 (2): 235-263. Kövecses, Zoltan, and Günter Radden. 1998. “Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view.” Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37-77. Lakoff, George. 1972. “Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts.” Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 183-228. Reprinted in Journal of Philosophical Logic, 1973, 2 (4): 458-508, and in Contemporary Research in Philosophical Logic and Linguistic Semantics, edited by David Hockney et al., 221-271. Dodrecht: Fortis.

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—. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. —. 1993. “The contemporary theory of metaphor.” In Metaphor and thought, edited by Andrew Ortony, 202-251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. McCarthy, Michael. 1998. Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prince, Ellen, Joel Frader, and Charles Bosk. 1982. “On hedging in physician-physician discourse.” In Linguistics and the Professions. Proceedings of the Second Annual Delaware Symposium on Language Studies, edited by Robert J. Di Pietro, 83-97. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco. 2000. “The role of mappings and domains in understanding metonymy.” In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, edited by Antonio Barcelona, 109-132. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Salager-Meyer, Françoise. 2014. “Origin and development of English for medical purposes. Part II: Research on spoken medical English.” Medical Writing 23 (2): 129-131. Searle, John. 1975. “Indirect speech acts”. In Syntax and Semantics Vol. 3: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 187-210. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, 1979, edited by John Searle, 30–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ten Hacken, Pius, and Renata Panacová (eds.). 2015. Word Formation and Transparency in Medical English. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Thibault, Paul J. 2000. “The multimodal transcription of a television advertisement: theory and practice.” In Multimodality and Multimediality in the Distance Learning Age, edited by Anthony Baldry, 311-385. Campobasso: Palladino Editore. Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN SPIN IN HEALTH NEWS: LEVELS OF TRUST IN KNOWLEDGE DIFFUSION ERSILIA INCELLI SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

1. Introduction This chapter focuses on the dynamics of knowledge diffusion with reference to the popularization of medicine and health-related topics in the media. In particular, it analyzes the pragma-linguistic features employed in the discursive construction of specific reporting strategies in the communication of medical results from their original source, in this case scientific medical journals, into new contexts, namely press releases and online newspaper articles. However, this work deals with a specific aspect of news reporting, when the recontextualization of scientific information into different genres creates what can be referred to as a ‘distortion’ of the discourse (Hilgartner 1990; Fairclough 2006), or news reporting with a slant or bias (Entwistle 1995). This distinct rhetorical phenomenon is also commonly referred to as ‘spin’, the current use of the term originating in the 1980s in American politics, but the phenomenon of course is much older and falls within the realms of classical rhetoric. For the purpose of this study, ‘spin’ can be defined as specific reporting that can distort the interpretation of medical results, which may ultimately give the public unrealistic expectations about new medical treatments (Boutron et al. 2010, 2058). Of course, not all news coverage on health and medicine is inaccurate or exaggerated, and newspapers can have a positive role when they publish important health warnings. Nevertheless, in the last decade or so, as a result of increasing transparency in the digital era, a number of studies (in different disciplines) have pointed out the variable quality of health stories in the media, drawing attention to overly enthusiastic or pessimistic health news. Common flaws or types of spin strategies include

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exaggerated estimates of the benefits and significance of the research, failure to identify the risks involved, no acknowledgement of nonstatistically significant primary outcomes, failure to identify unbiased expert sources and misleading headlines (Boutron et al. 2010). As the media play a central role in informing the public about new discoveries in medical research, particularly in the areas in which audiences do not possess direct knowledge, accurate media coverage is essential to maintain public trust in science and medicine (Taylor 2008). We assume journalists present trustworthy news. Likewise, we expect academic medical researchers to objectively report their data, and government regulators to remove harmful medications or treatments from the market. Instead, spin feeds a distorted insincere form of communication into our “epistemic environment” (Manson 2013, 21), which is detrimental to trust and, when trust is broken, it can lead to major moral panics and controversies (Hargreave 2011, on the MMR vaccine in the UK). This paper aims to contribute to the issue by identifying the strategies used by journalists to influence readers and convince them of the trustworthiness of the information they report. While the aim is to build readers’ trust, journalists may paradoxically employ, whether consciously or unconsciously, somewhat deceptive rhetorical strategies, which actually go against trust. The general consensus is that spin is a pejorative term, with negative connotations, often equated with misrepresentation and deviation from the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. Indeed, dictionary definitions reveal spin as: a way of describing an idea or situation that makes it seem better than it really is (Cambridge Dictionary); to give (a news story) a particular emphasis or bias (Oxford Learners Dictionary). However, this research is not an ethical evaluation of whether spin is right or wrong (Manson 2013), rather it aims to provide a linguistic account of spin and explore its role as both a linguistic strategy in the diffusion of medical knowledge in the media and as a distinctive kind of communication, where the intention is to influence an audience’s attitude by giving a slant to the data and health advice. This study attempts to do this through a comparative, qualitative and quantitative analysis of texts from three genres which make up the corpora, namely medical research articles (RAs) from specialized journals, press releases (PRs) and online newspaper articles, and in so doing identify the nature of the distorted presentation of information. The presence of spin is mainly evaluated in PRs and the associated online newspaper stories. The quantitative data are used to confirm and support the manually retrieved qualitative findings.

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The article is organized in this way. After a brief review of the current literature, the research questions are defined, followed by some theoretical foundations, and a description of the corpus and methodology. The analysis then presents the findings with illustrative sample case studies on health topics. Finally, the last section draws conclusions.

2. Literature review Before focusing on the main arguments of the chapter, it is apt to briefly comment on what has already been done in the field. Some recent studies have examined the type of (medical) news which gets into the press (or print media) and why, referring to the notions of news values and newsworthiness (Bednarek and Caple 2012). Of relevance to this research are also studies on the role of press releases (Jansen 2008), how they can produce information bias and influence the quality of news coverage (Woloshin et al. 2009). The medical community is particularly concerned with the phenomenon of skewed data. Boutron et al. (2010), a group of medical researchers, carried out a study to expose spin based on multivariable analyses and found that the inaccuracy of the information in news articles appeared to begin as early as the abstract of the science publication. Their study used coding systems for the presence of specific quality measures which are able to match the original research topic to the results, risks and limitations reported in the news and press releases. From a more linguistic perspective, the concern for spin or ‘distortion’ has been described by some studies in terms of hype and sensationalism (Bubela and Caulfield 2004). Linguists and discourse analysts have researched the distortion of discourse as manipulation of the language (Fairclough 2006), in political discourse (Partington 2003), and as hyperbole in news discourse (Partington et al. 2013). As far as scientific discourse is concerned, it has been considered for a long time as objective language based only on facts and figures. More recently scholars have focused on slant and bias in the specialized domains (Gotti et al. 2002; Cortese and Riley 2002; Garzone and Sarangi 2007; Garzone and Catenaccio 2008). Building on these results, the present study will make a systematic linguistic investigation into spin as an aspect of the bias landscape with a specific set of rhetorical strategies consisting of specific pragma-linguistic features.

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3. Research questions and aims In light of the above, the following research questions can be formulated regarding the exploration and investigation of spin in different contexts or genres: x What is it that creates spin in discourse? x Does genre affect the type of spin or the construction of the rhetorical strategy? x More specifically, what are the pragmatic-semantic features which construct the discourse of spin? x Can we systematically categorize these discursive strategies? x Can we identify the source of spin? The hypothesis is that the analysis carried out to answer these research questions will show how trust is undermined by the effect of rhetorical spin strategies, although to what extent this is so would need more ethnographic research. To answer these questions, this paper develops a model to identify the pragma-lexical features from a discursive and linguistic point of view to show how ‘spin’ can be explained by aspects of genre. All three genres aim to persuade the reader, but each genre has a different communicative purpose for an audience with varying levels of expertise. This entails different structures, different moves, each move occurring with the respective lexical grammatical, semantic choices. Therefore, more specifically, the aim is to identify the most prominent lexico-grammatical, semantic patterns particular to the genre and identify their pragmatic functions, which will in turn reveal the most frequent rhetorical spin strategies. Overall the paper hopes to contribute to the field of pragmatics in science popularization and the diffusion of medical knowledge to the lay public, by attempting to provide the conceptual tools to systematically analyze and explain how spin is constructed in popularized texts, so as to improve the understanding of the dynamics involved.

4. Theoretical foundations As the approach obviously in ESP Nonetheless, spin as rhetoric, as a form

is genre-based, the theoretical underpinnings are genre analysis (Nwogu 1991; Swales 2000). a linguistic strategy falls within the pragmatics of of selective claim-making which is shaped and

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constrained by the desire to achieve perlocutionary effects on audiences, i.e. to ensure that an action or proposal is viewed in a way that favours the speaker’s/writer’s interests (Austin 1962). Furthermore, spin is a type of communication governed by the intention to bring about ‘promotional’ perlocutionary effects (Manson 2013, 200), in that claims are constructed to inform, convince, impress, entertain, disgust, trigger emotions, for example by emphasizing the positive, downplaying the negative or by exaggerating. This explains the presence of highly evaluative language in popularization texts to attract and engage the reader. For this reason, notions of evaluation, stance and appraisal (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Martin and White 2005) are pertinent to the analysis. The analysis takes a genre-based approach in that genre is influenced by the audience and the discursive lexical-grammatical choices and pragma-semantic features are correlated to genre. At the micro-level scale of analysis, to carry out a systematic investigation of the language features, this work draws on Hyland’s concept of ‘proximity’ (2010, 116). Hyland uses the term ‘proximity’ to refer to a writer’s control of rhetorical features, through linguistic devices which writers use to represent not only themselves and their readers, but also their material in ways which are most likely to convey credibility, meet reader expectations and persuade a specific audience. As spin involves communicating something that can be true or false, this kind of communication, which may also be manipulative, is associated with the concept of ‘implicature’ within Gricean pragmatics (Grice 1975), i.e. what is suggested, implied or entailed in an utterance without directly expressing it. Grice argued that the process of understanding what speakers mean by their utterances is made possible by observing the ‘cooperative principle’ and its ‘maxims’. The maxim of quality concerns truthfulness and epistemic responsibility in that the speaker/writer is supposed to put forward claims as true; the maxim of manner concerns clarity and avoiding ambiguity. These maxims are based on trust. Mayer et al. (1995) explain we generally trust other people under the assumption that they will behave in a way that is beneficial to us. Hence, the theoretical underpinnings of trust are useful for understanding spin as a form of persuasive communication. From the perspective of discourse analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is particularly appropriate as an approach in that it views the ‘distortion’ of discourse as a social problem for social order (Fairclough 2006). However, CDA tends to focus more on social cultural structures and less on linguistic units in the discursive event, therefore to systematically and empirically investigate the texts and identify the

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linguistic resources at micro-level, this work attempts to relate an analysis of language units to a pragmatic explanation of their use and function. Hence, the work specifically draws on Hyland’s (2010) concept of proximity, to explain how writers use language to negotiate social relationships and position themselves in relation to others through register and lexical choices, which helps understand the ideational and interpersonal component of textual analysis. As the focus of attention is on the online newspaper media, the news genre (van Dijk 1986) and the related notions of news values and newsworthiness need to be considered. The media has its own news values, which are different to scientific texts, so newsworthiness differs according to the relevance of the news for a target audience. For example, news values are dictated by the pressure that is imposed on journalists to produce newsworthy stories, by the pressure of a pharmaceutical company to sell its product through press releases and also by the pressure on the medical researcher for status and scientific attention in a high impact medical journal. Spin and selective claim-making in this way can be explained by newsworthiness. Thus, the use of language that exaggerates the results of scientific research to increase the value of the news could imply that the news distorts health news reports.

5. Corpus and methodology 5.1 Corpus The corpus is composed of three core sub-corpora (Table 15-1) collected over the period January 2013 to July 2014 and consists of texts from three different genres: online newspaper articles, scientific medical research papers (RAs) and press releases (PRs). The newspaper corpus is made up of 118 online newspapers articles, totalling approximately 42,000 words. I downloaded articles from the health and medical sections of online newspapers, choosing regular health-related topics such as heart disease, obesity, back pain, cholesterol, ageing, cancer, stem cells, coffee, tea, red wine, acupuncture, flu, arthritis. Initially, I sought cases where news stories offered advice to readers, making causal claims drawn from correlation results, for example, stress and wine consumption correlations. Finally, for illustrative purposes, I selected three case studies, cholesterol, flu and aging, and I used the archive search engine of each newspaper to find related health stories. I did not distinguish between broadsheets and tabloids as I found both types of papers reported similar sensational news, with similar lexis, e.g. a major breakthrough, miracle cure. Therefore the

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newspaper corpus consisted of texts from the health sections of The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Sun, Daily Express, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. The news articles ranged in length from 250 to 2,000 words. Most newspaper articles referred to the original study in the academic journal, often by hypertext links within the text. In this way, I was able to access the original source or search for it on PUBMED (a database for medical journals). This allowed me to build up a small specialized corpus of 17 corresponding medical research papers (98,748 words), mainly from specialized, high impact medical journals with a wide international circulation, e.g. British Medical Journal (BMJ), The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Journal for Food and Nutrition. Unlike the newspaper articles, each research paper has an average length of 3,000 to 5,000 words. For the purpose of this research, the focus was on the abstracts and conclusions, which I also read analytically. The third corpus consisted of 15 corresponding PRs, a total of 17,671 words. I looked for the PRs, which corresponded to the original medical research on the PR database EUREKALERT with search terms from the title of the research paper, making sure the date and year corresponded. I found only 15 perfectly matching PRs; most were published by medical journals, university research centres, funding institutions, pharmaceutical companies, e.g. Georgetown University, Alnylanm Pharmaceuticals. To facilitate the matching process between RAs, PRs and online news stories, I also used the UK National Healthcare service website Behind the Headlines, which tries to monitor accurate medical reporting by practitioners and journalists. Online Newspapers

118 Newspaper articles Total tokens: 42,183 Types: 4,992 Broadsheets: Telegraph, Guardian, Independent Tabloids: Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror

Medical Research Articles 17 Medical research articles Total tokens: 98,748 Types: 8,712 Scientific medical journals: BMJ, Lancet, JAMA, Journal for Food and Nutrition, Cell, etc.

Table 15-1. Overview of the corpus.

Press Releases

15 Press releases Total tokens: 17,671 Types: 3,270 Medical journals, university research centres, funding institutions, pharmaceutical companies; e.g. University of Maryland, Alnylanm Pharmaceuticals

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5.2 Methodology The main thrust of the research and interpretation of the findings is the integration of qualitative comparative analysis with quantitative data retrieved from corpus software tools, which confirmed nuances and first impressions from an initial reading of the texts. The subsequent quantitative analysis also strengthened the identification of prominent recurring phraseological patterns in the genres, pointing to the main strategies employed. This type of methodological approach falls within integrated frameworks of discourse analysis, such as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), Partington et al. (2013) and Baker et al. (2013). The quantitative results were obtained with the aid of AntConc (Anthony 2008) and Wmatrix3 (Rayson 2003), and involved standard corpus linguistic procedures, such as the retrieval of keyword/frequency lists, concordance analysis, POS tagging, n-gram and cluster analysis for phraseological patterns, together with the notion of semantic prosody, which addresses the pragmatic level of meaning emerging from the connotations of collocates, chiefly in terms of positive or negative evaluation (Sinclair 1996, 87). Each stage of the automated analysis was consistently reinforced by a manual analysis of the expanded co-text of concordance lines which highlighted the pragmatic function of specific features. I first identified an initial group of keywords, e.g. new, significant, effective, safe, well-tolerated, significance, breakthrough, cure, hope, drugs, mice; and key 2, 3, 4 word n-grams, which guided the extraction of reoccurring lexical patterns, e.g. statistically significant results, more likely to die, less likely to. The rhetorical statements were then grouped according to ‘spin’ strategy, following Hyland’s notions on proximity (2010). In constructing proximity Hyland takes into account five elements involved in the popularization process: organization, argument structure, credibility, stance and reader engagement. For the purpose of this research I focus on the first four elements. For example, the rhetorical strategy of ‘claiming novelty’ for a new drug treatment can be classified under organization and argument in that academic sources are usually organized to foreground their new discoveries in research. Another frequent rhetorical strategy, ‘claiming validity’ through statistically significant results, can be categorized under the facet of stance in terms of taking a position on interpretative data. Hyland argues that writers appeal to their respective readers by using these facets of proximity to “display both authority as an expert and a personal position towards issues unfolding in a particular text” (2010, 119). In other words, proximity helps the author establish a relationship and build credibility with the audience. This way I

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use the main elements which emerged as a tool for categorizing key linguistic patterns and devices, and show how different language choices are employed to negotiate academic claims, depending on the genre and target audience. This framework allowed me to identify a salient set of rhetorical strategies common to the three genres, each marked by different pragma-linguistic features. A final remark regarding the methodological procedure concerns the fact that the study is performed on small scale corpora and therefore admittedly it cannot be fully representative of specific popularization texts, but nevertheless the framework proposed here is potentially useful as a starting point for larger scale analysis.

6. Analysis and discussion The analysis revealed several prominent discourse strategies comprising specific language features used by writers and journalists to build trust and affinity in their audiences. For a systematic analysis of the data, I use four of Hyland’s (2010) elements involved in the popularization process, namely Organization, Argument, Stance and Credibility. I focus here only on the salient reoccurring strategies common to all three genres.

6.1 Organization and argument structure claiming ‘novelty’ An aspect which contributes to the way rhetorical spin is achieved is the organization of the argument, which differs according to the genre and audience. Hyland points out that academic sources are usually organized in a strongly informative and detailed manner, whereas science journalism relates articles to the reader with the usage of deductive rhetorical patterns that highlight the relevance of the topic to lay readers “rather than the methodological steps taken to get there” (2010, 119). Within this aspect the texts in each sub-corpora revealed prominent pragma-linguistic features and specific rhetorical strategies. One feature which stood out both in terms of a qualitative reading and in the retrieved quantitative data is the concept of ‘novelty’, e.g. This study is the first to show. The retrieved frequency keyword list revealed that novelty adjectives, which also act as stance markers, e.g. first, new, novel, were high frequency items in all three corpora (Table 15-2). For example, first has 70 hits versus 40 in the newspaper corpus, and new has 60 hits in the RAs versus 101 hits in the newspaper corpus and 37 hits in the PRs.

Spin in Health News: Levels of Trust in Knowledge Diffusion Corpus Medical RAs PRs Online newspapers

first 70 (0.07%) 18 (0.20%) 40 (0.01%)

new 60 (0.06%) 37 (0.37%) 101 (0.03%)

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novel 13 (0.01%) 11 (0.10%) 8 (0.02%)

Table 15-2. Frequency of the adjectives first, new, novel in the corpora. In terms of ‘promotional perlocutionary effect’, all three genres in this case study are driven by novelty, each genre presenting idiosyncratic features. The main purpose and function of novelty is to produce a positive spin in the overall discourse prosody of the texts, as shown in the following examples (1) to (11) from texts in each sub-corpus. In research papers, novelty is a key feature of “academic advancement and intellectual exchange” (Hyland 2010, 119). (1) Since SCIPIO is the first study of CSCs in human beings, the results will be important for […] developing this new form of cell therapy. (The Lancet 2014, 383) (2) The purpose of the study was to test the therapeutic effects of novel vaccines […]. (Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology 2012, 3) (3) This study was the first time ALN-PCS was given to human beings, […]. The premedication regimen resulted in a substantial increase in serum PCSK9 […]. (The Lancet 2014, 383) (4) We explored these DFSAs as a possible new class of covalent mechanism–based influenza therapeutics. […] These are attractive because the initial affinity of the drug (Ki) can be optimized, […]. (Science 2013, 340)

As we can see in (1) to (4) above, in academic texts researchers typically introduce their work as novel, novelty being negotiated as the first in the scientific field to contribute to ‘existing knowledge’. This proposition is also supported by evaluative adjectives and causal statements employing verbs and key terms which enhance the appeal and novelty of the research, e.g. important, attractive, resulted in a substantial increase, can be optimized. In the following examples (5) to (7), novelty is emphasized by placing ‘local’ research within existing research (Hyland 2010), with important implications for medical research, health and people.

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We can see how scientific language can be evaluative in its promotional ends, emphasizing the contribution of the research to existing research, to convince the scientific community of its value, e.g. published in Nature Medicine, the first natural experiment, we identified a gap in the literature, a new pathway, with implications. When we explore the corresponding PR and online newspaper articles, the language features undergo pragma-lexical, semantic change. The language is more emphatic or forceful, in terms of its “sought effect” (Fuoli and Paradis 2014, 10). The PRs appear to use language features which ‘promote’ the novelty of a medical product or treatment. The following examples (8) and (9) are taken from the Alnylam Pharmaceuticals PR (2013) on a new cholesterol drug. (8) These new results show very robust, statistically significant, and dose-dependent lowering of both PCSK9 and LDL-C levels […]. In addition, ALN-PCS treatment was well tolerated at all dose levels studied to date indicating the potential for future studies. (9) RNAi is a revolution in biology, representing a breakthrough in understanding how genes are turned on and off in cells, and a completely new approach to drug discovery and development. Its discovery has been heralded as "a major scientific breakthrough that happens once every decade or so," and represents one of the most promising and rapidly advancing frontiers in biology and drug discovery today.

The language of novelty in the PR is intensified by the use of superlative and absolute adjectives and adverbs, which strengthen the meaning, producing an overall effect of exaggeration, e.g. a completely new approach, very robust statistically significant results, a major scientific breakthrough that happens once every decade or so, one of a most promising and rapidly advancing frontier. Claim-making propositions

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are made to be convincing by highlighting the positive, in order to engage the reader, the scientific community, practitioners or potential buyers. However, no data is available about readers’ reactions, so the question remains open about what effect exaggeration has. In effect, the PR is a marketing opportunity for promoting the new drug, replicating the sensational language often found in newspapers, e.g. a revolution in biology, heralded as a breakthrough. Let us turn now to the corresponding health story (10) in the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 2013. (10) New cholesterol drug without the side-effects (Headline) A radical drug which lowers cholesterol levels by silencing a key gene could work just as well as statins, in just one dose, a study has found. More than 5 million people in the UK currently take statins to reduce their risk of heart disease. The medication has been hailed as a "wonderdrug" bringing down deaths from cardiac problems, […] . Now findings from a trial published in The Lancet, has found that a new drug performed just as well, reducing cholesterol by up to 57 per cent, with just one dose.

The newspaper article above looks at novelty from the point of view of newsworthiness, in terms of what is of human interest and relevance. The journalist has taken up the promotional language of the PR, and boosted it even further, removing hedging, to make the information more convincing, e.g. New cholesterol drug without the side-effects, a radical new drug, medication has been hailed as a ‘wonderdrug’. What is more, the journalist has clearly copied information from the original PR and used it as the chief source of input for news coverage. This is an example of publication bias, when journalists rely on a particular source which affects the reporting (Entwistle 1995). The examples above illustrate how authors make specific lexicalgrammatical choices to strategically construct the rhetoric according to the communicative purpose and audience. The somewhat tentative academic claims of a potentially safe mechanism to reduce LDL cholesterol, a possible new class of covalent mechanism are transformed into a scientific revolution, a major breakthrough and heralded as a radical new drug in the PR and newspaper article. In other words, findings are stretched for newsworthiness, presented in terms of what is of immediate value, or potential benefit to the reader, also marked by ‘the end to…’ news frame. For example, in the newspaper clip, the new drug offers ‘the end to’ cholesterol and the side-effects. However, if we look carefully at the original research paper on cholesterol (11) in The Lancet (Oct. 2013) the aim of the research is:

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In contrast, media coverage focuses on the cholesterol lowering effects of the drug, even though this was not the aim of the study. What is more, in the RA conclusions, example (12) below, the authors admit that the trial had too few people involved to be able to tell how effective the drug is: (12) In this study we noted no significant changes in either in response to ALN-PCS although the number of participants assessed at efficacious doses was small […].

Media coverage seems to report the non-significant results. The rhetorical ‘spin’ strategy lies in focusing on an outcome that was not the aim of the study, (over)emphasizing beneficial/positive effects or safety despite nonsignificant results. The information has been modified by bias coverage, leading to possible misinterpretation by the public and false hopes. A byproduct of the analysis is the potential conflict of interest represented by Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which funded the research. This aspect is not the focus of this research, but nevertheless it is worth pointing out, because any discourse will be potentially promotional and affect the pragmatic, semantic, lexical and grammatical choices.

6.2 Organization and omission of information There is general agreement among scholars of genre analysis that information is organized for the strategic interest of ‘hooking’ the reader (Hyland 2005a). In newspaper discourse, information is either foregrounded or left to the end of the article depending on its newsworthiness (Nwogu 1991). The following case study on flu illustrates the strategy of deliberately downplaying information, provided by the example of the omission of the word mice. Mice are frequently used in medical experiments and Random Controlled Trials (RCTs). In fact, mice is among the top keywords in the RA corpus, with 147 instances (0.16 %, relative frequency), 46 instances (0.10%) in the newspaper corpus, with only 5 instances (0.06%) in the PR corpus. Table 15-3 presents an example of how the omission of information (the spin) may start as early as the title or headline.

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Medical RA Oral administration of Lactobacillus Brevis KB290 to mice alleviates clinical symptoms following influenza virus infection

Press Release Japanese superfood prevents flu infection

Online newspaper New wonder cure for killer flu originates from the humble turnip

Letters in Applied Microbiology, Waki N., Vajtma N., Sugamuma H., et al., Vol. 58: 1(6) Nov. 2013

Letters in Applied Microbiology, 5 Nov. 2013

Daily Express, 6 Nov. 2013

Table 15-3. Omission of mice in headlines. In the example in Table 15-3, the complex scientific title of the medical research paper, simplified and made accessible to the general public (e.g. Lactobacillus brevis KB290), becomes a humble turnip for the Daily Express readers. Although mice appears in the title of the medical RA, it is omitted in the title of the PR and in the newspaper headline. Moreover, there is lexical leeway in that there is a shift from the original word used in the title creating a new meaning. In fact, the verb alleviate in the RA title is changed into prevent in the PR title. This clearly modifies the meaning. The information undergoes further change when it is boosted into sensational language as a new wonder cure for killer flu. But most of all the reader is left with the impression that the experiments are carried out on humans. This may be because the associated press release leaves this impression. In actual fact, we can see in Table 15-4 below in an expanded excerpt of the Daily Express article, the lexical compound human trials is foregrounded rather than mice.

6.3 Stance: hedges and boosters Scientists/researchers tend to see their work as far more “tentative and mediated” than journalists (Hyland 2010, 124). Hence, researchers are careful about making overblown claims and frequently use hedges to keep interpretations close to the data findings (Salager-Meyer 1994). Journalists, on the other hand, take a different view towards facts. The diffusion of medical knowledge for popularization purposes often entails removing doubts and adopting linguistic features that amplify the certainty and significance of claims, so as to make the material they report more convincing. This explains the evaluative language used to exaggerate. The

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following examples show how the writers’ stance changes according to genre and how, in the recontextualization of new medical research in the press release and corresponding newspaper article, the tentativeness is removed in favour of unhedged or boosted assertions. In so doing, the information undergoes ‘distortion’, possibly creating unrealistic expectations, or even public fear, depending on whether the discourse is constructed as positive or negative spin. Research Article Letters in Applied Microbiology Vol 58 Issue 1, 6 Nov. 2013 Conclusions Our results demonstrated that oral administration of KB290 before infection could alleviate IFV-induced clinical symptoms. Alleviation of clinical symptoms by KB290 consumption may have been induced by longlasting enhancement of IFN-Į production […].

Press Release Letters in Applied Microbiology 5 Nov. 2013

Online Newspaper Daily Express 6 Nov. 2013

Japanese superfood prevents flu infection Scientists have discovered that bacteria found in a traditional Japanese pickle can prevent flu. Could this be the next superfood? Naoko Waki of KAGOME CO., LTD. in Japan said: "Our results show that when a particular strain of Lactobacillus brevis is eaten by mice, it has protective effects against influenza virus infection.” Scientists are hopeful that, […] foods containing them may turn out to be the next superfood. What it is about the bacteria that gives them this amazing property is not known, but it is remarkably tolerant to stomach juices, which are too acidic for many bacteria.

New wonder cure for killer flu originates from the humble turnip A DRINK derived from a vegetable has been hailed as a breakthrough in the search for a cure for flu. Drug could wipe out flu for good A NEW flu drug which is said to stop the virus in its tracks has been created by scientists. Experts are already carrying out human trials on a probiotic drink which contains the powerful new ingredient. Researchers said the breakthrough could provide the “blueprint” for a new vaccination programme, […], scientists are hopeful they have found the next superfood.

Table 15-4. Sample excerpts from the case study of flu.

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In the RA conclusions, the authors construct proximity by using language which expresses points of view through devices which allow writers to comment on the actual status of the proposition, conveyed in epistemic modality, e.g. KB290 could alleviate IFV-induced clinical symptoms; Alleviation of clinical symptoms may have been induced by […]. The hedges imply that a claim is based on plausible reasoning, rather than certain knowledge, creating affinity with the scientific community while opening a space to possible debate (Hyland 2005b). In contrast, in the PR promotional language is explicit. Scientific and technical terminology is removed and the language is simplified. Hedging is reduced and, all in all, the perlocutionary effect is more assertive, as for example in the sentence Scientists have discovered that bacteria found in a traditional Japanese pickle can prevent flu. Although there is an element of epistimicity, it is a type of hedging which is different to that found in scientific genres, which uses hedges to indicate a degree of caution or assurance. The claim is strengthened by evaluative adjectives, amazing property, remarkably tolerant, scientists are hopeful, the next superfood. We see examples of the rhetorical spin strategy of emphasizing the positive and ignoring non-significant statistical results. For the science journalist in the online newspapers, hedges reduce the importance and newsworthiness of a story drawing attention to uncertain truth and undermining its trust value. Any new medical treatment needs to be recontextualized as something to be glamorized, e.g. A drink […] hailed as a breakthrough; A new flu drug to stop the virus in its tracks; breakthrough could provide the “blueprint”. Journalists engage the public with ‘emotional’ adjectives, which intensify the importance of the information. This is reflected in the high frequency POS (parts of speech) tagset list in Wmatrix3. The tag for adjectives ranked second with 2,872 (8.12%) instances identified in the newspaper subcorpus. For example, the most frequent adjective in the newspaper corpus is new with 101 occurrences (see Table 15-2). Other adjectives include: likely with 44 occurrences; major 31; good 28; better and high 22; great/greatest/greater 20; potential 13; best 11; super 9; important 8; positive, promising and deadly 6; hopeful 5; worse 4; bad 3. In this case study example, the journalist has taken a clear stance, but the news is recontextualized a long way from the original information, e.g. drug could wipe out flu for good.

6.4 Stance: claiming validity This section describes how claim-making differs in degree of precision and technical jargon, depending on the genre and degree of popularization

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to be communicated (Hilgartner 1990), and how this phenomenon contributes to the overall rhetorical effect of spinning information. A quantitative analysis of the top frequency n-grams (or word clusters) provided some interesting data on what information is predominant or foregrounded according to the genre and audience. The top 4 word n-gram in the RAs is analyses of observational studies (35 hits), confirming the researchers’ emphasis on analyses, methodological procedures and results. In RAs, methodological procedures and results are usually reported with considerable exactness, as expected. In fact, the closest collocate adjective for describing results and effects, in terms of high precision measurements, is the top 2 word n-gram statistically significant, with 29 instances in the RA corpus (13), whereas it appears only 4 times in the PR corpus and has 0 instances in the online newspapers texts. (13) Most (30/48) of the meta-analyses of observational studies reported a nominally statistically significant result (P = 0.0038), with an odds ratio of 5.60 (95 % CI 1.51–21.95). (BMJ 2014, 348)

The top n-grams in the PR highlight the institution and the new drug being promoted e.g. the University of Maryland/the treatment of. In the newspaper article, the top 4 word n-gram is more likely to die (12 hits). The sample concordance lines below illustrate the pragmatic use of the adjective more likely to (40 hits), the second most frequent 3 word n-gram in the newspaper corpus. The comparative adverb more intensifies the likelihood or probability of the proposition, at the same time signalling vagueness rather than precision. 1. three times more likely to develop a brain tumour 2. were 50 per cent more likely to die from the illness 3. and a fifth more likely to die of cancer 4. two to three times more likely to die prematurely 5. the same category who were 34% cent more likely to die 6. and frequently nagged were even more likely to die 7. full-fat milk could be 50 per cent more likely to die 8. sit down all day are a fifth more likely to get cancer 9. are also 27% more likely to get coronary heart disease 10. much time sitting down are more likely to have a heart attack

The journalist adopts the adjective more likely to first to reformulate scientific measurements in an accessible way for lay readers, doing away with any technical scientific measurements. In fact, close collocates are other markers signalling approximation, e.g. three times more; 12% more; a fifth more; and secondly, to create a predominantly negative semantic prosody, which engages the reader on a personal level. In the examples we can see negative semantic prosody is illustrative of the type of news values

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which are pursued for reader engagement, e.g. more likely to have a heart attack. A full view of all the concordance lines showed that more likely to is rarely collocated with neutral or positive affirmations. It appeared more frequently with lexis presenting negative connotations, creating a negative spin, and consequently producing a scaremongering news frame, as shown in the expanded lines in (14) and (15). (14) Those with the disease who eat a single portion daily of a product containing full-fat milk could be 50 per cent more likely to die. (Daily Mail, March, 2014) (15) Women who spend too much time sitting down are more likely to have a heart attack, […]. (Daily Mirror, April, 2014)

6.5 Credibility Generally in popularization texts, as in the texts in these corpora, an effective way to promote ‘sought effect’ and build trust in the general public is to strengthen credibility by attributing the source of the information reported to scientists, researchers, professors or scientific journals. Attribution is often marked by direct quotes, introduced by the reporting verb say. In fact, said has 210 instances (0.5%) in the newspaper articles, say 36 hits (0.08%), and says 44 hits (0.1%), as opposed to said (10 hits, 0.10%), and says (14 hits, 0.1%) in the PRs. There are 0 hits for said and say in the RAs, which tend to use more verbs referring to research procedures and results, e.g. observe, suggest, report. In addition, in online news journalists are able to draw on intertextual relations by using hypertext links to the original research. The following examples from the newspaper corpus illustrate how journalists appeal to credible sources and voices: (16) Prof. Tim Spector, at King's College London, who took part in the research, said: "This is an exciting finding that shows that some components of foods that we consider unhealthy like chocolate or wine may contain some beneficial substances." (Daily Mail, Jan. 2014) (17) Dr Mark Walker, a consultant physician at Newcastle University, said the results of the study were 'very encouraging and an exciting breakthrough'. (Daily Mail, April 2014)

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Examples (16) and (17) involve direct quotes by scientists, who speak with enthusiasm about the research findings, taking advantage of media visibility to promote their research. In this way, journalists can attribute any sensationalism to the actual researchers, e.g. very encouraging and exciting breakthrough. Likewise, they can rhetorically distance themselves from any (mis)interpretations. In (18) the journalist names the scientific publication of the original research, and in (19) a generic reference is made to experts. This strategy allows the audience to look at the journalist as a credible person and the journalist’s information as more trustworthy. The PRs in the following examples similarly appeal to scientific authority, but differ in propositional content. Institutions, in collaboration with the scientists and researchers, write their own press releases; this influences lexical semantic choices. (20) Prof. Howard Federof said, “Our novel blood test offers the potential to identify people at risk […]. We consider our results a major step toward the commercialisation of a preclinical disease biomarker test […].” (Georgetown University PR, March 2014) (21) “This is an important project for world health,” Swartz said, noting that the vaccine must not only be broadly effective against different strains of flu but cheap to produce [...]. (Stanford University PR, Dec. 2013) (22) Dr. Campbell, associate professor at the University of Maryland says, “This one is totally different from any previous flu virus we know […]. The strength of this strain is another cause for alarm. […] it has the potential to cause a bigger impact than typical seasonal flu.” (University of Maryland PR, Sept. 2013)

In the examples above lexis is clearly promotional in intention, e.g. our novel blood test offers, commercialization, cheap to produce. The language is persuasive to raise research status and sell the product, e.g. an important project for world health. Example (22) about ‘the killer flu’ produces a scaremongering frame similar to media frames, e.g. cause for alarm, has the potential to cause a bigger impact.

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It is worth mentioning here that quoting in medical research papers is rare. In direct contrast to the personalizing strategies of popularizations, researchers increase credibility in science articles through impersonalization (often introduced by the dummy it) and by downplaying their personal role (Hyland 2005b).

7. Conclusions In view of eliciting linguistic features adopted to build trust and appeal to the reader, which paradoxically may ultimately break trust, this chapter has explored a particular aspect of the dynamics of knowledge diffusion in science popularization, when specific discourse strategies are used to report information which produces bias or spin, leading to a possible misinterpretation of new medical results by the public. The analysis has tried to give a linguistic account of how rhetorical ‘spin’ strategies are discursively constructed for the purpose of ‘promotional perlocutionary effect’, according to the genre, audience, and communicative purpose. This process also involves the notions of newsworthiness and proximity, which tell us about how writers see their readers and how lexical choices are orchestrated to manipulate the information they want to give. Texts from sample case study health stories have illustrated how spin is above all selective communication shaped by a specific repertoire of linguistic features involving highly evaluative and emotive language, through the use of intensifying adjectives and sensational nominalizations which present science and medicine to the general public as a series of discoveries, breakthroughs, miracles, rather than advancements in medical and scientific progress, in that details of the methods are left out. Examples have been given of how the rhetoric used to frame original research results tend to overstate the effectiveness of the new treatment, new therapy, new drug. This can lead to a distinct slant or bias in the discourse. What is more, exaggeration in the news is strongly associated with exaggeration in press releases. We have seen how results recontextualized in the press release arrive at the newspaper desk to be boosted further. The journalist finishes it off according to expected audience interest and newsworthiness. So far the analysis shows that most spin appears to originate in the corpora of PRs, more specifically the institution behind the press release. The data has also provided examples of scientists presenting their research in a sensational, promotional way, as apparent in the direct quotes in the PRs and online newspapers, meaning they may be partially contributing to any misrepresentation. However, more data would validate this hypothesis. In fact, the small size of the

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corpora acts as a limit on the investigation, in that research carried out on a larger scale would improve the validity of results and may even produce different data. Nevertheless, a similar framework can be applied to larger corpora analysis, and the repetition of patterns can be used, with due caution, as predictive data, uncovering recognizable features of that community or genre and specific contexts. Pedagogically speaking, this type of genre analysis can help raise awareness of the importance of audience, and the study of proximity within genre illustrates how each community transforms information from the same source for different purposes. Finally, this contribution highlights the important role of the media as a source of information to a vast public. We can see how a great deal of our knowledge comes from others, and there are serious risks at stake in low quality medical news reporting and, as a consequence, the possible undermining of trust.

References Anthony, Laurence. 2008. AntConc100. www.laurenceantony.net/software.html Austin, John. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, and Tony McEnery. 2013. Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bednarek, Monica, and Helen Caple. 2012. “Value added: Language, image and news values”. Discourse, Context, Media 1:103-113. Boutron, Isabelle, Susan Dutton, Philippe Ravaud, and Douglas G. Altman. 2010. “Reporting and interpretation of randomized controlled trials with statistically nonsignificant results for primary outcomes.” JAMA 303 (20): 2058-2064. Bubela, Tania M., and Timothy. A. Caulfield. 2004. “Do the print media “hype” genetic research? A comparison of newspaper stories and peerreviewed research papers.” CMAJ 170 (9): 1399-1407. Cortese, Giuseppina, and Philip Riley (eds.). 2002. Domain-specific English. Textual Practices across Communities and Classrooms. Bern: Peter Lang. Entwistle, Vikki. 1995. “Reporting research in medical journals and newspapers.” British Medical Journal 310: 920-923. Fairclough, Norman. 2006. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Fuoli, Matteo, and Carita Paradis. 2014. “A model of trust-repair discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 74: 52-69. Garzone, Giuliana, and Paola Catenaccio (eds.). 2008. Language and Bias in Specialized Discourse. Milan: CUEM. Garzone, Giuliana, and Srikant Sarangi (eds.). 2007. Discourse and Ideology in Specialized Communication. Bern: Peter Lang. Gotti, Maurizio, Dorothee Heller, and Marina Dossena (eds.). 2002. Conflict and Negotiation in Specialized Texts. Bern: Peter Lang. Grice, Paul. 1975. “Logic and conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole, and Jerry Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Hargreave, Ian. 2011. Wakefield and the Autism/MMR Vaccine Controversy. http://www.influentialpoints.com/Critiques/ analysis_re_ wakefield_&_mmr.htm Hilgartner, Stephen. 1990. “The dominant view of popularisation: conceptual problems, political uses.” Social Studies of Science 20 (3): 519-539. Hunston, Susan, and Geoffrey Thompson. 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyland, Ken. 2005a. “Hooking the reader: A corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts.” English for Specific Purposes 24 (2):123-139. —. 2005b. “Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse.” Discourse Studies 6 (2):173-191. —. 2010. “Constructing proximity: Relating to readers in popular and professional science.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9: 116–127. Jansen, Frank. 2008. “Conciseness, an outsider's perspective and smooth intonation contour: A comparison of appositions in press releases and news stories based upon them.” Pragmatics 18 (1): 115-142. Manson, Neil. 2013. The ethics of spin. Working paper University of Lancaster: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/manson/The%20Ethics%20 of%20Spin%20%5BWiP%5D; accessed November 2015. Martin, James, and Peter White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave/MacMillan. Mayer, Roger C., James H. Davis, and David F. Schoorman. 1995. “An integrative model of organizational trust.” Academy of Management Review 20 (3): 709–734. Nwogu, Kevin. 1991. “Structure of science popularization: A genreanalysis approach to the schema of popularised medical texts.” English for Specific Purposes 10:111-123.

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Partington, Alan. 2003. The Linguistics of Political Argument: The Spindoctor and the Wolf-pack at the White House. London/New York: Routledge. Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid, and Charlotte Taylor. 2013. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse. Theory and Practice in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rayson, Paul. 2003. “Matrix: A statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison.” Ph.D. thesis, Lancaster University. Available at: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/: accessed March 4, 2009. Salager-Meyer, Francoise. 1994. “Hedges and textual communicative function in medical English written discourse.” English for Specific Purposes 13 (2): 149-171. Sinclair, John. 1996. “The search for units of meaning.” Textus IX (1): 75106. Swales, John. 2000. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: University of Aston in Birmingham. Taylor, Alan, 2008. “How spin killed the news hound.” The Sunday Herald, 10 February. van Dijk, Teun. 1986. “News schemata.” In Studying Writing: Linguistic Approaches, edited by Charles Cooper, and Sidney Greenbaum, 155185. Beverly Hills/London: Sage. Woloshin, Stephen, Lisa Schwartz, Samuel Casella, Abigail Kennedy, and Robin Larson. 2009. “Press releases by academic medical centers: not so academic?” Ann. Intern. Med. 150: 613–618.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN INFORMATIONAL, PROMOTIONAL AND TRUST-BUILDING STRATEGIES IN THE WEB GENRE OF CLINICAL NEGLIGENCE CASE STUDIES GIROLAMO TESSUTO UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES 2 UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES FEDERICO II

1. Introduction It is amply recognized that the World Wide Web is a continual, ongoing process, transforming the way we conduct our lives. On-line business sites, information services and magazines regularly provide the social vehicles for people to interact. Relevant to this evolving universe of global network-accessible information and communication is a variety of research work done recently by linguists (Garzone et al. 2007; Giltrow and Stein 2009; Myers 2010; Campagna et al. 2012; Luzón 2013; Salvi and Cheng 2013; Garzone 2014; Garzone and Ilie 2014; Tessuto 2016, among others) committed to identifying the characteristics of web-mediated texts and genres from discourse analytical perspectives. Yet, with more sites popping up on the web, the universe of multimodal forms of data and communication creates new opportunities for the development of discourse and genre analytical studies in webmediated communication. This is the case of communication activity via clinical negligence (also referred to as medical negligence) websites which provide a range of information, knowledge and data regarding individuals who have become the victims of some form of negligence at the hands of medical or other healthcare professionals alongside the legal procedure for making a claim. In such a huge database available from these sites, the

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topic of medical negligence finds its way into the emerging genre of case studies, where the major strides in information sharing and legal services marketing mesh with the requirement for trust and its alternative, distrust, in the accounting of clinical negligence. Aside from online environments, trust is a complex concept that has been recognised as playing a central role in a variety of relationships, whether at the level of the individual, the organisation or society. Yet, despite the significance of trust at a variety of levels, “there also appears to be equally widespread lack of agreement on a suitable definition of the construct [trust]” (Hosmer 1995, 380). Thus, in addition to the normative view that “trust implies the belief that others act responsibly and for the common good” (Leveille 2006: 87), the alternative behavioural/cognitive facet of trust draws from the calculation of being trustworthy in relation to a particular event or task (Hardin 2002), to cite just a few of such theoretical perspectives. Against this background, the purpose of the present chapter is to look at the genre of clinical negligence case studies as the material for the exemplary analysis of episodes in medical malpractice and resultant legal complaints sourced from professional law firm websites. The study examines the genre from a discourse and web-enabled analytical perspective, focusing on the rhetorical move structure and communicative purpose intended by professional writers in this new form of communication. Through the analysis of structure and purpose and the tools provided by the Internet, the study considers the trust/distrust-related implications of both informational and promotional strategies performed in the genre, whether in text-based or computer-mediated interaction. The study also situates the trust building efficacy of these strategies within the dynamic processes of hybridization, interdiscursivity and re-contextualization of the genre. Prior to achieving this purpose, I should first indicate the empirical material and research method used before I undertake the analysis and discussion of the findings and draw conclusions.

2. Material and method 2.1 Corpus data The analytical data for this study came from a representative sample of clinical negligence case studies (n=30) published on two British law firm websites on November 12, 2015 – Longden Walker and Renney UK Solicitors (LWR) and JMW Solicitors (JMW). To build up a coherent data set for quantitative analyses, an equal number of randomized case studies

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(n=15) was chosen from those sites for inclusion in each set of the corpora. After retrieval from those sites, case studies (text-based entries) were then stored on a computer to provide text file formats for such analyses, yielding a whole corpus of 14,553 tokens from the sampled texts. Published case studies ranged from a minimum 250 to a maximum 750 word limit as was necessary to comprehensively cover the topic for the typical web reader, and were presented in short pieces of house-styled writing. Clinical negligence case studies, as labeled and used on the chosen sites, were based on real-life incidents experienced in clinical and legal practice and resolved through independent legal advice by a (UK) nationwide team of clinical negligence solicitors accredited to those sites. Building on real-life incidents, clinical negligent case studies provide an important locus for understanding how professional community ‘insiders’ – lawyers as writers of text from the law firm websites (author’s personal communication) – bring together all the facts of the medical and legal management of the case in a retrospective guise, recounting actions and events of medical injuries to patients and responding to those injuries by legal suits.

2.2 Analytic procedure For the empirical analysis of corpus data, this study determined the overall generic structure of case studies, and examined each rhetorical move content alongside the most salient micro-linguistic features in a basically qualitative approach. To do so, a combined framework of methodological perspectives from digital genre analysis (Askehave and Nielsen 2005), traditional genre analysis (Bhatia 2004, 2008, 2010; Swales 2004), evaluative (Martin and White 2005) and other approaches to language (Biber 1988; Toolan 2009) was followed in this study. In the absence of published studies on the case study genre, the current analysis had to look elsewhere for clues to develop an overall organizational structure from the genre-based view of professional discourse. As a result, Hoey’s (2001) model of textual organization used in the field of discourse analysis and known as the problem-solution pattern was adopted in the current study. However, the problem solving model involved modifying move names and coding scheme (Move 2, Move 3, Move 4) and adding Move 1 and Move 5 to the overall structure of the genre under scrutiny, so as to accommodate the data and facilitate the analysis in the existing corpus.

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Following this modified model, a five-move organizational structure of the clinical negligence case study genre was identified and outlined in Table 16-1. Communicative purpose Move 1 Introducing the case Move 2 Presenting the case

Move 3 Addressing the case

Move 4 Solving the case Move 5 Closing the case

Move-constructing information • Indicates the topic covered in the case by: - headline - lead • Provides a synopsis of the medical facts of the case by: - patient client diagnosis or treatment - course of medical management and patient's responses to treatment - actual outcome of management and treatment (injury) • Provides a synopsis of the facts of the lawsuit taken by patient client by: - letter of claim by claimant to defendant (allegation of negligent liability) - letter of response (admission or denial of liability) - court proceedings issued and served - exchange of liability experts reports or - claiming about negligence liability • States successful medical negligence claim by: - settlement and award • Solicits client feedback by: - contact and other information

Table 16-1. Overall organizational structure of the clinical negligence case study genre. This structure is one in which the genre was “associated with typical textualization patterns” (Bhatia 2004, 25) as used by professional writers to achieve their communicative purposes of Introducing the case (Move 1), Presenting the case (Move 2), Addressing the case (Move 3), Solving the case (Move 4), and Closing the case (Move 5) through the content criteria of the move-constructing information of the genre.

3. Results and discussion Viewed operatively, the content of rhetorical move types with communicative purposes of text in audience relations can be seen by the actual formulation of the genre, where information about low credentials

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for medical practice go hand in hand with online tools and law firm informational and promotional (marketing) strategies.

3.1 Move 1 Move 1 relied on two story-like rhetorical strategies corresponding to statements about the major introductory aspects of the case. This move bore resemblance to the structure of news discourse (van Dijk 1988), where a summary of a news story is first presented as the Headline followed by a Lead, or similarly to the structure of “hard news reports” (White 1997). With this news report organizing-like structure at work, the headline or title of a case story was the normal way to briefly introduce the case with an “attention-grabbing aim” (Haggan 2004), and was typically a complete sentence often with auxiliary verbs and articles removed. The headline was followed by the structural element of the lead including brief statements of the story’s essential facts in a number of one to three sentences. By way of examples: (1) [M1] Failure to recognise broken collarbone on X-Ray Nick lost the ability to work after hospital doctors failed to notice he had broken his collar bone. This was despite the break being present on an XRay and Nick being in an extreme amount of pain. Nick’s case was taken on by Melissa Gardner, one of the specialist medical negligence solicitors at JMW and he was later awarded £400,000 in compensation. (JMW)

On the face of it, the rationale of this move highlights what professional writers deemed to be newsworthy information about the healthcare problem and how this problem was taken on by the lawyer treating the case. In other words, it is here where the writers attempted to have the reader's attention engaged before elaborating information in the body of text, and did so by foregrounding the significance of the case according to its impact (representation of event) and closeness (the closer the target readers were to the event, the greater the human interest value for them). By front-loading the newsworthy information in this way and spotlighting a (dis-)trust relationship in medical and legal practice, the conventionalised context of the move thus relied on the short, punchy, informative lead to articulate the most comprehensive statement(s) that the writers could make around the ‘start-to-finish’ of clinical negligence episodes.

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3.2 Move 2 In Move 2 writers sketched out the case ‘backwards’ by informing about the general facts of medical malpractice and used nut-shell paragraphs to draw the reader into the case story. These facts were indicated through three case presenting rhetorical strategies, identifying the patient client diagnosis or treatment, the course of medical management including the patient’s responses to treatment, and how they developed under the medical mismanagement. The example below illustrates the essential move-organizing content: (2) [M2] The Claimant in this matter, underwent surgery for prostate cancer in June 2009. Unfortunately problems developed and a catheter had to be replaced. The District Nursing Team should not have replaced the catheter but did so on the instruction of the hospital, following an emergency telephone consultation. As a result the Deceased suffered damage and was admitted to hospital. The rectum was perforated necessitating an emergency operation to repair the damage which left the Deceased with a defunctioning colostomy and an ileal conduit. Further reconstructive surgery took place in September 2009. That surgery, in turn, caused the development of adhesions, which, in turn created an adhesional small bowel obstruction. This led to compression of the bowel wall. An area of the bowel became necrotic allowing the escape of bowel contents into the abdominal cavity. This led to the eventual development of peritonitis which caused the death of J Decd in November 2011. (LWR)

As is clear, a quick memo of the clinical case and ‘how it all came about’ was presented to inform about the series of treatment received and how they resulted in the patient being the victim of adverse events – those caused by medical mismanagement. More important still, the rationale of this informational move is one in which the writers were reporting on those events and situations that took place in the narrated sphere; in other words, re-telling completely objective, unbiased stories in such a way that the readers may perhaps be able to determine the feelings of the characters, even though those feelings were never described within the move-level reporting activity. As a result, the case presentation rhetorical move relied on narratives of past events re-told by the writers as thirdperson objective narrators, and the centrality given to past tense forms functioned as the primary surface markers of narrative discourse (Biber 1988; Toolan 2009). By the same token, this kind of narrating system emphasized the communication of “tellable” or “reportable” events (Labov 1997), even though the “reportability” dimension (in the Labovian model

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of personal narratives) was narrowed down to the third-person objective narration mode. To illustrate this, the example above presents a narrative focus with agency features, namely the parties’ reference (Claimant, District Nursing Team, Deceased), inanimate agents (e.g. rectum, surgery), and active verbs in past simple tense and passive agentless voice, as used to focus on the temporal sequence of clinical facts taken from the real-life cases. Considering the main thrust of this move to present the adverse experience of a patient who was agentively engaged in storytelling, two aspects of human agency were central to patient representation within this move. Unlike case stories published in LWR site, where the noun claimant naturally referred to the ‘legal identity’ of the patient and used as a linguistic variant to client in the story told, those appearing in JMW relied on a more intimate treatment of the patient who was referred to by proper name (Paula had suffered with a bowel problem since birth and for most of her life she had managed to control her condition), therefore contributing to a more personalised tenor of the story. However, centrality of the narrative focus was also to inanimate agents, such as human body-parts (the rectum was perforated) and treatment procedures (further reconstructive surgery took place), within the process of diagnosis and treatment course, so that these agents were other significant elements engaged in the storytelling. As we see, this kind of agentivity made the style of reporting and narrating more “depersonalized” (Anspach 1988; Fleischman 2003) as if in abstraction of either the person/patient from whom organs originated, or the agent (medical staff) performing treatment. While the narrative focus with agency features and active/passive voice sentence structures was useful to provide a climate of objectivity, it was also important to emphasize deficiencies in clinical practice, as measured by the medical and ethical duties to prevent judgment, skill-based or other errors on the part of healthcare team-work. Informed by the Appraisal analytical approach to evaluative language (Martin and White 2005), these errors can be gleaned from the framing of medical malpractice information in the same example presented in (2), where a range of semantically and discursively realised features provide the typical Pronouncement, Affect and Judgment meanings for those deficiencies: The Claimant in this matter, underwent surgery for prostate cancer in June 2009 Pronouncement. Unfortunately, problems developed negative Affect and a catheter had to be replaced. The District Nursing Team should not have replaced negative Judgement the catheter but did so on the instruction of the hospital, following an emergency telephone consultation. As a result,Proclamation the Deceased suffered damage negative Affect and was admitted

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Chapter Sixteen to hospital. The rectum was perforated necessitating Expectation an emergency operation to repair the damage which left the Deceased with a defunctioning colostomy and an ileal conduit. Further reconstructive surgery took place in September 2009. That surgery, in turn, caused Proclamation the development of adhesions, which, in turn created an adhesional small bowel obstruction. This led to Proclamation compression of the bowel wall. An area of the bowel became necrotic allowing the escape of bowel contents into the abdominal cavity. This led to Proclamation the eventual development of peritonitis, which caused Proclamation the death of J Decd in November 2011.

We can appreciate how these features construe negative emotional reactions to processes (Affect) implicated in medical malpractice, attend to the assessment of medical behaviour according to normative and ethical principles of clinical practice (Judgment), and at the same time present the types of errors as the most distressful and shocking lived experiences in the text, thus providing narratives of diagnosis and treatment along the ‘bad’ (as opposed to ‘good’) positioning of healthcare providers. With these evaluative meanings conveying the highest level of disservice in healthcare, not least because of the patient dying in the reported story, the narrative focus of this informational move naturally indicates the tension which arose when ethical trust between healthcare providers and the claimant/patient breaks down in offline contexts. In this sense, narration highlights the requirement for trust that is based on a belief about others acting responsibly (Leveille 2006) in relation to a particular task (Hardin 2002), and specifically singles out the discursively situated presence of risk in a variety of healthcare professional settings (e.g. Moore et al. 2003; Sarangi and Candlin 2003). Despite the fact that the concept of patient trust is a complex and multidimensional construct across academic disciplines, the reference to an ethical trust here naturally brings out the essential role that trust plays in effective doctor-patient relationships, where it has long been recognised to be a critical factor influencing a variety of therapeutic processes, including satisfaction with medical care (e.g. Cook et al. 2004). Based on this, the evidence of the narrative system in (2) suggests that the nature of a risk rested largely with the degree of accountability that healthcare providers should have owed to the patient and the mechanisms for responding to patient safety in healthcare. By relating to the need for healthcare providers (both individually and collectively) to perform according to professional standards, this responsibility for avoiding risk and enacting trust with patient belief about his or her expectation of the therapeutic task also naturally took into account the role of social trust in framing the

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traditional interpersonal trust between patients and their healthcare providers (Goold 1998). This way, then, the rationality of the informativity move-level increased knowledge about mismanaged medical care among readers on the one hand, and on the other it increased the scope for incompetency in risk avoidance that healthcare providers might be judged on and trusted. We therefore understand that, by reporting on these errors as they arose from the adverse outcome of diagnosis and course of treatment, writers were seeking to provide instant recounts of medical discourse taken at face value and patient distrust, where medical injury was indeed suffered by the person as a result of the negligent act or omission of healthcare providers. At the same time writers were also eliciting an emotional response from the captive audience affected by similar (untrustworthy) reported experiences. As a result of this, the style of reporting and narrating turned out to be naturally more descriptive than argumentative within this move, where short simple and compound sentences in past tense forms prevailed consistently over complex and compound-complex sentence structures. In keeping with this reporting style, then, the length and complexity of noun phrases were cut down to the essential, and the combination of simple and neutral word choice of the NHS semantic currency (pain, syndrome) and, where appropriate, specialized medical terms (colostomy, ileal conduit) was a recipe for distributing and acquiring rapid, reader-friendly information about the nature of errors among vulnerable people from the web community.

3.3 Move 3 Just as errors explained an unsatisfactory outcome of medical care across the sampled texts, so were their legal requirements disclosed as an opportunity for storytelling an injured patient’s action for remedial care. In this context, the brief realization of Move 3 served to recount facts of the lawsuit taken by the patient client (as a claimant) suing and seeking redress as a result of the negligence of the healthcare provider (as a defendant). This Move relied on five case addressing rhetorical strategies coinciding with statements about the medical negligence complaints process through 'letter of claim', 'letter of response', 'court proceedings', 'expert reports', and 'claim for negligence liability'. Example (3) below illustrates the information-giving elements of this move where the writer third-person narration mode served to make the reader aware of the claimant's concerns which were given a full and prompt response by the treating law firm's lawyers:

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Chapter Sixteen (3) [M3] The Claimant pursued a claim against the Hospital Trust who denied liability on the basis that it was not their responsibility to check and redress the wound following discharge in January 2011. Further investigations were made of the District Nursing Trust and, following receipt of further notes it was clear that, due to the poor state of the records that it could have been either of the two potential Defendants that had a liability to the Claimant. Therefore, a Letter of Claim was redrafted and submitted to both. A Letter of Response was not supplied. (LWR)

Where these formal stages of the claim were overtly removed from the surface of the text, the re-telling of facts of the lawsuit made its appearance in the form of descriptive claims about negligent liability: (4) [M3] There is no doubt that the injury to the ureter occurred at the time of the initial surgery, and JMW Solicitors claimed that had the surgeon taken more care to identify and isolate the ureters before proceeding with the removal of the uterus, the damage could have been avoided. It is well known that there is an increased risk of ureteric damage during LAVH compared with other types of hysterectomy. JMW Solicitors claimed that had Jenny received a higher standard of care from the hospital, she would have avoided weeks of pain, discomfort and anxiety, as well as an unnecessary laparotomy, invasive urological procedures and permanent renal damage. (JMW)

In this approach, the writer made an assessment of how an individual ‘would’ or ‘should’ have responded in the hypothetical circumstances under consideration (underlined), and therefore relied on hypothetical past conditions to report on a different action to avoid a bad outcome, and therefore risk, in healthcare delivery. In this sense, the ‘evaluative’ issues of breach of a duty of care and causation (of injury suffered) on the part of the healthcare provider come down to the rhetorical elements of this move to enable the writer to approach the question of determining the ‘would/should have’ position in the negligent case – what would have happened to this particular patient if her condition had been diagnosed when it should have been. Not only this, but viewed again from the Appraisal theory perspective (Martin and White 2005), and as shown in (4) in italics, the evaluative issues of negligent liability falling upon healthcare providers were organised in such a way that the writer was presenting various Engagement meanings directed towards (a) identifying facts as wellfounded and valid (There is no doubt that / It is well known that –

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Proclaim) by removing alternative positions in the story, (b) grounding those facts in the subjectivity of an external (lawyer) voice (JMW Solicitors claimed that – Attribute), as well as (c) scaling the level of liability via comparatives (more care / a higher standard of care – Intensification). Implicit in these meanings are the criteria by which untrustworthy providers could legitimately be expected to repair the damaged trust with the patient. In this sense, the writer in the example above showcased three main canons inherent in the rhetoric of Negligence Law, namely, (a) determining the legal standard of care owed by healthcare providers, (b) measuring the facts of proven (clinical) performance in the case against that standard, and (c) recognising that the damage/injury was caused by the failure on the part of the healthcare providers to perform according to the legal standard of care. By doing so, the writer sought to connect with the socially and legally determined beliefs and value positions of clinical negligence in two main ways: (i) advising on what inevitably led to anger and distress on the part of the patient experiencing mistrust in healthcare, and (ii) showing the JMW lawyers accountability to mismanaged healthcare practices, and most importantly creating a legal duty for the lawyers in whom the trust had been placed by the damaged patient as a client. Very clearly, in all their dealings, lawyers in general must uphold several principles by which they are governed, such as acting with competence and honesty towards clients so as to give precedence to their duties in the administration of justice. In this vein, therefore, both the canons and language in (4) suggest that the lawyer-client relationship of trust is one which licences the conceptualization of the trustee’s (lawyer’s) attitude towards another (client/trustor) as his/her personal propensity to trust (Leveille 2006), and as a consequence become the defining elements of the lawyers who acted as the trusted representatives of the client based on ethical as well as legal duties. Allied with this evaluative context of the move were the syntactic and lexical choices employed in recounting the facts of the lawsuit. In addition to short simple and compound sentences in past tense (active/passive) forms still prevailing over other structures, lengthy and complex noun phrases were also kept to a minimum. To reflect the kind of topic typifying this move, specialist lexis of the law (claim, damages, issue proceedings, No Win No Fee) was used only where appropriate to describe the particular legal process and procedure in this area of legal practice, and alternated with simple and neutral words (agreement, resolution, offer) as was necessary to provide a cut-and-dry set of those facts for lay readers, and similarly contribute towards a common level of shared knowledge.

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Yet, another variant of storytelling was available from this move through exclusive first-person pronouns (we, our, us), which made it possible for first-person writers-narrators to determine whose eyes the reader may experience the legal story through. This variant can be seen in (5), where re-counting facts by a collective we/our pronoun overtly drew the reader into the institutional and corporate ‘voice’ of lawyers informing about the conduct of the case; in other words, taking a stance on behalf of the law firm: (5)[M3] On our client’s behalf, we made representations to the Court, asking that it arrange two trial hearings; one to establish whether our client had been subject to substandard treatment and a later hearing to establish the appropriate level of compensation, [...]. (LWR)

While the narrating mode of a we pronoun was the explicit indication of the law firm’s virtual identity and stance, it also served to qualify this identity as a confidence/trust enabler associated with the quality and duty of service of legal practitioners as agents or creators of trust (trustees).

3.4 Move 4 Just as instant recounts of the legal facts in Move 3 demonstrated how lawyers treated and managed the clinical negligence claims for patient clients in their most vulnerable moments of clinical mistrust, so they needed to state the success of those claims by informing the reader about the resolution of the medical malpractice problem. In this context, then, Move 4 had one case-solving rhetorical strategy corresponding to snapshot statements about the amount of compensation sought for by the firm’s lawyers to settle the claim. Thus, we read: (6) [M4] Negotiations ensued once a Schedule of Loss was submitted and, the sum of £160,000 was successfully recovered in respect of damages. Our client was delighted with the result. (LWR) (7) [M4] Nick’s case was taken on by JMW’s Melissa Gardner who helped him to challenge the appalling care he had received. Melissa obtained an admission of negligence from the hospital trust and £400,000 in compensation for Nick to help him and his family to cope with the financial fall-out.Read what Nick had to say about our service here. (JMW)

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We can see that the examples above are littered with positively evaluative expressions (successfully recovered ... Our client was delighted with the result / Melissa obtained ... in compensation), suggesting that first and third-person writers-narrators were seeking to provide readers with positive descriptions of the law firm operating in a lean and efficient manner along with a keen understanding of its clients’ needs and wants. To further strengthen this favourable self-image is the sparing inclusion of a statement about the client testimonial for such a service and marked as clickable (link) when hovered over by a mouse (Read what Nick had to say about our service here), thereby allowing the reader/user of the web to alternate between reading the text and surfing through the medium (see Askehave and Nielsen 2005 on the “two-dimensional” properties of digital genres). However, we are aware of the business model of law firms being remarkably similar and that law firms differentiate themselves on their promise of value and service to clients, so it stands to reason that a legitimate attempt was made by the writer in the above and other move examples to promote, as well as inform about, the organizational effectiveness of the law firms as the most persuasive (marketing) strategy for reaping the benefits of reliance and trust among would-be clients and driving more customers to their legal service provision based, as it was, on the firms’ ability to deliver consistently on their promise of value to their past clients, and consequently move toward a differentiated market position. In other words, it provides information sharing and reader/client engagement with a trustworthy legal service practice along the lines ‘it makes all the difference’. Crucially, therefore, this way of extending the essentially informative move content over a promotional edge was responsible for interdiscursivity operating as part of the colonization process and the mixing, embedding or bending of genres (Bhatia 2004, 2008, 2010), and most significantly brought together the private intentions (Bhatia 2004: 25) bound, but still negotiated, by the lawyers’ common goals of creating credibility for their professional practices among prospective clients. By the same token, informational and promotional elements in the move were important to emphasise the marketization or commodification of discourse practices (Fairclough 1992) whereby the lines between “telling” and “selling” (Fairclough 1994: 257) become blurred. Allied with this informational/promotional overlap was the advantage of the narrative system within this move to create an avenue for fresh content and personal commitment by the lawyers as writers-narrators. As foregrounded within Move 3, the lawyer digital presence in the current move was significant to emphasise zealous acting in the client's lawful

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interest bound, as it was, by the client-lawyer fiduciary relationship – one which placed the clients’ confidence, good faith, and indeed trust in the lawyers whose advice was sought. And we have seen just how this important trust relationship came down to the rhetorical elements of Move 4, where compensation put clients as injured persons back to the position they were in before the adverse effects were caused and made their life more comfortable. In other words, restoring patient-client damaged trust in medical practice by imposing a legal duty on blameworthy healthcare providers.

3.5 Move 5 Finally, Move 5 had one closing-the-case rhetorical strategy designed to solicit client response by contact and other information, and relied considerably on the tools provided by the Internet, as in: (8) [M5] Please contact John Lowther on 0191 5666 500 or email [email protected] if you would like to discuss a medical negligence claim concerning a delay in treatment. If you would prefer, you can complete our short enquiry form and one of our medical negligence solicitors will contact you. (LWR) (9) [M5] If you would like to find out more about the topics discussed above, give us a call to discuss the situation and to see whether you could be entitled to compensation. Ring us today on 0800 054 6512, or complete our online enquiry form and a member of our friendly team will get in touch with you. Read more of our Medical Practice Negligence success stories here. (JMW)

As is clear from the textual surface of the move, writers as firm’s lawyers wished to connect with the readers they would be working with (prospective patient clients), before the latter decide whether they will pick up the phone and call them. Building rapport with these profiled readers can be seen in (8) and (9) by the use of second person pronoun (you) creating synthetic personalization and interpersonal meanings for strategic purposes (Fairclough 2001) alongside the use of imperatives (ring us ... or complete ...), used to direct or instruct readers in some kind of procedural activity. Yet, getting personal in the web medium of the genre gave profiled readers one more way to get in touch with the law firms, as measured

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again by the “two-dimensional” (Askehave and Nielsen 2005) property of the move, in terms of “production, function and reception” (Askehave and Nielsen 2005, 125), and deployed constantly across the samples. As the examples above show, this property allowed the readers to alternate between reading the text and navigating the medium through links to do various things – namely, to fill out consistently written contact (enquiry) forms, to immediately contact lawyers who could most effectively field case calls and emails, and to read about other successful case stories as testimonials to bolster the baseline firm reputation and client trust. These interactive affordances indicate the types of relational actions established within this move when the reader ‘drops anchor’ at the text to read about the lawyers’ practice, call them or fill out a contact form. Under these circumstances, dropping anchor through the conventional ‘Soliciting client feedback’ (Move 5) had the effect of creating a bespoke content for case management, and at the same time it worked piecemeal across the genre structure to building credibility and similarly improving the lawyer firm’s client acquisition from the websites. Consequently, the rationale of this ‘soliciting’ move accentuated the promotion of the lawyer’s service and expertise (flowing in gradually within Move 4) in the most effective marketing strategy performed yet as part of the private intentions of lawyers (Bhatia 2004, 25), and the marketization or commodification of discourse (Fairclough 1992). Indeed, we are aware of digital trust being the currency of today and a critical issue for every player in the ecosystem (healthcare, finance, law, etc). So, it is no wonder that the web as well as the text-based design of the move was key to emphasising the importance of engendering digital trust with professional legal advice of law firms as businesses and as an enabler of the overall digital economy. In this framework, many studies have addressed the important role of trust in online environments (e.g. Pavlou 2003), where opposing views have been expressed about conferring trustworthiness to technological artifacts which, as beneficiaries of trust, must possess “consciousness or agency” (Friedman et al. 2000, 36), or recognizing that trust in a person or a technology is no different simply because people design and control their own technologies (Sztompka 1999). What we mean by engendering digital trust in the context of our discussion is the perceptions readers as users of the web develop about others’ attributes (human-made technological artifacts) which establish the identity of the parties involved (technology as an agent or creator of confidence and the reader/user as the recipient of this confidence) and gradually evolve towards mutual trust. Clearly, mutual trust can only be

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established after the web readers/users have engaged in trust-related offline behaviour (in our instances, hiring lawyers for advice in the most suitable malpractice case) and had an opportunity to assess the trustworthy value of the agent in relation to outcome by circumventing uncertainty and risk in online environments. However, drawing on the model of initial consumer trust building via websites (McKnight and Chervany 2001– 2002), first trust perceptions and consensus can still come into existence and evolve over time after the web readers/users have gained a cognitive experience of discrete components made available to them by online agents, namely, testimonials and other interactive affordances via links, as noted, which provide an avenue for the readers to know about the quality of the legal service, and therefore encourage consumers to take specific actions on the web through a stepwise trust relationship. Of course, these web components of the move add to data-driven results and valuable content delivered across other structural moves, where they are built around the interest of the web agents’ targeted audience. In this sense, it is not unlikely that first trust perceptions and consensus can still be gained from web readers as they learn about online zealous lawyers solving the medical error responsibly and reliably, even if the readers' case will not be the same as the one in the story told.

4. The genre as the outcome of a problem-solution pattern and recontextualizing process We have seen how the emphasis on successfully defended claims within Move 4 presents the overall generic structure around the ‘start-tofinish’ of clinical negligence cases. Under these circumstances, it is vital to clarify something of the rhetorical structure of the genre, where the case was expressed first as an issue (Move 2) but is now concluded when a positive response is given to remedy this issue (Move 4). Consequently, the informative move contents and sequences of the genre (Move 2, Move 3, Move 4) present the progression of negligence compensation claims and the ways to treat them in medical and legal practice in both the problem and solution text rhetorical structure. Yet, looking at the genre as the outcome of a problem-solution pattern of text organization, an analysis of the rhetorical moves and sequences equally reveals the reciprocal influence and interaction of different discourses or activity types in institutional and professional settings. In essence, three kinds of activities, namely, the party suffering damage due to the malpractice actions of healthcare providers (Move 2) and the lawyer's offering of legal knowledge and advice to the aggrieved party as a

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result of the damage suffered (Move 3), were combined together in the process to achieve settlement of the claim (Move 4) through the reporting function of the genre. In this vein, then, these types of discourse and conventions are to be seen as interdiscursive in nature as a result of the hybrid enactment of three distinct genres being linked together, 'discourse of medical malpractice', 'discourse of legal advice', and 'discourse of bargaining', where ethical, moral and legal issues are ideologically and pragmatically involved in the reporting activity of the genre. Similarly, conversing across these types of discourse is useful to understand diverse genres and styles that are interconnected to each other in genre chains, where “systematic transformations from genre to genre” (Fairclough 2003, 216) are reflected, and processes of re-contextualization specified in terms of genre chains or networks of events. In our case, such transformations are a key feature of the participants, actions and events in the generic move structures in that case stories were sourced (decontextualized) from one (offline) context of discourse and reformulated (recontextualized), by re-telling, within another (online) context of discourse to suit the writers' objectives. Very clearly, this recontextualizing process required “the suppression of the meaning potential of a discourse” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 126) in order to redefine the social and discursive practices in focus within those particular Moves. However, depending on the context, such a process equally provided the tool in redefining intraprofessional (within specific professions), interprofessional (between different professions at workplaces) and professional-lay discourse (from professionals to lay people) (Linell 1998, 143) as regular and yet competing processes of communication. However, such transformations are more than a rhetorical move phenomenon in that they had an effect on style as well. As seen, the tendency to utilize synoptic moves in marking prior cases of clinical negligence went hand in hand with the need to popularize the choice of language used in the genre. Thus, viewed from a different (popularization) analytical perspective, the narratives of medical and legal facts, as sourced from the medical and legal discourse practices, equally involved “the transformation of specialized knowledge into ‘everyday’ or ‘lay’ knowledge” (Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, 370) within a process of recontextualization (Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, 371; also Brand 2008, 37, on a similar point), and “establish[ed] a direct link with the public’s general knowledge” (Gotti 2014, 19) by affecting persons and identities (Myers 2003, 272) within the micro-linguistic dimensions of popularizing texts (Garzone 2006). In this context of popularizing discourse, where images also semantically interacted (Lemke 1998) through a multimodal

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approach (Gotti 2013), becoming more 'ordinary' thus signified a decrease in specialization and an increase in readability of the case studies. Higher readability and lower specialisation, then, were the two essential elements to create and distribute valuable and consistent content for a clearlydefined audience, share this content to build a strategy based on trust that ultimately drives profitable customer action, and pave the road to the “democratization” of public discourse (Fairclough 1992, 203) in the web medium of the genre.

5. Conclusion In this study, I have attempted to show how clinical negligence case studies as an emerging genre via law firm websites create an avenue for information sharing and promotional/marketing process organised around trust building strategies. I have demonstrated this through the identification of a standardized generic structure and common move repertoire laying down the ways the writers went about achieving common communicative purposes in web-mediated professional discourse. Findings of the rhetorical move types point to a profiled community of readers, clients as injury victims, on the web making a socially usable record of the clinical negligence case constructed within an instantly informative purpose achieved through the rhetorical function or “generic value” of narration necessary for the realisation of distinct genres, such as stories and reports (Bhatia 2002, 281). This informative purpose gave shape to a partly-combined promotional purpose of the genre achieved within a commodified publication profile of the fluid, fast-paced web medium. The combination of these rhetorical functions or communicative purposes was the outcome of the writers’ choice to make a dynamic negotiation of diverse discourses and genres, and consequently brought about the phenomena of hybridisation, interdiscursivity/colonisation, and re-contextualisation in this medium. In this framework of variously conceptualised discourse practices of the genre, the analysis has shown the need for professional writers as lawyers/law firms to provide target readers with case information via referral-oriented websites, and the evidence to support that information about what made the promotional talent of accredited lawyers to those sites taking on and winning cases for their past clients. In consequence, evidential data through case information and promotion through appeals to differentiating features of the lawyers' service were relevant for the law firms to improve a web marketing presence of their own and drive more traffic towards their business.

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However, developing a law firm web presence means more than just informing the readers about those cases and engaging them in the law firm promotional/marketing process. It is also about the restoration of medical trust with past clients and the representation of social relations in action and conflicts, where patient-client interest in the regulation of neglect of duty in medicine and healthcare was a necessary force of the lawyer-client trust relationship constructed in the web medium of the genre. In this context, the varying experiences of trust examined across the narratives of the genre's structure emphasise that trust is a crosswise, and mutable construct and deeply embedded in professional practices and cultures (medicine and law), where it is linked with competency and risk involved and experienced (medical practice) as much as the good faith, confidence and honesty experienced (legal practice). While these dynamics link social responsibility with the ethical and professional standards of trust in those practices, they also therefore maintain and re-build expected actions and events by creating the possibility of re-balanced power relations. In addition to these dynamics of trust, there is an expectancy associated with web trust, that is to say, constructing digital affordances in a user-centred approach to the personal experience of future patient clients alongside the quality of reliable content features. And the ability to benefit from what first trust perceptions can reveal about a digital platform of law service practice can be a promise of what can be relied upon by prospective clients.

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Linell, Per. 1998. “Discourse across boundaries: On recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse.” Text 18 (2): 143157. Luzón, María, J. 2013. “Public communication of science in blogs: Recontextualizing scientific discourse for a diversified audience.” Written Communication 30 (4): 428-457. Martin, James R., and Peter R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McKnight, Harrison, and Norman Chervany. 2001–2002. “What trust means in E-commerce customer relationships: An interdisciplinary conceptual typology.” International Journal of Electronic Commerce 6 (2): 35–59. Moore, Alison, Christopher N. Candlin, and Guenter Plum. 2003. “Making sense of viral load: One expert or two?” Culture, Health and Sexuality 3: 429-450. Myers, Greg. 2003. “Discourse studies of scientific popularization: Questioning the boundaries.” Discourse Studies 5(2): 265-279. —. 2010. The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum. Pavlou, Paul A. 2003. “Consumer acceptance of electronic commerce: Integrating trust and risk with the technology acceptance model.” International Journal of Electronic Commerce (7) 3: 101-134. Salvi, Rita, and Winnie Cheng (eds.). 2013. The Use of English in Intercultural Professional Settings: Virtual Encounters and Identities. Textus 1. Roma: Carocci. Sarangi, Srikant, and Christopher N. Candlin. 2003. “Categorization and explanation of risk: A discourse analytic perspective.” Health, Risk and Society, 5(2): 115-124. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sztompka, Piotr. 1999. Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tessuto, Girolamo. 2015. “Posted by ...: Scholarly legal blogs as part of academic discourse and site for stance and engagement.” Textus XXVIII (2): 85-108. Toolan, Michael J. 2009. Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. van Dijk, Teun. 1988. News as Discourse. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. White, Peter R. R. 1997. “Death, disruption and the moral order: The narrative impulse in mass-media hard news reporting.” In Genres and

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Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School, edited by Frances Christie, and James R. Martin, 101-133. London: Cassell.

Websites LWR case studies available at: http://www.longdens.co.uk/clinicalnegligence/case-studies JMW case studies available at: http://www.jmw.co.uk/services-for-you/ clinical-negligence/success-stories/

AFTERWORD ON TRUST GIUSEPPINA CORTESE EMERITUS PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF TURIN

What does the word “trust” evoke for the woman and the man in the street, at least in the western world? Do we conceive of trust as something fleeting, like empathy, or capable of blooming at first sight, like love? I daresay that “trust” belongs with the sphere of sentiments that require time and cultivation, in one word, knowledge. In common usage, the word has retained its etymological sense: TRUST. (Scand.) M.E. “trnjst” – ICEL. “traust”, trust, protection, firmness; Dan. Swed. “Tröst”, consolation. + G. “trost”, consolation, Goth. “trausti”, a covenant. Related to Trow, True. (Klein, Ernest. 1966. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language: Dealing with the Origin of Words and Their Sense Development Thus Illustrating the History of Civilization and Culture. Amsterdam: Elsevier) TRUST c. 1200, “reliance on the veracity, integrity, or other virtues of someone or something; religious faith,” from Old Norse traust “help, confidence, protection, support,” from Proto-Germanic abstract noun *traustam (cognates: Old Frisian trast, Dutch troost “comfort, consolation,” Old High German trost “trust, fidelity,” German Trost “comfort, consolation,” Gothic trausti “agreement, alliance”), from ProtoGermanic *treuwaz-, source of Old English treowia “to believe, trust,” from c. 1300 as “reliability, trustworthiness; trustiness, fidelity, faithfulness”" from late 14c. as “confident expectation” and “that on which one relies.” […] (Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper ed., retrieved 24 Apr. 2016)

“Trust”, then, designates an internal state, a state of knowing and selfconfidence about the other or about the state of things. To be externalized and communicated via language, whatever the language, it usually requires the cognitive condition labelled “common ground”. To trust by instinct is a risk, for trust needs, even in the most trivial routine exchanges, a familiarity condition. The more local, familiar and secure the terrain, the more economical the verbal exchange:

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(1) Due coccodrilli e un chilo di tartarughe! (at neighborhood bakery)1 (2) Stampa e Sole, grazie! (names of newspapers, daily ritual at newsstand) (3) Andrei su un loden classico, di quelli con lo spacco sotto la manica.2 (choosing a new coat)

Typical, therefore, and often comical in its perlocutionary effects, the kind of exchange where the speech act misfires, or the speaker even loses face, by trusting that s/he will be successful in a milieu where common ground is not secure: (4) Mi dà due etti di guanciale? (at the old village butcher’s; the response is a baffled grunt)3 (5) Sorry dear, no powder rooms here, we’ve only got toilets! (old waiter in response to US woman tourist’s request in a London pub) (6) Questo esame è un casino!4 (Erasmus student, one month since his arrival in Italy, to Italian Professor; response left to reader’s imagination) (7) Patient with very low pain threshold. (Doctor-to-doctor talk, meaning “You can expect this person to complain all the time”)

Note that, amongst the variables impinging on common ground is not only the knowledge state, but the trust one has in the source of one’s knowledge. Try and offer new and relevant instructions to a child. Most likely, the response will be: 1

“Two crocodiles and 1 kg of turtles”. For a linguist, listening to orders at this corner bakery is pure enjoyment. 2 “I’d go for a typical loden coat, the model that’s got openings under each arm”: that is a “typical loden” here. 3 My then fiancé wanted to impress me with his culinary skills, so off we went to the local butcher’s. Standing behind the marble counter, which was raised a good two feet above floor level, the butcher looked huge and authoritative. True to the book, the daring young man asked for guanciale. He was actually asking for lard, more precisely lard from the pig’s cheek, which at the time (late 1970s) and in a small mountain village in the North of the country, was perceived as (and it was!) literally “lifted” from some sophisticated cooking recipe. The butcher’s grunt made it clear that we were being hopelessly taken for two city snobs. 4 “This exam is a tricky one” is what was meant, except that casino is a four-letter word, now in common use but surely not quite appropriate when consulting with an academic.

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But parents talking to a teenager trying out his/her autonomy will, more often than not, be faced with peer group positioning: (9) Ma loro dicono che… (“But they say”, my emphasis)

When in a verbal exchange one interlocutor is missing crucial information, asymmetry in the state of knowledge may cause, at best, surprise. Say, a wedding where an Italian, faced with chrysanthemums that typically decorate graveyards in Italy, will exclaim “I can’t believe it!” (revealing the verb TRUST belongs with epistemic modality). In trickier or more unpleasant circumstances, asymmetry may generate mistrust, or even extreme irritation: (10) Your filter, madam, needs changing! (madam’s filter had been changed, at a different gas station, the day before) (11) Say, how old are you, fourteen maybe? (store owner in response to a teenager trying to buy cigarettes) (12) Oh, really, and what do I do with this? (Patient in cardiac arrest, physician has asked the OTA5 who happens to be in the room for bicarbonate, meaning bicarbonate to be administered intravenously, but has received sodium bicarbonate powder from the kitchen).

Even worse, perhaps, is the anxiety arising from multiple and confusing or contradictory information, the current issue of correlations between the triple vaccine and autism being a case in point. But situations in which matter-of-fact information is in contradiction with expert knowledge and the related terminology are quite frequent, causing the uninformed lay person to feel at a loss. For example, I surely press 3 on the elevator to reach my home floor. Yet, the Surveyor’s map of the building, and the notary’s diction identifying my living space, are as follows: (13) Secondo piano (terzo fuori terra). (Second floor, third floor above ground level)

5

OTA are auxiliary technical operators, i.e. not fully registered nurses.

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Pray, where do I live? On the second floor? On the third floor?6

These are the reasons why a relevant amount of time in conversational exchanges where the state of knowledge is asymmetrical is spent in establishing, more or less successfully, a certain amount of common ground: (14) Anecdote:7 Pre-surgery consulting room. Young physician, to inform patient about surgery, begins by illustrating potential collateral effects. Patient’s wife turns pale. Colleague promptly specifies that those effects are statistically next to nil, whereas the world-known advantages of the op are… Wife’s colour back to normal.

6

On terminology, and its use by the powers that be to belittle or bamboozle the common citizen, notably the powerless, see Riley, Philip. 2002. “Epistemic Communities: the Social Knowledge System, Discourse and Identity”. In G. Cortese, P. Riley (eds.) Domain-specific English: Textual Practices across Communities and Classrooms. Bern: Peter Lang, 41-64. Riley gives a telling example of the woman denied her “claim to knowledge” in Court for using the technical term sputum instead of phlegm, which the judge seemed to prefer (p. 6263). 7 A sociolinguistic gloss is in order here. The first speaker is a non-native but fluent speaker of Italian; the second physician is an Italian native speaker. What may well have occurred is that the L2 speaker has retained L1 discursive macrostructures and rhetorical patterns requiring that negative considerations come first, whereas Italians usually present the pros first. Such intersections across communicative behaviour and sociocultural identity were identified and illustrated in specific case studies by Gumperz (1982). “Although the pragmatic conditions of communication tasks are theoretically taken to be universal, the realisations of these tasks as social practices are culturally variable. This variation can be analysed from several different perspectives […] (1) Different cultural assumptions about the situation and about appropriate behavior and intentions in it. (2) Different ways of structuring information […]”. Gumperz, John and Jenny Cook-Gumperz, “Introduction: language and the communication of social identity” (p. 12). In John J. Gumperz (ed.) Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, my emphasis. Experienced physicians know that their explanations to patients must be exhaustive and are ready for surprise, e.g. a patient trying to swallow a suppository, or, more commonly, asking whether s/he can have a drink of water after being prescribed “digiuno totale” (the English locution, “abstaining from food or drink”, however, is more precise); most typically, they know Latin prescriptions such as “per os” need to be explained: “that is, you swallow it”.

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Trust, the foundation for common transactions and interactions, cannot be given for granted and is far from easy to achieve when the interlocutor is not there in flesh and blood but is a potential respondent, to be approached and quickly persuaded to seek contact, as in the sphere of advertising. Below, an intriguing poster with multiple visual metaphors:8

LIFE is a RUN; LIFE is a MOUNTAIN to be ascended; LIFE is DANGER. Against such negative suggestions, the reassuring implications could be: WE make the road flat and easy for you; WE make your ride comfortable, you will have a model bicycle with all accessories and training wheels in case you have special needs; WE make your ride safe, you will have a wall protecting you all along; WE make your pathway enjoyable, you can ignore the ravines and enjoy the luxuriating foliage, the mountain air, etc. This colour photograph is the visual presentation of a “combined” (“multiramo”) insurance policy issued by a bank: how straightforward the message is, depends on the amount of time you will spend questioning the details while you stand in line to get to the teller. (Why is the bicycle leaning against the wall? Where’s the person? Did s/he jump, in spite of the protections?). “Trust”, then, both a noun and a verb, basically infuses our ontology and our epistemology with the nuances of axiology. Objects and facts, and knowledge about them, become imbued with moral value: (15) In God we trust. (on USA coins and bills)

Associating money with deity, church with marketplace, the occurrence of “trust” above is a juxtaposition which marks the extreme 8

http://www.intesasanpaolo.com/polizze-investimento/giusto-mix.jsp, retrieved 29th April 2016.

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embodiment of a move to the field of law and, later, of finance – a dazzling semantic amplification and specialization: […] Law (a). The confidence placed in a grantee or feoffee who holds or enjoys the use of property entrusted to him by its legal owner; (b) the condition of having confidence reposed in one or of being legally entrusted; […]. (Middle English Dictionary, by Robert E. Lewis, p.1139.) […] From early 15c. in legal sense of “confidence placed in one who holds or enjoys the use of property entrusted to him by its legal owner;” mid-15c. as “condition of being legally entrusted.” […]. (Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper ed., retrieved 24th April 2016.)

Note that “early 15c.” means the time when the Medici family improved banking instruments, notably the lettera di cambio. Such major provisions eased (and increased) financial flows with London and throughout the continent, locating financial institutions more and more within the legal sphere. The question, then, arises, which legal sphere? Middle English is marked by a blurring of language boundaries and by a pluridiscursive legal arena. Writs, charters, and broadly speaking public and private documents of a legal nature extensively attest Anglo-French usage, beginning with loan words from French such as affiance (from the Latin affidare, confidere, fiducia), soon replaced by confidence (e.g. ex confidentia, sur confidence) which on the Continent designated a legally binding notion (Graziadei, 1998)9. Long before, and even after the semantics of trust extended its moral connotations to the entrusting of property, confidence was the key formulation for deliberately committing someone to perform one’s wishes regarding assets to be handed over to someone else. Such an institution, the continental confidentia, not quite as binding as a contract and yet configuring some form of obligation on the part of the Medieval heres fiduciarius, was an established practice in ius commune. Though the latter was far from being a consolidated system, the practice known as confidentia gained ground in England and in the second half of the fifteenth century was increasingly designated with the binomial confidence and trust. Thus, the semantics of trust extended its moral connotations to the entrusting of property, for example in wills, synonymically reinforcing 9

Graziadei, Michele. 1998. “The Development of /fiducia/ in Italian and French Law from the 14th century to the End of the Ancien Régime”. In Richard Helmholz and Reinhard Zimmermann eds., Itinera fiduciae – Trust and Treuhand in Historical Perspective. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 327-359.

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the noun confidence to highlight the combination of property with an engagement which, it should be noted, conveyed the notion of knowing, for the fiduciary was legally entrusted to perform what was on the entrusting mind: sciens mentem [knowing the mind]10 of the person giving confidential instructions. Within the climate of hybridization or cooperation of the common law with some of the methods of ius commune which was to characterize English law in the Renaissance, the embrace of trust with the legal domain and the sphere of property came to generate, in the English context, a legal entity or institution which applied specifically to the management of property and/or business by third parties (other than original owners and inheritors) on behalf of others. From “transnational” legal practices, the English trust laws originated and evolved and were later transplanted in other legal systems:11 […] continental learning enriched English legal practice in the second half of the 15th century by providing a set of principles and rules that came to be shared and on which an original product was devised by the English: the modern law of trusts. (Lupoi 2009: 253)12

In the financial domain, which today occupies a dominant role in macro- and microeconomics and political economy, the nature of trusts tended to deviate into that of cartels trying to gain the lion’s share of the market by acquisitions that put smaller businesses seriously at risk. […].Meaning “businesses organized to reduce competition” is recorded from 1877. […]. (Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper ed., retrieved 24 Apr. 2016.)

10

See Maurizio Lupoi 2009, page 268 and footnote 155 (full references in footnote 12 below) for the Greek source of this locution referring to the fiduciary as the only person knowing, and being instructed to disclose and perform, the testator’s intentions. 11 On trusts in Italian, European and Anglo-American law, see: Graziadei, Michele. 1998. “Trusts in Italian law: a matter of property or of obligation?” In Italian National Reports to the XVth International Congress of Comparative Law. Milano: Giuffré, 189-224; Graziadei, Michele, Ugo Mattei and Lionel Smith eds. 2005. Commercial Trusts in European Private Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, XIII-XXXII, 600. 12 Lupoi, Maurizio. 2009. “Trust and confidence”. Law Quarterly Review Vol. 125: 253-287. I am indebted to this study, a mine of scholarly examples tracing the recontextualization and new entextualization of trust.

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Anti-trust laws and competition law deal with such bodies, wherein the moral values inherent in the notion of trust have turned into threats. The typology of TRUSTS included institutions such as CHARITABLE TRUSTS, avoiding state intervention and state interference. Charities have nothing to share with the welfare state provisions and welfare legislation, although their development is significantly linked to tax legislation allowing for exemption. The welfare state model in Italy has indigenous precursors such as the ONMI [Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia, National Agency for the Protection of Mothers and Infants, founded in 1925], a product of the Duce’s demographic policy which served to gain consensus especially in the poorer parts of the country. The older forms of Foundation, largely started by private grants but also counting on conspicuous benefits from the state and local government, in recent decades have been replaced by the charitable trust model, which has instantiated innumerable NGOs and non-profit organizations, as well as non-profit sectors of institutions such as banks and major companies. Briefly, the charitable trust has worked as an overarching model in the development of a flourishing dimension of the economy, those “tertiary sector” activities and institutions focussed on the most diverse social needs, which constitute a veritable case of legal transplant from the Anglophone world. Following Graziadei (2009),13 one can discriminate bottom-up initiatives connected with research, civil and human rights issues, tutelage and development activities in sports, the arts and the green economy, from top-down initiatives such as those which now infiltrate the promotional side of corporate discourse with humanitarian initiatives of all kinds, in the wake of Hollywood stars who have increasingly been joining international organizations or launching independent “crusades”. Multimedia advertising and the Internet are powerful tools in the spread of this approach, where the innocent spectators are asked for support by texting their money during a TV show or networked into a cause by “web 2.0 democracy”. This is an appeal to the citizen’s solidarity which leverages upon a range of impulses, from a sense of guilt to on-thespur-of-the-moment generosity to personal identification with the issue at hand, basically modifying the nature and meaning of trust: the moral sentiment requiring time-consuming knowledge and familiarity is now being turned into the answer to a call on the emotions, carefully staged and

13 Graziadei, Michele. 2009. “Legal transplants and the Frontiers of Legal Knowledge”. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 10 (2), 723-742.

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waged as a battle to win “followers”. Does this couch-potato moral activism add a new connotation to the meaning of trust? A different procedure, combining the bottom-up and the top-down approach and indeed working towards the formation of a new organization with the status of TRUST (with capital letters) was the 2014 road show launching the manifesto “Fiducia e nuove risorse per la crescita del Terzo Settore” [Trust and new resources for the growth of the Tertiary Sector], signed by a number of institutions trying to connect “the non-profit world” and its principal stakeholders with local administrations and branches of the body politic.14 In its more recent expressions, magnifying objectives and extending targets from support to the South of Italy to the South of the world, this initiative seems to have broadened to a new model bank, incorporating and reshaping the charitable Trust model: indeed, it seems that legal transplants may grow into something significantly different from their archetype. Trust, as a moral sentiment, is a prerequisite even for banal exchanges, involving shared encyclopaedic and local knowledge. In specialized/ professional communication, participants engage in a mutual construction of domain-specific knowledge regulated by the degree of symmetry/ asymmetry between/amongst interactants. For example, the surgeon in the operating theatre will negotiate levels of knowledge into different communicative styles, in addressing a triple audience:15 colleagues and nurses participating in the surgery; colleagues and disciples watching the event; families waiting for reports. The moral sentiment, then, is encoded into a framework of power and responsibility, which is designed, implemented, sustained and/or transformed in and by discourse. In domains such as news discourse and political discourse, so much of public communication now consists of wired icons, words themselves as icons. When public discourse originates - or is reported in - the new social media, clever and more or less subliminal engineering may annihilate trust by manipulating affect and by enhancing emotions at the expense of knowledge. In their partisan imbrications, digital practices entrap or disconnect thinking instead of liberating it, to an unprecedented extent: we only need to watch links and leaks across hashtags, tweets, blogs and web pages sprouting in cyberspace and immediately catching “likes” which will drive or blast consensus in the public arena… trust, then, requires 14

www.group.intesasanpaolo.com/scriptIsir0/si09/.../view/content-ref?, last accessed 3rd May 2016. 15 See Tannen, Deborah, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin ed. 2015. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd Edition. Chichester: John Wiley.

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huge efforts in terms of critical pedagogy, independent thinking, training in argumentative skills that reach deeper and further than cute aphorisms. Of course, this cursory glance at specific domains must end with the most prominent one for the semantics of trust. Across the financial, legal and economic spectrum, through the historic transformations I have summarily sketched above, “trust” has come to designate a cornerstone institution. Operating as a term, it is central to a highly complex system of specialized knowledge and globalized power affecting all levels, styles and practices in communication. Investigating and understanding trust, its pervasiveness and potent role in human affairs, particularly in specific domains of human intelligence and action, requires discourse analysis in its wide range of methodological approaches. This is the objective, and the merit, of the present collection of studies.

CONTRIBUTORS

Janet Bowker is Associate Professor in English Linguistics in the Faculty of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome. Her research interests lie mainly in academic, institutional and professional discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, socio-cognitive pragmatics, ESP teaching and testing. She has been compiling a specialised corpus of business discourse for a number of years consisting of a wide range of organizational data. This has been used to explore a variety of topics such as description, evaluation and persuasion in internal and external company discourse, multimodal organizational communication, and intercultural business interactions. She has published extensively on these themes, including a book “Internal Organizational Discourse in English: Telling Corporate Stories”, 2014. Together with Rita Salvi, she is co-editor of “The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English”, 2015, and “Space, Place and Identity: Discursive Indexicality in Cultural, Institutional and Professional Fields, 2013. She serves as peer reviewer for national commissions appointed to evaluate research quality. Paola Catenaccio is Associate Professor at University of Milan. Her research interests lie primarily in the field of discourse analysis, which she applies to a variety of domains (legal discourse, business communication, the discourse of news production, the discourse of science and popularization) in combination with other methodological perspectives, adopting a multimethod approach to linguistic research. She has contributed studies on the above mentioned topics to international journals and edited volumes. She has also co-edited three volumes (Identities Across Media and Modes: Discursive Perspectives 2009; Language and Bias in specialised discourse, both with Giuliana Garzone, and Multimodality in Corporate Communication. Web Genres and Discursive Identity 2007, with Giuliana Garzone and Gina Poncini) on various aspects of specialised discourse. She has authored a volume on the genre of the corporate press release, a topic of research to which she has devoted much attention over the last few years. More recently, her research interests have focused on the discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility.

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Giuseppina Cortese is Emerita, English Language and Translation, University of Turin. She was Chair of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) from 2007 to 2011; Chair of the Academic Programme and of the Organizing Committee, the X International Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (University of Turin, 2010); joint coordinator of the English Language and Literature sections of the first national research evaluation exercise (Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca), 2011-2013; developer of student mobility programmes; Research Fellow with the Newberry Library (Chicago) and the University of Southern California (Los Angeles); unit coordinator, local/national/ international research projects; member/referee for various editorial and scientific committees. Her research interests and publications cover translation and translation pedagogy, domain-specific (academic and professional) communication and language teaching, text linguistics and discourse analysis, marginalized identities and social change. Giuliana Diani is Associate Professor of English language and translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy). She holds an MA in language studies from the University of Lancaster (UK) and a PhD in English linguistics from the University of Pisa (Italy). She has worked on various aspects of discourse analysis and EAP, with special reference to metadiscourse and evaluative language. Her recent work centres on language variation across academic genres, disciplines and cultures through the analysis of small specialized corpora. Her recent publications include the books: English for Academic Purposes: Approaches and Implications (Cambridge Scholars, 2015), co-edited with Paul Thompson; Reviewing Academic Research in the Disciplines: Insights into the Book Review Article in English (Officina Edizioni, 2012); Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), coedited with Ken Hyland. Daniele Franceschi holds a Ph.D. in English Linguistics awarded by the University of Pisa (Italy) where he currently works as an Adjunct Instructor. He teaches ESP both at an undergraduate and graduate level and specializes in the fields of medicine, law, business and economics. His publications are in the area of lexical/temporal semantics, pragmatics, language learning and cognitive studies. He has presented papers at a number of international conferences and is an active member of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English), AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and SLE (Societas Linguistica Europaea). He is also a certified Gestalt counsellor.

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Contributors

Sara Gesuato is a graduate of the University of Padua, Italy, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is associate professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Padua, Italy. Her research interests include pragmatics, discourse and genre analysis, verbal aspect, and corpus linguistics. In her publications, she has discussed the structure and wording of initiating and reacting speech acts, the phraseology and rhetorical structure of academic genres, the temporal and aspectual meanings of catenative motion verb constructions, the collocational profile of near-synonyms, and the co-text of use of plural premodifiers. She has recently co-edited two volumes on pragmatic issues in language teaching and learning – both with Francesca Bianchi – and is currently investigating pedagogical applications of the analysis of oral and written speech acts. Ersilia Incelli is an English language assistant at the Faculty of Economics, ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome. Her current research interests lie in discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, applied to specialized genres such as in business, social studies, newspaper discourse. Recent publications include: Unbottling the truth about water: the discursive construction of water as a ‘strategic’ resource (2015); Managing discourse in intercultural business email interactions; a case study of a British and Italian business transaction (2013). Donatella Malavasi holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Languages and Cultures from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she is now a Tenured Researcher in English Linguistics and Translation. Her research interests span from corpus linguistics and translation to genre and discourse analysis. Her most recent contributions focus on the analysis of financial communication and Corporate Social Responsibility Reports (‘The Multifaceted Nature of Banks’ Annual Reports as Informative, Promotional and Corporate Communication Practices’, 2010; “ ‘Doing Well by Doing Good’: A Comparative Analysis of Nokia’s and Ericsson’s Corporate Social Responsibility Reports”, 2011; “ ‘The Necessary Balance between Sustainability and Economic Success’: an Analysis of Fiat’s and Toyota’s Corporate Social Responsibility Reports”, 2012), and the construction of identity in business discourse (“ ‘Made in Italy’: Local and Global Distinctive Traits”, 2013; “Selling How Good We Are: An Analysis Of Web-Based CSR Communication In 'Made In Italy' Companies”, 2014).

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Renzo Mocini is a researcher in English Language and Linguistics at the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, where he teaches Medical English. His major interests include language teaching methodology, ESP, Corpus Linguistics, Functional Grammar and narrative analysis. Among his recent publications are Evidential Devices in English Medical Journals (2015), Gastronomic Salience: the story behind the dishes (2015, co-authored with Graziano A.), Expressing Surprise. A Crosslinguistic Description of Mirativity (2014), Communicating Findings. A Functional Analysis of a Medical Research Article (2013). Ilaria Moschini is tenured researcher in English Linguistics at the University of Florence (Italy), Department of Languages, Literatures and Intercultural Studies, where she teaches Critical Discourse Analysis to undergraduate students at the School of Humanities, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis to postgraduate students at the School of Political Science. Her main research interests include US political and institutional language, media/new media language and global popular culture that she investigates using a framework that combines systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis with a socio-semiotic approach to multimodality. She has published several essays on the linguistic/semiotic analysis of texts from different discursive areas (politics, media and advertising) and a volume on the evolution of American imaginary. Currently, she is studying the ‘webridization’ of US institutional and political language; the discursive practices of fan communities on social media and the multimodal representations of postmodern ‘webridized’ TV series. Franca Poppi is Associate Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She has published on various aspects of teacher-learner interaction, learner autonomy and advising in self-instruction. She has also focused on the interactional features of discourse, with particular reference to academic settings (economics and marketing textbooks) and the language of the law. Her current research interests center on English as an international lingua franca, as it is used in intercultural business communication, written corporate communication and corporate web-site communication. She is a reviewer for the Asian ESP Journal, the Profile Journal, Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development and the Journal of Linguistics and Literature Studies. Her latest publications include: Global Interactions in English as a Lingua Franca, published by Peter Lang (2012); The Three Waves of Globalization: Winds of Change in

376

Contributors

Professional, Institutional and Academic Genre (co-edited with W. Cheng) published by Cambridge Scholars Chiara Prosperi Porta has been working at Sapienza University of Rome since 2002. Throughout this time she has taught at B.A. and M.A. levels in the Faculties of Economics, Humanities, Law and Medicine. She has also been assistant researcher of English in the Faculty of Economics and has been teaching English for tourism at the ITS Foundation in Rome. Her interests are mainly in ESP and EAP with particular reference to scientific discourse and genre analysis, technological genre and communication in professional fields. Some of her recent essays are: “On the State of Public Health: Discourse and Sharing Practices in Annual Medical Reports” (Peter Lang 2015), “‘Unity in Diversity’: The shaping of identities in the annual reports of the ECB and EU member states’ central banks” (Peter Lang 2013), “Analysing discourse in research genre: the case of biostatistics”(John Benjamins 2013). Federico Sabatini teaches English Linguistics at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of Turin University, for both undergraduate and graduate students, where he teaches both in BA and MA courses. His teaching and research interests mainly focus on Language and the Construction of Knowledge from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective. He has worked for four years at the Hans Kreitman Research Center at the Tate Gallery of British and Modern Art (London) where he developed his research on Tourism Promotional Discourse and Museum Discourse. Within the field of Discourse Analysis and Social Constructionism, he has also written on Gendered Language (“Languaging Gender and Gendering Language”) in several domains, including dubbing and subtitling. Rita Salvi is full professor in English Linguistics and Translation in the Faculty of Economics, ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome. She is a member of AIA (Italian Association of English Studies) and former secretary and treasurer (2005 – 2009). Member of the following scientific associations: ESSE (European Society for the Study of English), Eurolinguistics and AIDEL (Italian Association of Law and Literature). Representative of ‘Sapienza’ in the Directive Board of CLAVIER, Corpus and Language Variation in English Research, in collaboration with the universities of Bergamo, Firenze, Milano, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Siena and Trieste. Member of the scientific committee of CRILL (Center for Research in Language and Law, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli). She

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contributes to the initiatives undertaken by ELC/CEL (European Language Council / Conseil Européen pour les Langues) for the development of languages and cultures within the EU. She serves as peer reviewer for national commissions appointed to evaluate research quality. She also serves as reviewer for journals, book publishers and research funding entities. Member of the Editorial Board of international journals. She sits on various teaching and research committees, as well as in scientific committees of several national and international conventions. Her research interests include general and applied linguistics, text and genre analysis, intercultural discourse for academic and professional purposes, language teaching particularly through the medium of advanced technologies, synchronic and diachronic lexicographic analysis mainly in the field of specialized language (economics and law). She has recently co-edited the following volumes: The Dissemination of Contemporary Knowledge in English (with J. Bowker, 2015); Language and Law in Professional Discourse: Issues and Perspectives (with V.J. Bhatia et al., 2014); Space, Time and the Construction of Identity (with J. Bowker, 2013); The Use of English in Intercultural Professional Settings: Virtual Encounters and Identities (with W. Cheng, 2013); Intercultural Interactions in Business and Management (with H. Tanaka, 2011). Christina Samson lectures English Language at the School of Humanities, Business Communication in English and English for Finance and Risk Management at the School of Economics and Business in the University of Florence, Italy. She holds a PhD in Applied Languages and has recently been awarded the National Academic Qualification for Associate Professor. Her research interests are mainly focussed on corpus-driven analysis integrated with discourse analysis of small specialised corpora belonging to different genres and communication areas, such as cultural heritage and business. More specifically, her attention is devoted to museum websites, online guidebooks, online corporate annual reports with a particular focus on point of view, evaluation, verbal description and promotional discourse. She has recently co-founded “The Lexicon of Cultural Heritage” research unit in the Department of Languages, Literature and Intercultural Studies (University of Florence) and has cocoordinated the creation of a Florentine Heritage Dictionary Portal addressing translators and tertiary students. Publishing (2013); Space, Place and the Discursive Construction of Identity (co-editedwithJ.BamfordandD.Mazzi)publishedbyPeterLang (2014); From Business Letters to Emails: How Practitioners Can Shape

378

Contributors

TheirOwnFormsofCommunicationMoreEfficiently,inThe Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research. Reflections on Interacting with the Workplace, publishedbyPalgraveMacmillan(2015). Girolamo Tessuto is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the Department of Law, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, where he is also Director of the Centre for Research in Language and Law (CRILL). He also teaches in the Department of Law, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, and the Department of Medicine, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli. Besides memberships of several academic and professional associations, including the CLAVIER research unit (Milan), he is editorial board member of various international English linguistics journals and chief editor of the Legal Discourse and Communication international peer-reviewed series (Cambridge Scholars, UK). His research interests lie in text and (critical) discourse analysis of academic, professional and institutional genres in legal contexts, translation/interpreting, English for Specific Purposes, combining corpuslinguistics. His areas of interests extend to language and discourse of healthcare and medicine, including analyses of different Web-mediated genres. His published academic work comprises research monographs and several publications appearing as research papers, book chapters, co-edited volumes and book reviews. Judith Turnbull is a foreign-language assistant at the Faculty of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome and has been awarded the Italian National Academic Qualification as Associate Professor of English and Anglo-American Language, Literature and Culture, Group 2013. Her research interests include discourse analysis applied to the fields of economics and law and cross-cultural communication, with a particular focus on websites. Her recent publications include: “Communicating and recontextualising legal advice online in English” (2016); “Online knowledge dissemination: How to make the dismal science less dismal” (2015); “Knowledge dissemination online: the case of health information” (2015); “Tracking the evolution of genres: the case of corporate websites” (2014); “Expert to layman communication: Legal information and advice on the Internet” (2014).

INDEX

ability xv, xx, xx, xxvii, 38, 120,132, 134, 138, 147, 194, 233, 250, 251, 252, 257, 259263, 265-267, 296, 299, 304, 313, 343, 351, 357 academic xii, xvi, xvii, 26-28, 31, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 77, 132, 207, 229, 230, 272, 317, 322-325, 327, 346 adverb(s) of certainty xviii, 88, 93, 94, 98, 102-104 epistemic – xviii, 88, 93, 94, 98, 104 restrictive – xviii, 89, 92-94, 98104 Affect 12, 112, 252, 254-256, 258, 345, 346, 370 airlines xxviii, 46, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 127 American Dream 200 Appraisal Theory 252, 348 argumentation 19, 96,156, 163, 165, 211, 214 attributors 113,116, 117, 126 axiology 366 behavior non-verbal – 296, 306, 307, 309, 311 bias 20, 76, 316-318, 327, 328, 335 blame deflection 216 business xviii, xix, 24, 50, 79, 88, 89, 91, 93-96, 98, 104, 105, 108, 110, 112, 120, 128, 131, 132, 138, 140, 143, 146, 161, 224, 229, 267, 339, 351, 353, 356, 368

case study xvii, xix, xx, 44, 92, 185, 267, 325, 328, 331, 335, 341, 342 clause(s) existential – 284 mental – 280, 281 relational – 282, 283 clinical negligence xxi, xxii, 339343, 349, 350, 354-356 clusters 100, 136, 191, 230, 235, 236, 242, 243, 332 common law 368 communicative purpose(s) 26, 37, 43, 44, 196, 319, 327, 335, 340, 342, 356 community engagement 185 of practice xx, 26, 206, 209, 210 responsibility 143 academic – 43, 44 corporate – 96 discourse – 58 European – 207 global – 190 medical – 318 national – 190, 196 on-line – 193 professional – 341 scientific – xxi, 272, 278, 289, 305, 326, 327, 331 virtual – 50 web – 347 common ground 93, 94, 98, 103, 104, 195, 362, 363, 365 compliance 100, 117-119, 249, 298, 305 convergence(s) 88, 90, 98, 104, 114, 225, 304, 306

380 corporate communication xi, 108-110, 131-133, 135, 148, 250 identity xix, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 144, 147 social responsibility xviii, 88, 89, 108, 132, 144, corporation xviii, 88, 90, 109, 116, 123, 126, 133, 190, 191 country-of-origin 108, 127 credibility xv, xvii, xviii, xxi, 5, 10, 29, 39, 40, 46-48, 54, 55, 57, 112, 113, 115, 116, 122, 131, 146, 171, 206-209, 212, 214, 216, 219-226, 229-231, 233, 234, 239, 240, 242, 249, 272, 280, 284, 288, 305, 320, 323, 324, 333, 335, 351, 353 critical discourse analysis 3, 320 CSR communication 91, 132, 133 reports xviii, 91, 94, 98, 103, 108, 109, 113, 114, 127, 133-135, 137, 139-141, 144, 146, 147 culture national xviii, 52, 108 defensive strategies 215, 226 dialogic engagement 89, 252 disability 67, 71, 75 discourse(s) financial – 207, 211 institutional – 2, 9, 191 legal – 355 medical – 347 museum – xvii, 62 political – xvi, 2-5, 12, 14, 16, 18, 185, 193, 200, 318, 370 promotional – 63, 109 discourse analysis 3, 4, 154, 170, 178, 236, 320, 323, 341, 371 Doctor Europaeus 26-28, 30, 37-39 doctor-patient xxi, 293-295, 298, 306, 313, 346

Index domain(s) semantic – 15, 16, 277 specialized – xxvii, 318 empathy xxi, 12, 158, 178, 197-199, 252, 257, 294, 304, 362 emphasizing the positive 251, 252, 320, 331 empowerment xv, 155, 157, 195, 196 engagement 17, 79, 89, 90, 94, 102, 105, 135, 144-146, 155, 158, 164, 169, 172, 176, 185, 193196, 199, 200, 252, 260, 265, 295, 323, 333, 348, 351, 368 ethics 78, 79, 88, 119, 200, 212, 213, 218, 222, 226 European xvi, xviii, xx, 5-8, 11, 12, 15, 17-19, 24, 26, 27, 67, 112, 134, 135, 206, 208-210, 212, 217-219, 221, 222, 225, 226, 265, 267 evaluation(s) xxi, 4, 8, 12, 30, 31, 36, 37, 39, 41-44, 53, 54, 57, 71, 89, 91, 117, 134, 157, 158, 163, 177, 196, 240, 242, 252, 255, 258, 265, 272-274, 277-285, 288, 317, 320, 323 evaluative function(ing) 26, 99 language xxi, 9, 13, 320, 329, 345 lexis 31, 67, 125, 226 meaning(s) 93, 279, 282, 288, 346 significance 100 face(s) 13, 18, 165, 261, 308, 363 feedback 26, 28, 31, 34, 38, 39, 43, 144, 158, 342, 353 Florence xx, 48-52, 74, 230, 234, 239-243 framing theory 185

The Discursive Construal of Trust in the Dynamics of Knowledge Diffusion generic move 355 structure 91, 179, 341, 354, 356 genre analysis xxii, 319, 328, 336, 341 evolution 5 digital – 341, 351 emerging – xvii, 26, 340 web – xxi, 361 globalization 79, 90, 108, 128 guidebooks 229-234, 237-243 health news xxi, 316, 321 healthcare xxii, 208, 322, 339, 343349, 352-354, 357 hedge(s) 35, 113, 122, 123, 126, 301, 329, 331 heritage historical and artistic – 56 intangible – 232 tangible – 230 hybridization xxii, 2, 5, 179, 340, 368 hyperbole 67, 79, 318 identity corporate – xix, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 144, 147 construction of – xviii, 2, 9, 133, 134 ethical – 133, 144 national – 230 ideology xvi, xx, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 20, 78, 206-208, 210, 212, 214, 215, 217, 221, 225-227 Italy image of – xvii, 46, 47, 56 institutional discourse 2, 9, 191 image(s) 209, 222, 226 language xix, 185 integrity 134, 147, 160, 234, 250252, 254, 257-259, 262, 263, 265-267, 362 interaction(s) xv, xvi, 3, 5, 10, 15, 19, 29, 37, 38, 62, 63, 67, 69,

381

76, 101, 155, 160, 162, 169, 172, 177, 178, 208, 232, 262, 272, 275-277, 293, 294, 296, 306, 340, 354, 366 interactive xvii, 64-70, 78, 81, 184, 190, 197, 293, 353, 354 interdiscursivity xiv, xxii, 4, 81, 170, 179, 340, 351, 356 intersubjectivity 156 ius commune 367, 368 Judgement social esteem 252, 258 social sanction 252, 256, 258 knowledge dissemination xii, xiv-xvi, xxi, 63, 154, 155, 157, 169, 178, 179, 208, 249, 293 production 208 medical – xxi, 293, 317, 319, 329 language body – 174, 313 evaluative – xxi, 9, 13, 272, 320, 329, 345 figurative – 15, 214, 303 institutional – xix, 185 metaphorical – 227 promotional – 70, 73, 327, 331 languaging 4, 5, 15, 16, 19 legitimation techniques 211 lexical indexicality 14 salience 14, 210, 212, 226 -semantic 294-296 liability 347-349 malpractice 340, 344-346, 350, 354, 355 management 90, 125, 131, 147, 155, 156, 159, 161 career – 162, 175 crisis – 250 disease – 294

382 hierarchies – 157 knowledge – 156 medical – 342, 344 paradigm – 156 patient – 296 quality – 158 rapport – 160, 168 reputation – 90 stress – 162 marketing xv, xxii, 46, 47, 64, 73, 82, 132, 327, 340, 343, 351, 353, 356, 357 marketization and commodification 351, 353 meaning(s) cultural – xvii, 47, 53 evaluative – 93, 279, 282, 288, 346 experiential – 278, 283 interpersonal – 92, 352 metaphorical – 175 metonymical – 175 presentational – 163 organizational – 163, 168 orientational – 163, 168 textual – 168 medical communication xi, xx, 295 information xxi, 293, 294, 313 jargon 298 journal(s) xxi, 273, 316, 321, 322 knowledge 317, 329 research paper(s) 321, 322, 329, 335 results xxi, 316, 319, 335 terminology 297, 347 writing xxi, 272 meeting place 65, 199, 201 metadiscourse 109, 112-114, 116 metaphor(s) 15, 18, 161, 172, 195, 199, 214, 223, 303, 366 metaphoric(al)(ly) 15, 167, 172, 175, 191, 214, 226, 227, 304, 309, 310 metaphoric-metonymic imaging 172

Index metonymy(ies) 196, 303, 304 modal admixtures 179 affordances 178 ensembles 162 modality 12, 13, 18, 33, 192, 194, 331, 364 model of trust-repair discourse 251, 252 multimodal xix, 48, 91, 136, 154, 155, 158, 163, 169, 170, 174, 176, 178, 179, 189, 195, 295, 339, 355 multimodality 154, 178, 185 museum discourse (MD) xvii, 6264, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80-82 narration(s) xvi, xvii, 3, 6, 18, 19, 55, 57, 145, 161, 166, 195, 238, 240, 242, 309, 345-347, 356 narrative(s) 8, 12, 19, 44, 66, 67, 73, 75, 80, 81, 197, 199, 232, 235, 239, 240, 344-346, 351, 355, 357 neutralizing the negative 251, 265, 266 newsworthiness 318, 321, 327, 328, 331, 335 ‘Obamification’ 190, 200 otherness 172, 209 perlocutionary effect(s) 320, 325, 331, 335, 363 persuasion xvi, xvii, 2, 5, 156, 288 PhD candidate(s) 26-28, 31, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 43 thesis report(s) xvii, 26-31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44 popularization 134, 316, 319, 320, 323, 324, 329, 331, 333, 335, 355 pragmatic xi, xvi, 2, 14, 15, 80, 91, 92, 96, 98, 104, 155, 160, 168,

The Discursive Construal of Trust in the Dynamics of Knowledge Diffusion 294-296, 319, 321, 323, 328, 332, 365 pragmatics 319, 320 press releases xxi, 3, 18, 136, 250, 316-318, 321, 322, 334, 335 principles of composition 163 problem-solution pattern 341, 354 promotion 46, 82, 147, 353 self – xix, xxii, 134, 162, 177 promotional 10, 63, 65, 68-71, 73, 78, 79, 109, 132, 188, 190, 242, 243, 320, 325-328, 331, 334, 335, 340, 343, 351, 356, 357, 369 pronoun(s) 12, 18, 51, 123, 197 address – 125, 126 personal – 11, 51, 55, 113, 123, 125, 188, 197, 240 1st person – 49, 121, 123, 126, 137, 196, 282, 350, 2nd person – 49, 125, 352 3rd person – 254 proximity xxi, 70, 164, 168, 235, 237, 252, 254, 278, 288, 320, 321, 323, 331, 335, 336 rapport xxi, 160, 168, 294, 296, 302, 307, 312, 352 recommendation(s) xvii, 27, 28, 30, 37, 39, 43, 44 re-contextualization xvi, 340, 355 reformulation 297 (re)(inter)semiotization 168, 170, 172, 174, 175, 178 relevance xxi, 43, 98, 104, 112, 138, 148, 169, 171, 177, 272274, 277, 279, 281-285, 287, 288, 321, 324, 327 repair(ing) xi, xix, xx, xxii, 10, 207, 212, 218, 221-224, 226, 249252, 254, 265, 267, 268, 349 repetition 7, 196, 299, 300, 336 reporting activity 344, 355 reputation xviii, 2, 88, 90, 108-110, 127, 132, 133, 143, 232, 233, 249, 252, 259, 265, 353

383

responsibility 17, 24, 43, 119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 206-208, 211213, 216, 219, 220, 222, 224, 226, 250, 257, 262-265, 283, 320, 346, 357, 370 social – 67, 75, 78, 143 rhetorical 3, 91, 100, 104, 122, 191, 200, 207, 284, 323, 334, 348, 352, 354, 356 device 278, 303 effects 92, 112, 279, 332 feature(s) xvi, 5, 278, 320 move(s) 340-342, 344, 354-356 patterns 101, 102, 104, 365 phenomenon xxi, 316 strategy(ies) xxi, xxii, 17, 26, 43, 63, 104, 195, 300, 317319, 323, 324, 343, 344, 347, 350, 352 structuring 89, 94 semantic chain 188, 194 domain(s) 15, 16, 277 features 279, 319, 322 field 65, 117, 147 prosody 15, 323, 332 preferences 236, 237 semiotic coordinates 155, 175 Senser(s) 194, 280 expressed – 281 unexpressed – 281 simplification 79, 297 simulation(s) 175, 176, 238, 243 Situated Social Semiosis 162, 178 social hub 185, 190, 191, 195, 197-200 media 67, 69, 184, 185, 190, 191, 193-197, 199, 200, 370 socially-shared constitutive practices 160 socio-semiotics 155 speech acts 9, 302 spin xxi, 316-321, 323-325, 328, 330-333, 335

384 stakeholder(s) xviii, 35, 89-90, 108110, 113, 118, 120, 127, 131141, 144, 146-148, 229, 249251, 255, 264-266, 268, 370 stance xxi, 2, 12, 13, 33, 44, 80, 89, 93, 94, 99, 100, 103, 166, 190, 193, 199, 200, 213, 219, 222, 223, 252, 272-274, 289, 320, 323, 324, 329, 331, 350 authorial – 17, 89, 93, 104, 208 standard of care 300, 349 strategy(ies) communication – 3, 150, 186, 297 defensive – 208, 215, 216, 226 personalization – 168, 188 promotional – 65, 78, 243, 340, 343 rhetorical – see rhetorical trust-building – xxii, 39, 143, 356 sustainability 91, 92, 133, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145-7, 374 symmetry/asymmetry 298, 364, 370 Systemic Functional Linguistics 185, 273 togetherness 15, 16, 66, 207 transactions 366 transduction 168-170, 173, 175, 177, 178 travel bloggers 47, 53-55 blogs xvii, 46-48, 50, 54, 57, 58 trust

Index and confidence 206, 214, 221 and self-confidence xvii, 64, 81 building xi, xvi, xxii, 14, 15, 17, 158, 177, 190, 200, 211, 223, 225, 226, 354 maintenance 162, 216, 218, 225, 226, repair(ing) xi, xix, xx, xxii, 10, 207, 218, 221-223, 226, 249-252, 254, 265, 267, 268, 349 confidence and – 120, 367 self-confidence and – 80 trust-building efficacy 340 patterns 44 strategies see strategy(ies) tasks 221 trustworthiness xxi, xxii, 2, 47, 48, 113, 127, 131, 134, 138, 147, 160, 206, 208, 216, 233, 238, 239, 249, 250, 252, 272, 278, 317, 353, 362 vague 257, 266 language xvii, 2, 255 vagueness 211, 266, 332 value judgement 30, 214 violation of integrity 250, 265 of the Code of Ethics 119 of trust 250 ‘webridization’xix, 185