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Contemporary workplaces are often characterized by diversity, involving participants from multiple linguistic and cultural traditions (e.g., Angouri, 2014). In such settings, participants draw on their rich cultural assumptions and values to co-construct meaning (e.g., Takamiya & Aida Niendorf, 2019), as language use and communication patterns have been found to be inextricably linked to different group belongings. While diversity enriches workplace interaction linguistically and culturally, it also presents “communicative challenges to many employers and co-workers” (Holmes, 2018, p. 335). These communicative challenges include increased likelihood of miscommunication, social exclusion (Lønsmann, 2014), and limited interpersonal communication (Tange & Lauring, 2009). While considerable research has been devoted to understanding intercultural workplaces communication, little research exists on the linguistically and culturally diverse Swedish workplace. To gain greater insights into how diversity may enrich workplace interaction and the communicative challenges employees may experience, this pilot study explores employees’ attitudes to and beliefs about intercultural communication in the Swedish workplace. The pilot study is part of a larger project on digital professional communication in multilingual workplaces in Sweden. Five employees in managerial positions in Swedish higher education and corporations were interviewed. We adopt a critical intercultural communication approach, seeing “culture” as a dynamic concept, which employees may attribute to self and others, and (dis-)align with in different ways. Findings show that: (a) language competence in English is seen as indexing general competence; (b) categorisations of cultures are prevalent: Participants often view culture as synonymous with nation and point at differences between groups as a challenge to achieve effective communication; (c) identity and face are foregrounded: Some participants feel like a different person when using a different language, while others see a specific language as a way to adopt a different persona or professional role; and (d) culture and language are used to explain group dynamics (e.g., feeling as an outsider or as part of the group), and as tools to actively integrate or exclude others. The material has raised our awareness about not seeing the workplace as a monolith, but workplaces may be marked by internal variation when it comes to intercultural communication. 

References   Angouri, J. (2014). Multilingualism in the workplace: Language practices in multicultural contexts. Multilingua 33, 1-9.     

Holmes, J. (2018). Intercultural communication in the workplace. In B. Vine (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language in the workplace (pp. 335-347). Routledge.    

Lønsmann, D. (2014). Linguistic diversity in the international workplace: Language ideologies and processes of exclusion. Multilingua 33, 89–116.    

Takamiya, Y. & Aida Niendorf, M. (2019). Identity (re)construction and improvement in intercultural competence through synchronous and asynchronous telecollaboration: Connecting Japanese language learners in the United States and Sweden. In Zimmerman, E. & McMeekin, A. (Eds.), Technology-supported learning in and out of the Japanese language classroom: Theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical developments (pp. 111-145). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.    

Tange, H., & Lauring, J. (2009). Language management and social interaction within the multilingual workplace. Journal of Communication Management 13(3), 218–232.     

This case study on COVID-19 warning designs in a Swedish context illustrates how a unified affordance approach may contribute to an understanding of the meaning-making in reminders, instructions, cues and prompts that communicate the message “keep your distance.” The analysis combines semiotic and ecological affordance categories, taking both Gibson’s original theorizing on affordances and more recent affordance-informed research efforts into consideration. In so doing, the study aims to bridge a knowledge gap in the study of visual instructions and warning designs as well as in a more comprehensive way delineate the multimodal design strategies associated with COVID-19 warning designs. The analysis shows that Swedish COVID-19 warning designs of the keep-your-distance-kind belong to a non-standardized and emerging genre that is marked by great variation and ad-hoc design solutions, several of which combine physical blocking functions with verbally based messages. The analysis also highlights the tension between verbal and visual recourses, on one hand, and the signage placement and choice of materials, on the other hand. It is concluded that communication resources do not always appear to convey the same basic message, but in incongruent ways weaken what might be considered the intended main message. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Contemporary workplaces are characterized by diversity, involving participants from multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. In such settings, translanguaging is considered a common practice in which multilinguals “create an apparently seamless flow between languages and language varieties and to transcend the boundaries between named languages and/or language varieties as well as the boundaries between language and other semiotic systems” (Hua et al., 2022, p. 315). Little research, however, exists on such practices in multilingual workplaces (Du & Zhou, 2022), and even less on the linguistically diverse Swedish workplace. To gain greater insight into the seamlessness, transcendence, and boundaries such language users create and perceive, we explore the communication practices of employees in different Swedish workplaces. As an initial departure point, five employees in managerial positions were interviewed in the pilot study. We adopt a critical intercultural communication approach, seeing “culture” as a dynamic concept, which employees may attribute to self and others, and (dis-)align with in different ways. Findings show that categorisations of languages are prevalent, with participants applying a scale of linguistic sophistication or complexity and ranking formality conventions on a strong-to-weak scale. When categorising people and groups, participants foreground identity and face, and group dynamics is a recurring theme, with distinctions made between groups and orientations. This presentation focuses on participants’ descriptions of L1 and L2 identities and their perceived effects on workplace communication. Findings suggest that translanguaging has yet to be commonplace in the workplaces we investigated and shed light on lay perspectives on (trans)languaging in the workplace.

References

Du, J., & Zhou, X. (2022). Translanguaging practices in Chinese/English bilingual engineers’ communications in the workplace. Applied Linguistics Review, 13(3), 389-402.

Hua, Z., Jones, R.H. & Jaworska, S. (2022). Acts of distinction at times of crisis: An epistemological challenge to intercultural communication research. Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(3), 312-323.

In this talk, we present a research project that we plan to launch in late 2023. The aim of the project is to investigate professional communication in video meetings, which is justified given their growing importance in the modern and post-pandemic workplace. The setting is workplaces in Sweden where English is used as a lingua franca, due to the increasing societal impact of multilingual workplaces. In the specific context of study, communication is embedded in several layers of complexity: It takes place in an institutional setting; it is digital and takes place in video mode; it is done across cultures and marked by diversity; and it is done partly in English as a lingua franca. The project focuses on internal communication within the workplace and does not consider external communication, for example involving customers. The overarching research question is: What factors contribute to (un)successful digital intercultural interactions in multilingual workplaces, specifically in video meetings? To map the characteristics of video meetings, we compare them to in-person meetings. We thus ask: (a) What (perceived and actual) differences and similarities are there between digital and in-person workplace meetings? To map the video meeting as a genre, we ask: (b) What are the key structural, linguistic, and interactional patterns of the video meeting? Given the central role of English as a lingua franca in these workplaces, we ask: (c) To what extent and how does English language proficiency—including participants’ beliefs about and attitudes to English language proficiency—affect workplace communication in digital intercultural interactions? Finally, we adopt a critical intercultural communication approach, seeing ‘culture’ as a dynamic concept (e.g., Hua et al., 2022), which employees may attribute to self and others, and (dis-)align with in different ways. We ask: (d) To what extent and how is culture seen as relevant in multilingual workplaces? Participants will be interviewed about communication practices in the workplace both individually and in focus groups. We will also record and analyze samples of (i) video and (ii) in-person meetings, to enable triangulation of different types of data. We conclude by discussing how the project's findings can be used as a basis for best practices and for developing workplace communication training materials.

Föreliggande rapport är ett resultat av det samverkansprojekt som Interkulturellt Utvecklingscentrum Dalarna, IKUD, vid Högskolan Dalarna tillsammans med Ludvika Kommun, finansierat av Länsstyrelsen i Dalarnas län, startade under senhösten 2020 för att skapa kunskap om etableringsprogrammet Samhällsorientering för nyanlända med olika språkbakgrund under förändrade villkor som digitaliseringen medförde under pandemiåret 2021. Syftet med projektet har varit att bidra med en forskningsöversikt om digital lärmiljö utifrån best practice-erfarenheter från nationell och internationell forskning och att, utifrån en fallstudie om SO (situationen i Ludvika), resonera kring praktiker i digitala lärmiljöer. Fokus ligger på interaktion i en digital lärmiljö. Interkulturella förhållningssätt är också ett centralt tema. Ytterligare en viktig aspekt som undersöks är hur bilden av Sverige och den nyanlända skapas och uttrycks i klassrumsinteraktionen utifrån SO-läromedlet (boken Om Sverige). Utifrån syftet med projektet presenteras i rapporten (1) en kort forskningsöversikt om digital lärmiljö baserad på nationell och internationell forskning, (2) reflektioner utifrån observationer i en digital undervisningsmiljö i Ludvika kommun i samband med samhällsorienteringen, samt (3) en analys av undervisningsmaterialet som användes på de observerade lektionerna.

This chapter presents corpus contributions to the study of input in SLA. Viewing input as the language to which learners are exposed, researchers use target language corpora as models of potential input, e.g. to map how linguistic phenomena are distributed. This can be compared to learner corpora to study input-output correlations and to assess learner needs. Researchers also use interactive corpus data to investigate input effects on learner production. Core topics such as input frequency, saliency and the reliability of form-function mappings are discussed, as are methods for researching input characteristics, learner trajectories and input effects in interaction through syntactic priming.

In metadiscourse work, what may be called a ‘marker’ approach vastly outnumbers a ‘move’ approach. This has led to a research focus on small units of analysis, typically word based, classifying for example the pronoun I as Self-mention. This paper argues that we also need to develop a ‘move’ approach in metadiscourse studies, involving a more contextualised analysis of the discourse functions that speakers/writers use metadiscourse to perform. To support such a development, an overview is given of existing functional taxonomies for academic discourse and a specific taxonomy is presented of metadiscursive functions. The taxonomy was originally developed based on academic lectures and student essays, but is further developed as applied to spoken student presentations. The second main contribution of the article is the analysis of student presentations. The material is culled from an MA-level English-language online teaching context and compiled into a corpus of 13 presentations (20,000 words and 169 min of presentation time). The qualitative focus of the study is on the taxonomy for how metadiscourse is performed. Quantitative findings regarding the distribution of different types of metadiscourse functions are also included. Despite the widespread practice of student presentations, they have received very little research attention, but the present study maps their key discourse functions.

This chapter deals with the fundamentals of corpus compilation, approached from a practical perspective. The topics covered follow the key phases of corpus compilation, starting with the initial considerations of representativeness and balance. Next, issues in collecting corpus data are covered, including ethics and metadata. Technical aspects involving formatting and annotation are then presented, followed by suggestions for sharing the corpus with others. Corpus comparison is also discussed, as it merits some reflection when a corpus is created. To further illustrate key concepts and exemplify the varying roles of the corpus in specific research projects, two sample studies are presented. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of future directions in corpus compilation, focusing on the importance of compensating for the inevitable loss of complex information and taking the increasingly multimodal nature of discourse as a case in point.

This chapter takes the theme of metadiscourse across genres as a point of departure. To illustrate variation in the use of metadiscourse, reflexive uses of second person ‘you’ are examined in different genres, all of which represent academic discourse. The material includes university lectures, research articles, advanced university student essays and teacher feedback on student writing. The data is analysed both quantitatively, taking frequency into consideration, and qualitatively, taking discourse function into consideration. The extended units in which ‘you’ occurs are compared across genres to highlight the considerable variability of metadiscursive uses. One of the implications of the variation found—which was brought to the fore especially through the study of teacher feedback—is that our conceptualisations of metadiscourse are overly influenced by the type of data that have been in focus in research to date: highly visible written genres at the highly monologic end of the continuum. The metadiscourse in teacher feedback was found to be primarily about solving communication problems rather than organising the discourse and telling the reader how to respond to it. In fact, the feedback material is congruous with Roman Jakobson’s original conceptualisation of the metalinguistic function as solving communication problems.

A distinct metonymic pattern was discovered in the course of conducting a corpus-based study of figurative uses of WORD. The pattern involved examples such as Not one word of it made any sense and I agree with every word. It was labelled ‘hyperbolic synecdoche’, defined as a case in which a lexeme which typically refers to part of an entity (a) is used to stand for the whole entity and (b) is described with reference to the end point on a scale. Specifically, the speaker/writer selects the perspective of a lower-level unit (such as word for ‘utterance’), which is quantified as NOTHING or ALL, thus forming a subset of ‘extreme case formulations’. Hyperbolic synecdoche was found to exhibit a restricted range of lexicogrammatical patterns involving word, with the negated NOTHING patterns being considerably more common than the ALL patterns. The phenomenon was shown to be common in metonymic uses in general, constituting one-fifth of all cases of metonymy in word. The examples of hyperbolic synecdoche were found not to be covered by the oftquoted ‘abbreviation’ rationale for metonymy; instead, they represent a more roundabout way of expression. It is shown that other cases of hyperbolic synecdoche exist outside of word and the domain of communication (such as ‘time’ and ‘money’).

This chapter contributes to metadiscourse theory and our understanding of digital forms of communication. Digital communication carries great potential in that mainstream metadiscourse studies are limited to seeing academic writing as prototypical. A popular vlog is explored by asking ‘What is done in the vlog that we do not/cannot do in academic writing?’. The reflexive model is revisited and applied to the selected vlog, which is especially interesting in being highly ‘meta’ without having much metadiscourse. It is shown how other semiotic resources support the metadiscourse. The qualitative analysis illustrates delimitations and differences between metadiscourse and related phenomena. ‘Synchronous intertextuality’ is coined, for the way simulator games are running, with the vlogger interacting. A third wave of metadiscourse studies is envisioned, shifting the focus from non-propositional and interpersonal to reflexive.

Feedback on student writing is a common type of discourse to which university teachers dedicate much time. A pilot corpus of feedback—40,000 words representing five teachers’ comments on 375 student texts—was investigated for metadiscourse, defined as reflexive expressions referring to the evolving discourse, the writer-speaker, or the audience. The overarching question concerned how visible the writer, reader and current text were. To help determine how the feedback data may be unique, comparisons were made to previous studies investigating metadiscourse in other types of academic discourse, both written (university student proficient L1 writing and university student L2 writing) and spoken (university lectures). The feedback data had considerably higher proportions of metadiscourse and the overall frequency of metadiscourse was exceptionally high. The student reader (‘you’) was considerably more visible than the teacher writer giving feedback (‘I’). The material involved large quantities of references to the text, e.g. ‘here’ used to indicate trouble spots. Previously studied data have resulted in a view of metadiscourse as prototypically discourse-organising, but the metadiscourse in feedback is instead problem/solution-oriented, serving the metalinguistic function and aiming to solve communication problems. The findings have led to a revision of the model of metadiscourse in which the roles of the writer, audience and text are multidimensional rather than one-dimensional. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd

This article takes the theme of metadiscourse across genres as a point of departure. To illustrate variation in the use of metadiscourse, reflexive uses of second person “you” are examined in different genres and discourse types, all of which represent academic discourse. The material includes university lectures, research articles, advanced university student essays and teacher feedback on student writing. The data is analysed both quantitatively, taking frequency into consideration, and qualitatively, taking discourse function into consideration. The extended units in which “you” occurs are compared across genres and discourse types to highlight the considerable variability of metadiscursive uses. One of the implications of the variation found— which was brought to the fore especially through the study of teacher feedback—is that our conceptualisations of metadiscourse are overly influenced by the type of data that have been in focus in research to date: highly visible written genres at the highly monologic end of the continuum. The metadiscourse in teacher feedback was found to be primarily about solving communication problems rather than organising the discourse and telling the reader how to respond to it. In fact, the feedback material is congruous with Roman Jakobson’s original conceptualisation of the metalinguistic function as solving communication problems.

This study investigates variation in how research article (RA) writers position themselves vis-à-vis others through explicit references to the writer and the audience. Based on a two-million-word corpus of single-author RAs, the study considers several variables potentially affecting discourse patterns: language (English; Swedish), regional variety (British; US-American English), and discipline (History; Linguistics; Literary Studies). While nouns referring to the writer/reader were marginal and second person pronouns highly marked in both languages, first person pronouns—both ‘I’ and ‘we’—were used liberally. Regarding ‘I’, previous work has found that, unlike academic English, many academic cultures avoid it in research writing. Swedish, however, like Norwegian (Dahl, 2004), presents a rare case of outnumbering English in uses. ‘We’ orientations were equally used in Swedish as in British English, but less in US-American English. Differences were thus found across varieties, with British English showing a preference for ‘we’ over ‘I’, and especially authorial ‘we’. The disciplinary trends were especially strong for English, following the order in Sanderson (2008), with the most writer/reader visibility in Linguistics, followed by Literary Studies and with History last. While the findings show patterned behaviour for all three variables, the extensive in-group variation found for first-person pronoun use also demonstrates that these pronouns are not especially good markers of the genre, but that the RA exhibits fluid conventions, allowing for highly varied individual preferences.

Writer/reader visibility in research articles has been studied contrastively between English and other languages (e.g. Dahl 2004; Pérez Llantada 2010; Sanderson 2008; Vassileva 1998). This study considers several variables potentially affecting discourse patterns: language culture (English; Swedish), regional variety (British; American English), discipline (History; Linguistics; Literary Studies) and gender. The phenomenon studied is metadiscourse, defined as reflexive linguistic expressions referring to the evolving discourse itself, including references to the writer-speaker and the audience of the current discourse (Ädel 2006). The study is based on a 1.6 million word corpus of single-authored research articles. The English-language material consists of 96 and the Swedish material 70 articles. All three disciplines are represented in the English material, but the Swedish material presently includes only Linguistics. The findings include first and second person pronouns used metadiscursively. Nouns referring to the writer/reader were also studied and found to be marginal. Second-person pronouns occur rarely in the English and never in the Swedish material. First-person pronoun use exhibits considerable variation: occurrences of ‘I’ range from 1-28 and ‘we’ from 0.5-32 per 10,000 words. There are disciplinary trends in the English data, with an average of 15 occurrences/article in Linguistics, 11 in Literary Studies and 3 in History, following the same order as in Sanderson (2008). The results for regional variety are similar, with the exception of ‘we’, used considerably more often by the British authors. No major differences based on gender were found, in contrast to Sanderson (2008). In the Swedish material, ‘I’ is almost twice as frequent as ‘we’, which makes it dissimilar to both the British data where ‘we’ predominates and the US data where the distribution is even. The talk closes with a discussion of multivariate statistics, consistency in findings and research design in this type of research on scholarly writing practices.

References

Ädel, A. (2006). Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Dahl, T. (2004). Textual metadiscourse in research articles: A marker of national culture or of academic discipline? Journal of Pragmatics, 36(10), 1807–1825.

Pérez-Llantada, C. (2010). The discourse functions of metadiscourse in published academic writing: Issues of culture and language. In Ädel, A. & A. Mauranen (Eds.) Nordic

Journal of English Studies, 9(2), 41–68.

Sanderson, T. (2008). Corpus, Culture, Discourse. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Vassileva, I. (1998). Who am I/who are we in academic writing?: A contrastive analysis of authorial presence in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(2).

Academic writing exhibits strong preferences both for and against explicit references to the writer and/or reader, such as I, we and you. While second-person reference is marked, first-person usage is subject to variation, conditioned by e.g. cultural and disciplinary conventions for positioning. English-language research articles (RAs) do not necessarily disprefer first-person singular pronouns, unlike most other contexts (e.g. French (Dahl, 2004), German (Sanderson, 2008), Italian (Molino, 2010), Persian (Abdi, 2009)). First-person pronoun distribution varies considerably across specific disciplines and across ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ fields, with the former relying more heavily on self-reference (e.g. Hyland & Jiang, 2017). Previous research has typically studied variables separately, but the present study investigates the intersection of culture and discipline. The material includes 192 single-author RAs from History, Linguistics, and Literary Studies journals published in Britain, the US, and Sweden—including not only two English-language cultures but also Swedish, which is unusually allowing regarding first person in formal texts. Articles were divided into six groups representing different national discipline varieties. All first-person pronouns referring to the writer and/or reader were included. Frequencies were calculated for each text and entered into a 3x3 full factorial ANOVA with main effects of discipline and national variety/culture. Statistically significant effects were found for the main effect of discipline (F2,183 = 43.083, p < .001,   = .320), the main effect of culture, (F2,183 = 22.107, p < .001,   = .195), and for the interaction effect of discipline and culture (F4,183 = 10.678, p < .001,   = .189). Post-hoc Tukey HSD tests revealed significant differences across many of the groups, with British History texts containing significantly fewer first-person pronouns than all other groups while British Linguistics texts contained the most. The findings further our understanding of the complex roles played by culture and discipline in shaping discourse conventions.

Ansvar har både juridisk och etisk betydelse och är ett nyckelord i högre utbildning. I den högre utbildningen förekommer en rad olika roller med olika juridiskt ansvar såväl som olika förväntningar på etiskt ansvar. I sammanhang där flera roller är sammankopplade för att lösa en komplex uppgift finns potentiellt olika syn på ansvarsfördelning. Det gäller i synnerhet handledningssituationen, där etiskt ansvar och ansvarsfördelning kan vara särskilt omgärdade av gråzoner, särskilt vad gäller nyckelrollerna student och handledare. Studien behandlar studenters syn på ansvar i kandidatuppsatsprocessen. En enkätundersökning med studenter från examensarbeteskursen inom två språkämnen vid ett svenskt lärosäte (Högskolan Dalarna) visar att majoriteten anser sig ha fått processen förklarad vid kursstart, men att en relativt stor andel inte håller med om det. Några pekade på skillnader i beskrivningar och praxis. Studenterna anser att student och handledare har ett gemensamt ansvar för flera aspekter av uppsatsarbetet, men att studenten har större ansvar för t.ex. att uppsatsen är fri från plagiat och att den blir klar i tid och handledaren större ansvar för t.ex. att forskningsfrågan är relevant för ämnesområdet och att metoden och materialet är lämpliga. Svaren pekar på en viss variation i synen på ansvar. Ser man exempelvis närmare på exakt vilka aspekter av uppsatsprocessen man anser att studenten respektive handledaren bör ha ansvar för, så är bilden inte samstämmig. Resultaten pekar på ett behov av att diskutera ansvar och därmed medvetandegöra de bilder vi bär med oss in i uppsatshandledningen.

Samtidens diskussioner handlar mycket om resurser och resursutnyttjande. Det forskningsprojekt som skisseras här är en strävan att i en mångvetenskaplig forskningsmiljö ta vara på den resurs som språkvetenskaplig kompetens innebär. Sommarens skogsbränder, inte minst i våra egna hemtrakter, har gett upphov till en diskussion om brand och säkerhet och inspirerade oss till att inventera den brandskyddsinformation som finns i vår omedelbara närhet, och utifrån den diskutera hur det kommunikativa förloppet kring brandskyddsinformation ser ut, och hur vi som språkvetare skulle kunna bidra till att vår förberedelse inför det som ”inte ska inträffa” kan bli så bra som möjligt.

Projektets övergripande ärende är att öka förståelsen av vad ett språkvetenskapligt perspektiv kan tillföra till arbete med brandsäkerhet och utrymning. I den upptaktsfas där projektet befinner sig har vi samlat ett material av utrymningsskyltar och brandinstruktioner inom Högskolan Dalarnas väggar. Skyltarna är antingen monomodalt visuella eller multimodala genom att bygga på både visuella och verbala resurser (jfr Forceville & Kjeldsen 2018). I en explorativ analys kombinerar vi erfarenheter från klarspråksforskning och multimodal analys för att identifiera möjliga läsningar och begriplighetsproblem i materialet.

Ett drag som gör den här typen av texter intressant är att det verkar viktigare att de finns, än att de läses och förstås. Det gör att utrymningsanvisningarna påminner både om sådana texter som måste finnas i organisatoriska kontexter, värdegrunder och andra policydokument, och om andra säkerhetstexter där förekomst är viktigare än reception, såsom säkerhetsgenomgångar på flygplan. Det saknas en precis terminologi för att ringa in den här ”rituella” funktionen hos texter, och där kan projektet lämna ett viktigt bidrag.

I nästa steg planerar vi att anordna fokusgruppssamtal för att komma i kontakt med den specialistkultur som präglar produktionen av skyltar och anslag och för att kontrastera lekmäns förståelse av utrymningsinformation mot specialisters.

Risk communication research spans many domains, including the environment, healthcare, science and technology, law enforcement, banking, workplace health and safety (e.g. Chrichton et al. 2016). The EXIT project deals with issues of security and responsibility in relation to communication about evacuation, e.g. in fire hazards or terror attacks. Our study focuses both on what evacuation information to the general public looks like and on policies and attitudes behind specific evacuation information guiding the general public. We see evacuation information as a possible resource for the distribution of responsibility. The aim is to investigate how groups and individuals construe their sense of responsibility in relation to evacuation: (a) How do people discursively construe their sense of responsibility in the face of risk and evacuation situations?; (b) To what extent does their interpretation of what to do correlate with the intentions of the policy makers producing and sanctioning the evacuation information (on signs, websites)?; (c) What is the purpose of the meaning production in this field of discourse: is the primary function to make evacuation as efficient as possible in a risk situation; is it to educate the public in how to behave in situations of risk; or is the giving of evacuation information a mere ritual? As a first step of data collection, we have analyzed evacuation signs and conducted focus group discussions at a higher education institution in order to evaluate participants’ understanding of evacuation practices and individual responsibility within the institution.

References

Crichton, Jonathan, Candlin, Christopher N. & Firkins, Arthur S. (Eds). (2016). Communicating Risk. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

This study analyses experiences with and in relation to issues of risk, responsibility and evacuation in workplace settings as discussed in four focus groups in Sweden and Swedish-language Finland. The discussions, and in particular the participants’ positionings in their ‘small stories’, are analysed from two perspectives: that of narratives, and that of interpretive repertoires. The main question under investigation is how employees at different workplaces discursively construe their sense of responsibility in the face of risk and evacuation situations. The findings show that these issues are handled very differently in different workplaces, but at all in accordance with the participants’ implicit responsibility positionings and what we see as the interpretive repertoires (organisational, instinctual, skills-based and informational) they draw on. Whereas previous studies have considered workplaces with high-stakes settings, the present study is set in workplaces where risk is not thematised on a regular basis, making the results applicable not only to workplace scenarios, but to society at large.

The supervision of degree theses is one of several institutional practices in higher education that are regulated by various systems of rules. However, the social roles involved in the practices may still be largely based on interpretation, negotiation and personal choice. Research on supervision has primarily targeted the doctoral level, but the present study targets the Bachelor level. Existing inventories of roles are based on supervisor roles, but the present study also includes student roles. Existing inventories are not always based on empirical data, but the present study uses focus group discussions with supervisors and responses to open-ended questions from a questionnaire to students as a basis for extracting supervisor and student roles. The supervisor and student participants came from two language departments at a Swedish university. The local guidelines relevant to supervision underspecify roles. The findings show a considerable complexity and a broad repertoire when it comes to roles attributed to supervisors as well as students. Some roles may be plotted along a scale, where stakeholders may have different preferences and needs, such as along transactional and interactional types, or between support and management; or between seeing the thesis primarily as a process or a product.

Persuasion is especially prominent in genres with a strong aim to affect others’ behaviour. Contemporary persuasion studies often centre on domains such as advertising, politics and media, and the present study targets tourism. Previous work on persuasion in tourism discourse has focused on word choice and collocations, while this study addresses how persuasion is performed through broader rhetorical functions. The English version of the official tourism website for Sweden was compiled into a 53,296-word corpus. Word frequency data showed that you was highly frequent. All examples involving you (N=450) were analysed inductively to identify persuasive rhetorical functions. Seven functions emerged: Specifying tourist identities; Constructing helpful/expert guide; Building rapport; Anticipating reader reactions (focusing on the visitor and/or guide); and Personifying the destination; Presenting options; Imagining scenarios (focusing on the destination). The most frequent function was found to be Constructing helpful/expert guide, whose frequency contrasts sharply to Anticipating reader reactions and Personifying the destination, with the remaining functions falling in between. The frequency analysis details how the seven functions co-occur; it revealed a common pattern of overlapping functions. © 2024 The Authors

Persuasion is always at work in language, even if it is especially prominent in genres where the directive function of language is key. This is highlighted in the definition of persuasion as “those linguistic choices that aim at changing or affecting the behavior of others or strengthening the existing beliefs and behaviors of those who already agree” (Virtanen & Halmari, 2005). Contemporary studies of persuasion tend to centre on domains in the public sphere such as advertising, politics and media discourse. In our talk, we focus on tourism discourse.  

The complete English-version material from Sweden’s official tourism website (www.visitsweden.com), whose mission is to market Sweden as a tourist destination, is analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. All verbal text (excluding images) from the 2019 version was compiled into a specialised corpus, comprising 53,296 words and 2,673 sentences. A frequency word lists generated through Sketch Engine showed that second-person you was highly frequent, ranked #9 after function words such as the, and and of. Based on frequent 2-4-word n-grams, it was also observed that you was commonly included in larger patterns. This justified the decision to use all examples involving you as a basis for the study, where tourism discourse is considered from the perspective of audience orientation, with a special focus on extended patterns that serve a persuasive function. While you has been studied in tourism research, it has not been in focus and observations regarding patterns you is involved in have been limited to collocations. As previous work has not considered the wider rhetorical patterns of you, our research will contribute to a broader perspective.  

In the qualitative analysis, three coders participated in an inductive process of identifying persuasive rhetorical functions in a concordance list of 456 unique examples of you (with duplicates removed). The findings show that the you examples cover a scale from relatively informational to highly persuasive. This is in line with previous research having observed that tourism discourse generally serves both an informational and a persuasive function (e.g. Bosnar-Valkovic & Jurin, 2019; Calvi, 2010; Malekina & Ivanov, 2018). The majority of the you examples are clearly or even highly persuasive and can be divided into categories based on their rhetorical function: Building the writer-reader relationship; Anticipating reader reactions; Imagining scenarios; Presenting options; Offering tourist identities; Presenting tourist values; and Presenting a welcoming destination. Many of the examples serve more than one of these functions, as illustrated in the title. Quantitative findings on how the rhetorical functions are distributed will be presented in the talk. 

There are two distinct speaker roles involved in the material: the “guide” (who is also the writer) and the potential “visitor” (the reader). Their relationship is asymmetrical from the perspective of knowledge about the destination, but the guide does not have the power to direct the audience (unlike e.g. a teacher in an educational context), so the potential visitor needs to be persuaded to follow the advice of the guide. As persuasion is clearly linked both to the discourse type—tourism discourse—and the discourse feature—you and associated patterns—in this study, we may expect to find the essence of persuasion at this intersection. 

The widespread view that risk is highly relevant in late modern societies has also meant that the very study of risk has become central in many areas of social studies. The key aim of this book is to establish Risk Discourse as a field of research of its own in language studies. Risk Discourse is introduced as a field that not only targets elements of risk, safety and security, but crucially requires aspects of responsibility for in-depth analysis. Providing a rich illustration of ways in which risk and responsibility can serve as analytical tools, the volume brings together scholars from different disciplines within the study of language. An Introduction and an Epilogue highlight the intricate relationship between risk and responsibility. Part 1 deals with expert and lay perspectives on risk; Part 2 with emerging genres for risk discourse; Part 3 with risk and technology and Part 4 with ways of managing risk. The topics covered – such as COVID-19, nuclear energy, machine translation, terrorism – are socially pertinent and timely.

In alignment with the theme of the conference, this study deals with atypical risks and risk-taking. Risk involves two core elements: adversity (referring to something unwanted) and potentiality (referring to things that may, but need not, happen). ‘Risk’ is typically thought of as something negative, and as something that should be avoided at all costs. Risk-taking characteristically has to do with the probability of an unwanted event occurring (e.g. Hansson, 2018). This type of negative perspective clearly predominates in discourse studies related to risk (e.g. Crichton et al., 2016; Ädel et al. 2022), not to mention in public perceptions of risk.

However, risk may also, albeit atypically, be seen as something positive and energizing, as in the context of financial markets (cf. e.g. Giddens, 1999) or in gambling. These types of voluntary risk taking have been approached through concepts such as ‘action’ (Goffman, 1967) and ‘edgework’ (e.g. Lyng, 2014).

In this study, we explore both negative and positive aspects of risk in the context of adventure/extreme tourism. Our focus is specifically on how risk is discursively constructed on adventure tourism websites for Sápmi (referred to as “[arctic] Lapland”), centring on destinations in Sweden (Kiruna), Finland (Rovaniemi) and Norway (Tromsø). Our primary material from the booking platform Adrenaline Hunter amounts to 12,000 words. In the material, it is precisely the balance between negative and positive aspects of risk that is foregrounded (cf. e.g. Imboden, 2012), but in a scalar sense, ranging from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ types, with a negotiable awareness of how relative what counts as ‘extreme’ may be. We find that “extreme tourism” is a highly relative concept, for example marketing an everyday activity (like walking on ice) as an “extreme” experience for an audience not too familiar with snow and ice.

When looking at risk in a tourism context, the issue of sustainability inevitably arises. In tourism discourse, sustainability may be framed through negative risk but also through positive risk from the point of view of the tourist (foregrounding benefits of enjoyment and “butterflies”). We investigate the balance between something that needs to be managed but simultaneously helps construct (a feeling of) “adventure” in relation to different kinds of responsibility – individual-moral, formal-juridical, and culture-collective.

Risk communication is widely researched in the social sciences, but in linguistics the study of how risk is communicated has not yet formed a coherent field of its own. In this chapter, we approach risk from a discourse perspective, aiming to promote the establishment of risk discourse as a field of study with its own characteristics. We approach the question “What is “risk”?” through a discourse-linguistic analysis that crucially involves the concept of responsibility. We show that there is a body of previous research in linguistics that has dealt with some aspect of risk, but typically without foregrounding risk or using risk as an analytical tool. We show how this state of affairs also applies to responsibility. We argue that an understanding of discourse about risk and risk scenarios needs to be informed by an understanding of the concept of responsibility. The theoretical point of this chapter is therefore to conceive of and establish this type of responsibility-embedded Risk Discourse. Throughout the chapter, we discuss ways in which risk and responsibility can serve as analytical tools in risk discourse studies. This is illustrated by reference not only to previous research, but also to the chapters included in the current volume.