Cover not available
Article published In:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 7:2 (2017) ► pp.137–162

Construing negotiation

The role of voice quality features in American-Filipino business telephone conversations

| Hong Kong Shue Yan University (China)

The call centre conversation is a telephonic exchange of voices between the customer and the customer service representative (CSR). Both lexicogrammatical and prosodic features are used to construe emotional and attitudinal recognition. Studying these features can investigate how the call centre discourse is construed, and how the interpersonal meaning takes shape through the text. The spoken data are constructed by Filipino CSRs and American English-speaking customers. The findings show that participants tend to make specific paralinguistic voice quality choices to express their emotions in dialogue. This article first discusses the voice quality framework for its semiotic features in relation to interpersonal meaning, reviews previous voice quality studies and later delineates how voice quality relates to interpersonal meaning in the calls.

Keywords: voice quality features, spoken discourse, business telephone conversation, negotiation, interpersonal meaning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Voice quality framework
    • 2.2Phonology – intonational system in SFL
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Findings and discussion
    • 4.1Voice quality feature – volume (loud/soft) in call centre conversations
    • 4.2Voice quality feature – pitch (high/low) in call centre conversations
    • 4.3Voice quality feature tension (tense/lax) in call centre conversations
    • 4.4Voice quality feature – rhythm (slow/fast) in call centre conversations
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 27 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.7.2.01yau
References
Banse, Rainer and Klaus R. Scherer
1996 “Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(3): 614–636. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crystal, David
1969 Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dalton, R. J.
2006 “Communication Breakdown?”. Newsday. Retrieved from [URL]
Dellaert, Frank, Thomas Polzin, and Alex Waibel
1996 “Recognizing emotion in speech.” In Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 1970–1973. Philadelphia, USA. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eriksson, Mats
1994 “Story-telling as drama.” Young 2(1): 47–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Esling, John H. and Rita F. Wong
1983 “Voice quality settings and the teaching of pronunciation.” TESOL Quarterly 17(1): 89–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friginal, Eric
2007 “Outsourced call centers and English in the Philippines.” World Englishes, 26(3): 331–345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “Call center training and language in the Philippines”. In Globalisation, communication and the workplace, ed. by G. Forey and J. Lockwood, 190–203. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Gorin, Allen L.
1995 “On automated language acquisition.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97(6): 3441–3461. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, Judith A. and Gregory B. Friedman
1999 “Status, gender, and nonverbal behavior: A study of structured interactions between employees of a company.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25(9): 1082–1091. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K.
1989 Spoken and Written Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., and W. Greaves
2008 Intonation in the Grammar of English. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Jewitt, Carey
2002 “The move from page to screen: The multimodal reshaping of school English.” Visual Communication 1(2): 171–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, S.
1999 “Communication at the call centre.” Strategic Communication Management 3(5): 22–27.Google Scholar
Jones, Peter and Peter A. Jones
1990 “Stress: Are you serving it up to your restaurant patrons?” Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly 31(3): 38–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ko, Sei Jin, Charles M. Judd, and Irene V. Blair
2006 “What the voice reveals: Within-and between-category stereotyping on the basis of voice.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(6): 806–819. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Chipongian
2006 “Poor English threatens Philippines outsourcing”. South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, p. 11.Google Scholar
Leijssen, Mia
2006 “Validation of the body in psychotherapy”. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 46(2): 126–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, J. R.
2001 “Language, register and genre.” In Analysing English in a Global Context, ed. by A. Burns and C. Coffin, 149–166. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2007 Multimodality – some issues. Paper presented at the Semiotic Margins: Reclaiming meaning, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Australia.
Möller, Sebastian
2000 Assessment and Prediction of Speech Quality in Telecommunications. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plutchik, Robert
1994 The Psychology and Biology of Emotion. New York, NY: HaperCollins College.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson
1974 “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50(4): 696–735.. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scherer, Klaus R.
1986 “Vocal affect expression: A review and a model for future research.” Psychological Bulletin 99(2): 143–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steele, Fritz
1975 The Open Organization: The Impact of Secrecy and Disclosure on People and Organizations. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Titze, Ingo R. and Brad H. Story
2002 “Voice quality: What is most characteristic about ‘you’”. Echoes 12(4): 3–4.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Teun
1982 “Levels of formality in the television interview.” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 13–14: 59–68.Google Scholar
1984 “Rhythmic structures of the film text.” In Discourse and communication: New approaches to the analysis of mass media discourse and communication, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 216–232. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
1999 Speech, Music, Sound. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 Introducing Social Semiotics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wallbott, Harald G.
1998 “Bodily expression of emotion.” European Journal of Social Psychology 28(6): 879–896. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wehrle, Thomas, Sussane Kaiser, Sussana Schmidt, and Klaus R. Scherer
2000 “Studying the dynamics of emotional expressing using synthesized facial muscle movements.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78(1): 105–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yogo, Yumi, Mitsuoko Ando Akie Hashi, Sachiko Tsutsui, and Naoto Yamada
2000 “Judgments of emotion by nurses and students given double-bind information on a patient’s tone of voice and message content.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 90(3): 855–863. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Wan, Yau Ni
2023. “But it’s truly aggravating and depressing”: Voicing counter-expectancy in US–Philippines service interactions. Journal of Intercultural Communication ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
Wan, Yau Ni
2024. Graduation Resources in News Discourse: Calls for the British Museum to Return Chinese Cultural Artefacts. Journalism and Media 5:1 ► pp. 189 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.