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Part of
Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics
Edited by István Kecskés and Stavros Assimakopoulos
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 274] 2017
► pp. 105–127

Chapter 5
The interpersonal pragmatics of intercultural financial discourse

A contrastive analysis of European vs. Asian earnings conference calls

| University of Pisa

Earnings calls are financial reporting events organised by companies via teleconferencing as a format that allows management and financial analysts to interact on an interpersonal level. In this study, I analyse the relational dimension of earnings calls of European and Asian companies, representing cultures that are widely recognised as having different communicative approaches. I used corpus software to extract and analyse pragmalinguistic features that encode relational aspects of interaction. The findings revealed rather strong differences in interpersonal communication styles that did not always align with presumed cultural orientations. In this context, the use of relational features appears to be impacted not only by cultural values, but also by the distinct professional goals of participants and the technology-mediated setting.

Keywords: financial discourse, earnings calls, corpus linguistics, interpersonal features, intercultural communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Financial disclosure
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2The analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Semantic analysis of the Euro corpus vs. the Asian corpus
    • 4.2Semantic analysis of the Asian corpus vs. the Euro corpus
    • 4.3Other differences in interpersonal communication styles
      • 4.3.1Apologising
      • 4.3.2Challenging episodes
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.274.06cra
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