Episode 27
Brand tone of voice: using language to convey certain attributes for a brand personality, e.g. creating the effect of a brand sounding friendly, trustworthy or exciting
Large language model (LLM): a particular kind of machine learning model for natural language processing (NLP), e.g. answering user questions in a conversational manner, translating or classifying texts
Move analysis: an approach in genre analysis that investigates what different communicative purposes are realised in parts of a text type. The linguistic strategies to realise a move are called steps.
Prompt engineering: generating input prompts from tasks for applications in natural language processing; this can be done automatically or by human users
Episode 26
Cleft sentence: see episode 15
Cognitive dissonance: the result of someone holding conflicting beliefs or values
Collocation: a pair of words that occur together with statistical significance
Conditionals: a way to talk about hypothetical scenarios, often with the help of if-clauses. Hypothetical scenarios in the past are called counterfactuals
Epistemic modality: see episode 10
Ergative verbs: verbs that can be used both with or without an object, i.e., transitively and intransitively. The object of its transitive use corresponds to the subject of its intransitive use, e.g., ‘She opened the door’ vs ‘The door opened’.
Hedging: a function of language use that mitigates or “waters down” a statement. Various linguistic features can enact hedging, including epistemic modality and modifiers.
Presuppositions: background beliefs in an utterance that is known or assumed by both speaker and hearer
Episode 25
Anthropomorphisation: to give human form to a brand. Anthropomorphisation comprises a number of strategies such as the use of cartoon characters, the use of the first person singular on packaging or surfaces, and the creation of user imagery.
Fallacy: A violation of the rules of rational argumentation, especially an invalid conclusion.
Greenwashing: see S1E2
Episode 24
directive: a type of speech act (see episode 9) that requests something of the hearer
genre: also known as a text type; a conventional way of using language to achieve a particular purpose
imperative: the form that a verb typically takes in a → directive
native advertising: Advertising that blends in with or looks like editorial content or like the newsfeed on a social media platform.
small stories: see episode 14
Episode 23
Backstage: A term introduced by Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982). He developed a theatre analogy for social interaction, where the backstage is the space where “actors” (i.e. speakers) prepare for an interaction and which is not usually visible to others.
Context: Factors outside of a text that influence how its producer uses language. Relevant contexts can be social, cultural, political or economic.
Co-text: The text around a passage or phrase of interest in a text.
Episode 22
Agentless passive: see episode 4
Conversational implicature: see episode 20
Indirect speech act: see episode 9
Prosody: see episode 4
Sentiment analysis: the use of natural language processing to systematically identify, extract, quantify and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to customer materials such as reviews, online and social media and is now being extended to other domains where authors typically express their opinion/sentiment less explicitly, such as news texts and financial reporting.
Text mining: the process of transforming unstructured text into a structured format to identify meaningful patterns and new insights. Text mining explores and discovers hidden relationships that would otherwise remain buried in the mass of textual big data.
Episode 21
Accommodation: see episode 20
Conversational implicature: see episode 20
False friends: Two words that look very similar in two languages or language varieties but have different meanings. An example is gift (‘present’) in English and Gift (‘poison’) in German. ‘Billion’ used to denote different numbers in US and British English but that proved so confusing (and presumably costly) that British English speakers adopted the US meaning.
Lingua franca: see episode 20
Pidgin: An effect of language contact, a pidgin is a hybrid of two or more languages that is used to be able to communicate. When a pidgin is established enough to become people’s native or first language, it is called a creole. Semiotic system: A rule-governed sign system, such as a language or colour or music. A semiotic system has elements (e.g. words, hues, notes) that can in principle be combined in infinite ways. In practice though, rules (e.g. grammar, artistic and design conventions, counterpoint) limit how the signs can be used to communicate meanings.
Episode 20
Accommodation: the phenomenon of speakers changing their use of language to become more (convergence) or less (divergence) like that of their interlocutors
Code switching: Changing from one language to another within a spoken interaction or a written text.
Conversational implicature: The meaning that is implied rather than made explicit in an utterance.
Dialect: A language variety that is typical of a particular geographical region. In contrast to accents, dialects involve not only phonetic but also lexical and grammatical features.
Idiolect: A language variety that is typical of a particular person.
Lingua franca: Speakers of different first languages using a language they all speak for the purposes of communication with each other, e.g. English as a lingua franca (ELF). When ELF occurs in a business context, researchers use the acronym BELF (Business English as a lingua franca).
Sociolect: A language variety that is typical of a particular social group.
Translanguaging: Using features from different languages to make communication more effective. The concept was first formulated as ‘‘trawsieithu’ and used in the context of Welsh-English bilinguals.
Episode 19
Back region: The sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) used a theatrical metaphor to describe social interaction, where the type of activity that people are engaged in is the performance, the speakers are actors (and hearers are the audience) and the self-images they project are different masks.He further distinguished between front and back regions, by which he meant the “stage” where a performance takes please and the place where the “actors” rehearse and prepare their performance, respectively. Goffmann gave the example of a kitchen being the back region of a restaurant.
Double voicing: see episode 8
Turn taking system: A concept from conversation analysis, which denotes the patterns and rules according to which speakers take the conversational floor to speak and concede it to let others speak.
Zero-sum thinking: the belief that a given resource is fixed, limited, in competition and relevant to either short- or long-term survival. Zero-sum thinking leads people to strategise as if their perceived competitor’s gains are directly tied to their own losses. This kind of thinking can happen in actual zero-sum situations, but also frequently manifests when the resource in question is abundant or unlimited. In the latter case, psychologists speak of zero-sum bias.
Episode 18
Phatic communication: see episode 4
Speech acts: see episode 9
Episode 17
Acrostic: A form of poetry where the first letters of each line, written from top to bottom, make a word.
Alliteration: Words in close proximity that start with the same letter, e.g. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’.
Indexical sign: Going back to the semiotic theory by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), an index establishes a relation of cause and effect between the sign and what it signifies. For example, traces in the snow index that someone has walked there. Other types of signs are icons, where a sign resembles what it signifies (e.g. emojis) and symbols, where the relation between the sign and what it refers to is arbitrary and conventional (e.g. a red rose symbolising romantic love in some cultures).
Ostranenie: A term from formalist Russian theories on literature which translates into ’defamiliarisation’. It refers to the use of poetic language to make familiar things seem strange in order to gain new perspectives on them.
Parallelism: A parallel arrangements of elements in a sentence, e.g. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’. Opposite: chiasmus.
Semiotics: The study of how meanings are made by the use of signs.
Speech acts: see episode 9
Episode 16
Keyword: In general terms, a word that is of central importance in a text or discourse. The term has a specific meaning in corpus linguistics, where it denotes a word that is used in a corpus with statistically significant frequency when compared to a reference corpus.
Nudge theory: A concept from behavioural science which refers to influencing behaviour through positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions rather than legislation or enforcement. It was first made popular by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness (Yale University Press, 2008).
Register: A way of using language that is linked to a particular social, including professional activity, such as a bureaucratic register. Registers feature typical words and grammatical forms, e.g. words of Latin origin.
Source domain: A term from conceptual metaphor theory that denotes a semantic domain that speakers draw on to talk about something in metaphoric terms. For example, in the metaphor COMPANY IS A SHIP (e.g. realised in “Ms Firorina took the helm at Hewlett Packard”), SHIP is the source domain, while company is the so-called target domain.
Episode 15
Clefts: In cleft sentences, a simple sentence is expressed through a main clause and a relative clause, in order to draw attention to a particular part of the sentence. It-clefts take the form it + to be + relative clause, e.g. ‘It was Sarah who gave the order’. Wh-clefts, also known as pseudo-clefts, take the form relative clause + to be +x, e.g. ‘What I really needed was some time to myself’. Listeners/readers in Northern England will be familiar with the Yorkshire cleft (also heard in Lancashire), which take the form main clause + to be + subject, as in ‘They are tender things, are artichokes’.
Deixis: Ways to point to something inside or outside texts. So-called deictic markers can indicate something as being close or further away in space or time, e.g. ‘this’ and ‘these’ vs. ‘that’ and ‘those’, ‘’now’ vs. ‘then’.
Ethos, logos, pathos: In Aristotelian rhetoric, these refer to three strategies of persuading audiences: through credibility (ethos), rationality (logos) or emotion (pathos).
Episode 14
Portmanteau words: New words that are formed by blending two existing words. For example, ‘Brexit’ is a portmanteau of ‘Britain’ and ‘exit’.
Small stories: Short forms of storytelling that are different from the typical narrative relating a sequence of events. A small story can only hint at a longer story, defer or refuse telling a story, or give only part of a story.
Episode 13
Degrowth: is an idea that critiques the global capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs, causing human exploitation and environmental destruction. The degrowth movement of activists and researchers advocates for societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption. This requires radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy. Degrowth means transforming societies to ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries
Dialogue, as David Bohm envisioned it, is a radically new approach to group interaction, with an emphasis on listening and observation, while suspending the culturally conditioned judgments and impulses that we all have. This unique and creative form of dialogue is necessary and urgent if humanity is to generate a coherent culture that will allow for its continued survival. https://www.bohmdialogue.org/
William Isaacs : see https://thesystemsthinker.com/author/william-n-isaacs/
Episode 12
Conversational maxims: According to H. P. Grice, the four maxims that speakers need to adhere to for successful conversation are
Cooperative principle:A notion introduced by H. P. Grice in his article “Logic and conversation” (1975), which states that speakers understand each other in conversation, because they follow particular rules and assume that others do as well. Those rules are known as → conversational maxims.
Narrative structure: One very influential model of how speakers organise their stories was put forward by socio-linguist William Labov. His model was derived from interviews about personal experience with young African American men in the mid- to late 1960s and comprises six elements:
Not all elements will always be realised and when they are, they do not necessarily occur in the above order. More recent work on narratives (e.g. by Alexandra Georgakopoulou) has shifted the focus from stories as a product with formal characteristics to storytelling as a way of creating identities in context.
Questions: We can broadly distinguish between four types of questions.
– Open questions leave the person asked free to elaborate as much or little in their answer as they like (e.g. ‘What do you expect from this change in career?’).
– The opposite are closed or yes/no questions (e.g. ‘Are you considering a career change?’).
– Rhetorical questions are those that preempt their own answers, e.g. ‘Wouldn’t you like a pay rise?’.
– Tag questions take the form of a statement with a question attached to it. They can facilitate interaction (‘It’s rather more complicated than we thought, isn’t it?’) or challenge the hearer (e.g. ‘You haven’t quite met the sales target though, have you?’).
Speech acts: see episode 9
Episode 11
Deixis: The various ways on which speakers and writers can use language to point to someone or something. One way of doing so is pronouns, both personal (‘you’,’she’, ‘they’ etc.) and demonstrative (‘this/that’, ‘these/those’). Another way is by adverbials of space and time, e.g. ‘over there’, ‘back then’. People, things, ideas and events can thereby be constructed as more or less close to (proximal) or distant from (distal) the speaker or writer, who is at the deictic centre.
Episode 10
Double voicing: see episode 8
Modality: In particular, epistemic modality, i.e. using language to express how likely it is that something was, is or will be the case. In English, this is typically done with modal verbs (e.g. ‘may’, ‘might’), but also through adjectives (e.g. ‘likely’), adverbs (e.g. ‘possibly’) or nouns (‘probability’).
Monoglossic: A text is said to be monoglossic when it represents only one voice. The opposite, i.e. a text representing many different voices, is known as heteroglossic.
Pronouns: Pronouns are parts of speech that stand in for a noun; for example, the pronoun ‘she’ can refer to a particular person who was mentioned earlier in a conversation or who is visible to both the speaker and the hearer. We can distinguish between personal pronouns (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘she, he, it, ’‘we’, ‘they’), possessive pronouns (‘mine’, ‘yours’ etc.) and demonstrative pronouns (‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, ‘those’).
Episode 9
Hyperbole: Exaggeration in language,e .g. through using lots of intensifiers (‘really incredibly bad’), high-impact words (‘fanatical about customer service’) or often absurd numbers (‘with you 1000% percent’, ‘a gazillion problems’)
Speech acts: Speech act theory covers the form and function, intention and effect of an utterance. Speech acts can be performative, i.e. by saying something, the speaker actually carries out the action (e.g. saying ‘I promise to be back by 3pm’ enacts the promise). The form and function of an utterance can be the same, e.g. using questions to ask about something, or they can diverge, in which case we talk about indirect speech acts. An example of the latter is using questions as a polite way to make a request without sounding too imposing (‘Could I just borrow your pen?’). Finally, what the speaker says is known as locution, what they intend to do with their utterance is called illocutionary force, and the effect it has on the hearer is referred to as perlocutionary effect. Intention and effect may not be the same; for instance, the utterance ‘I’ll be back’ can be intended as a promise but be understood as a warning..
Episode 8
Communities of practice: Originally developed by Jean lave and Etienne Wenger in 1991, the notion of a community of practice has been taken up and used widely in sociolinguistics as well. It is defined as a group of people who regularly come together to work towards a mutually negotiated aim and, as they do so, develop norms of interaction, including approved ways of how to communicate and use language.
Discourse marker: A word or short phrase that signals a transition to another part of a conversation. Examples are ‘so’, ‘okay then’ or ‘moving on’.
Double-voicing: Drawing on a concept by Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Baxter defined double-voicing in the workplace as speakers simultaneously expressing their own standpoint while also expressing that of others.
Illocutionary force: According to speech act theory, every utterance has three aspects: locutionary content or what is said, illocutionary force or what effect the speaker wants an utterance to have, and perlocutionary effect or the effect that the utterance actually has on the hearer. Examples of illocutionary force are warnings, promises or advice.
Episode 7
Deontic modality: The use of language to express obligation, permission or prohibition. In English, this is typically done with modal verbs (e.g. ‘should’, ‘have to’), but also through adjectives (e.g. ‘compulsory’), adverbs (e.g. ‘obligatorily’) or nouns (e.g. ‘duty’).
Epistemic modality: The use of language to express how likely it is that something was, is or will be the case. In English, this is typically done with modal verbs (e.g. ‘may’, ‘might’), but also through adjectives (e.g. ‘likely’), adverbs (e.g. ‘possibly’) or nouns (‘probability’).
Open questions: Questions that leave the person asked free to elaborate as much or little in their answer as they like (e.g. ‘What do you expect from this change in career?’). Opposite of yes/no questions (e.g. ‘Are you considering a career change?’).
Parataxis: A series of sentences with only main clauses, e.g. ‘I went home after work. I had managed to tick off all items on my to-do-list. My partner had made lasagna.’ Opposite of hypotaxis, which is a sentence with main and sub-clauses, e.g. ‘After managing to tick off all items on my to-do list, I went home from work to find that my partner had made lasagna.’
Rhetorical questions: Questions that preempt their own answers, e.g. ‘Wouldn’t you like a pay rise?’.
Episode 6
Image Repair Theory (IRT): a rhetorical theory developed by W. L. Benoit. It focuses on how and why individuals and organisations defend their reputation. IRT focuses on ‘image repair strategies’ individuals or organisations use when they are accused of wrongdoing.
Lingua Franca: see episode 3
Evaluative language: as our guest, Dr Fuoli explains, this is a broad umbrella term for language that is used to convey a positive or a negative subjective opinion.
Trust/worthiness: we discuss a model of trust in the podcast, which is based on Mayer et al.’s (1995) work. This model identifies competence, integrity and benevolence as key factors influencing individuals’ perceptions of others’ trustworthiness. Source: Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709-734.
Episode 5
Audiences: Going back to Alan Bell’s 1984 paper ‘Language style as audience design’, published in the journal Language in Society (volume 13, issue 2, pages 145-204), we can distinguish four different kinds of recipients of a message:
– Addressee – recipients who are known, ratified, and addressed, e.g. a company tagged and addressed in a tweet by a customer
– Auditor: recipients who are not directly addressed, but are known and ratified, e.g. the person running the company’s Twitter account
– Overhearer: recipients of whom the text producer is aware, e.g. followers on Twitter
– Eavesdropper: non-ratified recipients of whom the text producer is unaware, e.g. podcast hosts analysing the customer’s tweet in an episode
Context collapse: The phenomenon in online communication whereby a message can be read by people that the person posting it knows from many different contexts, e.g. family, friends, colleagues.
Episode 4
Agentless passive: A grammatical construction that only mentions the object or goal of an action and the action itself, but eliminates the subject or actor. For example, ‘Additional security measures have been put in place’ does not mention who put those measures in place.
L1, L2: Short for first and second language, i.e. the language that someone learned as a child (mother tongue, native language) and one that they acquired later in life.
Lingua franca: Latin for ‘free language’. A language that speakers use to communicate although it is not their mother tongue or → L1. For instance, Bernard, Erika and Veronika are native speakers of Dutch, Hungarian and German, respectively, but we don’t know each other’s languages, so we use English with each other – including in this podcast of course!
Phatic communication: Often very conventional phrases that are not meant to convey or obtain information but have a social function, e.g. greetings (‘How are you?’) or well wishes (‘Have a nice day’).
Pragmatic affordances: The functions that speakers and writers can realise when using language in a particular context. For example, depending on context and participants, jokes allow speakers to diffuse tension in a conversation or disparage someone else. Emojis or emoticons such as 😉 and acronyms (e.g. LOL) are often used for their pragmatic affordance to mitigate the force of a request or a criticism.
Prosody: Elements of spoken language that are not individual sounds but qualities of a shorter or longer unit of speech. Prosodic elements include stress, rhythm, pitch and volume.
Episode 3
Sound symbolism: The idea that certain sounds communicate meaning and evoke associations. For example, vowels formed at the front of the mouth, like “i”, are often associated with small, spiky things, whereas so-called back vowels, like “o”, conjure up the image of large, round objects. Sound symbolism is widely used not only in poetry but also in brand names.
Lingua franca: Latin for ‘free language’. A language that speakers use to communicate although it is not their mother tongue. For instance, Benard, Erika and Veronika are native speakers of Dutch, Hungarian and German, respectively, but we don’t know each other’s languages, so use English with each other – and in this podcast of course!
Episode 2
Conduit model: A model of communication that was first proposed by Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949. (It is also known as the Shannon-Weaver model.) Shannon and Weaver were engineers and developed their model for radio and phone technology. In simple terms, the model includes a sender who produces a message (e.g.a speaker), a transmitter encoding the message (in spoken communication, the same as the speaker), a channel to send the message (e.g. a website) and a receiver who decodes the message (e.g. reader). The conduit model assumes a linear flow of information and does not account for any contextual factors. It has therefore been recognised as unsuitable to describe and explain human communication.
Fordism: Named after the Ford automotive company, Fordism denotes an approach to management in manufacturing that is characterised by synchronisation, specialisation and precision. The Ford company was among the first to introduce assembly lines and split up the manufacturing process into a number of steps carried out by individual workers to increase efficiency. The term was first used by Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci in 1934 and is linked to Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
Greenwashing: Attempts by companies to build a brand image of themselves as sustainable and environmentally friendly, when their practices are not. The term comes from ‘whitewashing’, i.e. trying to appear innocent when not, and has been extended to ‘pinkwashing’, for attempts to appear women- or LGBT-friendly, and ‘blackwashing’, to describe the phenomenon of a few senior positions held by token non-white people to appear ethnically diverse.
Interdiscursivity: the mixing of typical features from various text types and discourses. The purpose can be to persuade (e.g. using scientific language in cosmetics advertising) or to get attention (e.g. making an advertisement look like a till receipt). Interdiscursivity is not always used to deliberately though and can then indicate some social change that is underway (e.g. a high-ranking police officer referring to members of the general public as ‘customers’).
Episode 1
Corpus linguistics: A branch of linguistics where research use computer software to analyse large bodies (Latin ‘corpora’, singular ‘corpus’) of texts to see, for example, what words are particularly frequent, what words co-occur with each other (collocation) and what words, word classes or semantic fields are over/underused with statistical significance (keywords, key parts of speech or key domains). Corpus linguistic research has been done on the grammars of the world’s languages, on the language use of learners of a language, on language variation and change, on the language of Shakespeare and many other areas.
Face-threatening act: In linguistic politeness theory, any utterance that can potentially damage someone else’s or the speaker’s wish to be appreciated and valued (called, somewhat confusingly, ‘positive face’) or their wish to be unhindered in doing what they want at the time they want to do it (so-called ‘negative face’). Speakers use a number of strategies to mitigate face-threatening acts and preserve social harmony.
Lingua franca: Latin for ‘free language’. A language that speakers use to communicate although it is not their mother tongue. For instance, Bernard, Erika and Veronika are native speakers of Dutch, Hungarian and German, respectively, but we don’t know each other’s languages, so use English with each other – and in this podcast of course!
Modal verbs: One way of expressing either a degree of certainty that something was, is or will be the case (so-called epistemic modality) or to convey a more or less strong obligation on someone (known as deontic modality). Examples of epistemic modal verbs are ‘I may/might be able to type up the notes in time’, while deontic modality is illustrated by ‘I really need to type up the notes in time’.
Words & Actions 