‘It's not good saying “Well it it might do that or it might not”’: Hypothetical reported speech in business meetings
Introduction
When speakers use direct reported speech (DRS) in discourse, it is presented as an exact reproduction of speech that occurred in a different context from the current one. However, some instances of DRS ‘quote’ utterances that have never happened, but are projected as hypothetical in an imaginary world or as possible in a future situation, e.g.:
In this example, the first instance of DRS (I would never say …) is counter-factual and thus projected into an imaginary/hypothetical world, while the second example (I'd say…) is at the same time hypothetical and possible. The speaker also clearly indicates which of these two hypothetical scenarios is desirable. We will refer to such examples as hypothetical reported speech (HRS), following Myers' (1999b) term “hypothetical reported discourse”.
This article examines the use of hypothetical reported speech in a 1-million-word corpus of business interactions (primarily face to face meetings) – the Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus (CANBEC).1 In this corpus, HRS occurred frequently, especially within particular meetings. However, there did not seem to be any text-external contextual patterns shared across the meetings where it was most frequent: it occurred in both internal and external meetings, in a wide range of companies (e.g. pharmaceutical, manufacturing, IT), in negotiations, technical discussions and sales meetings, and across meetings involving senior management and managers and subordinates. The question therefore arises as to why speakers use these hypothetical ‘direct quotations’ in such a wide range of contexts, what functions they perform within these contexts, and whether there are any contextual patterns that emerge from the textual analysis.
While some previous studies of HRS have looked at institutional or professional contexts, Koester (2014) is the only one to examine spoken business discourse. It examines HRS in a particular sub-set of meetings in CANBEC: those involving negotiations. The current study explores the phenomenon of HRS in the whole CANBEC meetings corpus, and is thus broader in scope, allowing us to comment on the frequency and use in a variety of contexts of this under-examined yet widespread discourse feature. Despite the range of meeting contexts represented in the corpus, the study showed that HRS was used in a way that is distinct from its uses in non-business contexts and clearly linked to the speakers' professional and organizational practices. It was used overwhelmingly to effect some change in action relevant to the particular context of the business meeting, as will be discussed in more detail in the article.
In reviewing previous work on reported speech in interaction, Clift and Holt (2007) pinpoint three main themes:
- 1.
forms of reported speech
- 2.
the authenticity of reported speech
- 3.
the functions of reported speech
This paper will mainly address the first and the third themes through an analysis of HRS in spoken business discourse, and as such is the first to examine HRS across a representative corpus of meetings. Corpus linguistics can be employed to find many of the lexico-grammatical items used to introduce HRS, and a close analysis of the discursive contexts of HRS can help us understand its sequential unfolding across longer stretches of interaction. Nevertheless, the limitations of concordance-based corpus tools in both locating a discourse feature with a variety of linguistic forms and in providing a contextually rich explanation are evidenced in this study; an original methodology is therefore developed to overcome these limitations.
In terms of authenticity, while HRS by definition is clearly not ‘real’, it frames the ensuing utterance in meaningful ways and is employed for rhetorical and strategic purposes. This leads on to the third point: by analysing extracts from a range of meetings, we will show that HRS in business fulfils several related functions, affects the frame of the discourse, and can be employed to craft persuasive messages. In other words, through a fine-grained analysis, we further the understanding of this intriguing linguistic feature in an important workplace genre. Specifically, we will answer the following research questions:
While our analysis confirms previous findings on HRS, we also identify some discourse patterns and sequences that have not hitherto been focused on, thus making an empirical contribution to this body of work. As indicated above, we also propose distinct reasons why HRS is used by speakers, particularly senior staff, in a business context, thus contributing to the theoretical understanding of HRS usage and business discourse. Furthermore, in the conclusion we will briefly evaluate this hybrid methodology in terms of its usefulness for identifying and analysing a feature of discourse (HRS) that is not constituted solely by a fixed or semi-fixed lexico-grammatical item. The methodology combines corpus linguistic tools to locate frequent lexico-grammatical patterns with discourse analysis to identify both further lexicogrammatical patterns in the corpus and sequential patterns within extended interactions.
Section snippets
Literature review
Before explicitly addressing our research questions, it is relevant to review what previous studies have revealed about the form and function of DRS in general and HRS in particular. The literature review is structured around the ‘three main themes’ (forms, authenticity and functions of DRS/HRS) identified by Clift and Holt (2007) as discussed above, and begins with a brief review of narrative and non-narrative studies of DRS and HRS in a range of contexts.
The past two decades have seen a great
Methodology
Drawing on Li, 1986, Mayes, 1990 lists five features of interaction that indicate the utterance in question is RS: (1) pronominalization, (2) place and time deixis, (3) verb tense, (4) presence of the complementiser that, (5) intonation. As our data is already transcribed, we only consider the first three, plus (4) when it is necessary to distinguish between direct and indirect speech. Furthermore, many of the instances of DRS are signalled through the use of speech marks, which transcribers of
What discourse patterns are most frequently used to perform HRS in CANBEC?
In addition to the three main patterns which frequently introduce a stretch of HRS, as discussed above, one further pattern involving negative forms was identified through the corpus searches. Table 1 lists and exemplifies each pattern, indicates the number of times it occurred and the numbers of the data extracts discussed in the article in which the examples occur.
The most frequently used reporting verb by far across the whole corpus was say (83 instances) but think, ask, go and turn
Discussion and conclusions
A key question we have addressed in the paper is why speakers use HRS in business contexts. The analysed examples show, as in studies of DRS (Buttny, 1997, Myers, 1999a), that HRS allows speakers to achieve a sense either of detachment or involvement, and we argue that both of these can be persuasive in business contexts. Detachment is persuasive because it creates an objectifying distance between the speaker, the message and the listener, and hence may be particularly pertinent to business.
Almut Koester Professor of English Business Communication at Vienna University of Economics and Business. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, and is author of The Language of Work (2004), Investigating Workplace Discourse (2006) and Workplace Discourse (2010). Her research focuses on spoken workplace discourse and business corpora, and her publications have examined genres, such as negotiating, and a range of discourse phenomena, including metaphors and
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2023, English for Specific Purposes“I'd a set that back at the chocks”: The personal hypothetical “I would” in aviation flight instruction
2020, Journal of PragmaticsCitation Excerpt :Hypothetical constructions can be accomplished through the use of a modal verb such as “would” (Koester and Handford, 2018). While other studies have investigated the use of hypothetical speech in a range of contexts (e.g., Koester and Hanford, 2018), its use has not yet been examined in flight instruction. In addition to its use as a hypothetical, “would” can be used as a marker of tentativeness or politeness (Ronan, 2011) or as a mitigating device (Linde, 1988).
Creation, dissemination and uptake of fake-quotes in lay political discourse on Facebook and Twitter
2020, Journal of PragmaticsCitation Excerpt :and Mayes's notion of ‘impossible quotes’: such reported speech is “presented as an exact reproduction of speech that occurred in a different context from the current one[, while in many cases] these have never happened, but are projected as hypothetical in an imaginary world or as possible in a future situation” (Koester and Handford, 2018: 67). As seen in (3), such instances will generally express their hypothetical nature (cf. “I would never say”, “I'd say”) predominantly serving as “rhetorical persuasive” (Koester and Handford, 2018: 70) rather than expectedly misleading devices, which is why such types have been situated slightly towards the left end, merely as ‘bald-faced’, in Fig. 1. Misquotes are placed within the latter sphere, too, but with significant closeness to the realm of pseudo-references, considering that they – even though not intentionally constructed as incomplete or flawed – do formally (not, however, content-wise) misrepresent the original utterance due to speaker's negligence (cf. (4)).2
Almut Koester Professor of English Business Communication at Vienna University of Economics and Business. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, and is author of The Language of Work (2004), Investigating Workplace Discourse (2006) and Workplace Discourse (2010). Her research focuses on spoken workplace discourse and business corpora, and her publications have examined genres, such as negotiating, and a range of discourse phenomena, including metaphors and idioms, relational language and conflictual talk in business and workplace contexts. She is also actively involved in applying research findings to Business English teaching.
Mike Handford is Chair of Applied Linguistics at Cardiff University, and Director of Research in The Centre for Language and Communication Research. He has published on discourse in professional settings, cultural identities at work, the application of corpus tools in discourse analysis and intercultural communication, English as a Lingua Franca, and language learning and teaching. He is the author of The Language of Business Meetings (2010, Cambridge University Press), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis (2012).