The Three Waves of Globalization : Winds of Change in Professional, Institutional and Academic Genres [1 ed.] 9781443856072, 9781443851596

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The Three Waves of Globalization

The Three Waves of Globalization: Winds of Change in Professional, Institutional and Academic Genres

Edited by

Franca Poppi and Winnie Cheng

The Three Waves of Globalization: Winds of Change in Professional, Institutional and Academic Genres, Edited by Franca Poppi and Winnie Cheng This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Franca Poppi, Winnie Cheng and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5159-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5159-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ...................................................................................................... viii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix PART I: GENRES IN PROFESSIONAL CONTEXTS Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Tracing (and Tagging!) Language Features in the Historical English Courtroom (1649-1856) Dawn Archer Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 The Language of Insurance Claims Adjustments: Interviews or Interrogations? Glen Michael Alessi Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37 Tracking the Evolution of Genres: The Case of Corporate Websites Judith Turnbull Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 56 The Discursive Encoding of Changing Business Values in CSR Reports: A Corpus-Based Investigation Paola Catenaccio Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 77 Make up or Made up? Intra and Interlinguistic Messages in the Globalised World of Cosmetic Advertising Gillian Mansfield PART II: GENRES IN I NSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 94 Modality and Performativity in Legislative Texts across Jurisdictions: The Case of Shall Giuliana Garzone

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 123 Modality in Judgements: Italian Texts in a Diachronic and Cross-Cultural Perspective Francesca Santulli Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 142 Elements of Change in Contemporary Institutional Discourse: A Longitudinal and Corpus-Based Analysis Julia Bamford and Giuditta Caliendo Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 160 Tracking Language Change in the American Government: Keys in the Old and New Administrations Denise Milizia Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 181 Tracking the Change in an Institutional Genre: A Diachronic Corpusbased Study of White House Press Briefings Cinzia Spinzi and Marco Venuti Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 197 The Use of Modality in UK TV Electoral Debates Chiara Degano PART III: GENRES IN ACADEMIC CONTEXTS Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 222 Language Change in Legal Research Article Titles Michele Sala Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 244 Relatives in Scientific English: Variation across Time and Space Marianne Hundt Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 269 Linguistic Evolution of Conjunctive Relations in Emerging Scientific Registers Ekaterina Lapshinova Koltunski, Stefania Degaetano, Elke Teich and Hannah Kermes

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 285 The Changing Language of Monolingual Dictionary Discourse: A Diachronic Analysis of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Corpus Laura Pinnavaia Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 307 Genre Variation across Academic Disciplines: A Case Study of “Cultures” in MA Theses Josef Schmied Contributors ............................................................................................. 339

PREFACE

This volume investigates how generic, rhetorical and linguistic resources are creatively exploited by different Communities of Practice (CofP) in a range of professional, institutional and academic contexts to respond to different socio-cultural scenarios. In particular, it describes the language and structures specific to genres with a view to ascertaining whether homogenizing or fragmenting forces and trends have been brought about by the three waves of globalization which have swept the world since 1492 (Friedman, 2005). Relying on the assumption that generic developments are at the same time shaped by and shaping their situational contexts, the sixteen chapters in this volume will contribute to a better understanding of language change by adopting different theoretical approaches, analytical tools and new perspectives of study, and bringing together two complementary strands of linguistic investigation - corpus analysis and genre analysis. The geographical areas analysed here range from the USA to the UK, from Italy to South Africa and New Zealand. The genres covered are spoken genres (courtroom debates and cross-examinations, insurance claim adjustment interviews, political speeches, press conferences, press briefings and electoral debates) as well as written genres (advertisements, statutes, judgments, academic papers, MA theses, journal articles and dictionary entries). In addition, in order to acknowledge the role played by technological developments in radically changing the way information and specialized knowledge are disseminated, web-migrated (informative brochures) and web-generated genres (websites) have been investigated. (Franca Poppi and Winnie Cheng)

INTRODUCTION Globalization has often been described in terms of the spatio-temporal processes of change which underpin a transformation in the organization of human affairs by linking together and expanding human activities across regions and continents (Held and McGrew, 2007: 15). Those spatio-temporal processes did not begin in recent years. On the contrary, the very first signs of global cooperation, mainly in the economic field, appeared around the end of the 15th century, when Columbus’s pathbreaking journey cleared the way for open trade between the Old and the New World. The first wave of globalization (1492-1800) was driven principally by the countries’ governors, who broke down walls between nations and favoured global integration. In the second wave (1800-2000), multinational companies went global for markets and labour, thanks to the boost of the Industrial Revolution. In the first half of this era, global integration was powered by falling transportation costs; in the second half, by the diffusion of the telegraph, the telephone, the PC, the satellite and the first version of the World Wide Web. Finally, the third era (2000 – now) has been powered by individuals, who began to cooperate globally, thanks to the creation and diffusion of a global fibre-optic network all over the world, together with advances in software and applications. With the third wave of globalization that began after 2000, the world has become smaller given that plenty of technological innovations have sharply increased the availability of new modes and channels of communication as well as the range and scope of international interactions. The third wave of globalization has contributed to creating a flattened world, in which completely new social, political and business models have emerged. On top of this, and possibly more importantly, globalization has prompted the sharing of knowledge and information, substantially improving the diffusion of ideas and practices all around the world, to wider portions of local audiences. This can account both for the emergence of new ‘globalizing genres’ and for the implementation of a series of adaptations to the existing ones, in an attempt to guarantee the success and survival of different genres in an era which celebrates the need for a ‘global reach’.

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1. Investigating Genres The interest in the notion of genre has evolved from the need to classify events/objects, as genre rules are always invoked when people engage in professional activities and social interactions. Given its multifarious nature, genre theory has been approached from different perspectives. In fact, three broad ‘schools’ of genre theory are usually identified. The first is the North American New Rhetoric, which draws upon the seminal paper by Miller (1984) and is represented in the works by Bazerman (1984, 1987), Yates and Orlikowski (1992), Freedman and Medway (1994), Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), and Coe (2000). A second orientation, based on Halliday’s (1978) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), underlines the importance of the social purposes of genre in describing the rhetorical structures that have evolved to serve these purposes. Genre is thus seen as a stage-oriented social process (Martin 1997; Christie and Martin 1997). The final perspective steers between the two previously described types of orientation. It employs the Bakhtinian notions of dialogism and intertextuality (Bakhtin 1981), drawing on SFL’s understanding of text structure and Vygotskian’s (1978) principles of pedagogy. Genre here comprises a class of structured communicative events employed by specific discourse communities whose members share broad communicative purposes (Swales, 1990, 1998, 2003; Bhatia 1993, 1997, 2004). Genres are unanimously considered dynamic constructs (cf. Yates and Orlikowski 1992, 2002; Devitt 1993; Orlikowski and Yates 1994; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Bhatia 1997a; Paltridge 1997; Trosborg 2000; Nickerson 2000; Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta, 2005), developed to respond appropriately to new recurrent situations brought about by a change in the social environment. If the social action invoked in response to the new situation proves useful for mastering the business at hand, it enters the stock of knowledge of the relevant community and its application becomes routine. In other words, as Miller (1984: 153) argues, “a set of genres is an open class, with new members evolving, old ones decaying”. Genres have become dynamically complex as a result of several factors, which include a tendency to mix ‘private intentions’ with socially recognized ‘communicative purposes’ (Bhatia 1993) and a need to respond to complex, novel, or changing sociocultural contexts (Fairclough 1992a, 1992b, 1993). Among the many available definitions of genre, the present volume mainly draws inspirations from that proposed by Bhatia (2002: 5), according to which genre is considered one of the several available

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instances of conventionalised or institutionalised textual artifacts adopted by the members of specific discourse communities to achieve their communicative goals, usually in response to a recurring situation. In terms of rhetorical model, and with a view to singling out those conventions which can guide the members of a community to communicate in a recognizable and easier way, genres will be analysed here as textual artifacts that share a common purpose, structure and audience. If evolution (both diachronic and synchronic) tends to affect genres, it is also an inherent characteristic of language. In fact, it goes without saying that genres are enacted through rules that associate appropriate elements of the text’s form and substance (or content) with certain recurrent situations (Yates and Orlikowski 1992: 302), with form used to refer to the observable aspects of communication, such as structural features, medium, and language (Yates and Orlikowski 1992: 301; also 2002: 14–15). This is why an analysis of change in professional, institutional and academic genres is bound to involve a fine-grained analysis of several aspects of language, explored in accordance with its two-fold distinction into code and discourse (cf. Nickerson 2000: 45), to account for the use of languages other than English (Italian, Afrikaans and other South African languages).

2. Genres and Technology The nature and construction of genres have always been defined as both static and dynamic. In fact, genres conventionally perform important discursive actions within particular historical, social, and cultural contexts, but can evolve in terms of communicative purpose, content, form, structure, language, intertextuality and interdiscursivity, subject to the powers of creativity and innovation of individuals and groups. With an increasing trend of globalization and inter-disciplinarity, new cultural and linguistic interconnections are being established in professional, institutional and academic settings to meet the demands for communication in wide-ranging contexts of situation. Moreover, the last few years have witnessed dramatic changes in technology, which, in turn, have altered the way information and expertise is disseminated around the globe. The adoption of digital communication has increasingly replaced faceto-face interactions and has thus dramatically changed the perception of space and time, which by definition has always served the purpose of helping us define what is commonly known as ‘propinquity’, that is, nearness in place and nearness in time (Korzenny, 1978). Propinquity is

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the base for communication to take place, since an interactive process always occurs at a specific time, in a specific place. The advent of the Internet in today’s society has brought about a technological revolution in all professional and social domains. In fact, given its nature, it is an infinite archive of knowledge, allowing for a deep and unrivalled exploration of documents through the path of our aims or personal tastes. In addition, the advent of the new technologies has made it possible for texts to be realized by a range of semiotic resources, such as interactive images, videos, and music. As a consequence, the use of the new media has led to a decrease in the presence of monomodality in favour of multimodality, defined by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001: 20) as “the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event”. The development of Internet technologies, together with the affordances they offer, has triggered a great change in the current interchange of communications and interactions, leading to the creation of new classes of genres that are no longer printed but rely on the multimedial facilities and the multiplicity of possible reading paths. In fact, alongside a completely novel set of web-generated genres (Askehave, Ellerup Nielsen 2005: 132), existing genres are undergoing various adaptations.

3. The Present Volume An important way of capturing a large number of linguistic realizations of genres is language corpora. Corpora of genres are also useful for tracking any changes in the structure and language specific to genres, as clearly shown by a well-established tradition in historical linguistics that has conducted diachronic analyses of specialized genres. However, apart from adopting a historical perspective, researchers have also conducted generic studies that examine different contemporary discourses and genres situated in an array of contexts of interaction. The parties involved in the communicative process usually gather into communities of practice, joined together by looser ties than those of a speech community, whose members share a common repertoire (cf. Wenger 1998) and may contribute to bringing about changes affecting the prototypicality of exemplars of genre, depending upon the complexity and diversity of the disciplinary, professional and discursive practices. It is, therefore, pertinent that an empirically informed analysis does not only focus on the textual, intertextual and interdiscursive features, but also on the institutional, organizational, professional and socio-cultural contexts,

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namely all those aspects which show how genres reflect changing disciplinary and professional cultures. Accordingly, and in line with the multi-faceted nature of genre, different reading paths can be identified in the present volume. It is possible to make a distinction between professional, institutional and academic contexts. Five chapters focus on professional contexts and offer insights into courtroom cross-examinations and the influence of the adversarial system of law, the relationship between assessment and interrogation interviews, web-mediated corporate communication, and comparable advertisements of cosmetic products. The institutional context is investigated through chapters which take into account different corpora of English statutes and Italian judgments, informative booklets, media coverage of the present and past American administrations, and TV electoral debates. Finally, an insightful description of the academic context is provided by the analysis of legal and scientific research articles, learner-dictionary definitions, and native- and non-native learner corpora of academic written English, At the same time, the concept of change can be investigated by adopting a different perspective and focusing on oral, written and webmediated genres. As far as the first category is concerned, insights into courtroom investigations, insurance claim adjustment interviews, pressbriefings, TV electoral debates, and scientific lectures will be provided. Research articles, journal articles, dictionary entries, scientific academic writing, learners’ academic essays, and British statutes will be investigated as instances of written genres. Finally, print and web advertisements will bridge the gap between written and web-mediated genres, and will be analysed alongside online EU booklets, companies’ websites, and CSR reports. Throughout the volume, the different reading paths will aim at highlighting the influence of the three waves of globalization on genre evolution, thus contributing to providing evidence in favour of the homogenization or fragmentation hypothesis, namely as to whether new ‘global genres’ are outnumbering or are outnumbered by the proliferation of a myriad of new, customized genres.

4. Genres in Professional Contexts Within the professional context, the journey through genre changes started as long ago as in the mid-1600s, as Dawn Archer shows by examining the most prevalent speech acts in the courtroom, which include

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early examples of aggressive ‘cross-examinations’, and highlighting the various ways in which language resources were creatively exploited by courtroom dyads in the past, especially as adversarialism became more established. Glenn Alessi examines insurance claim adjustment interviews, which originate from the need to provide impartial expertise in accurately reporting the context, sequence, conditions and chronology of events involved in an accident. The study, based on a spoken corpus of adjuster-victim interviews, is an initial attempt to contextualize the language of insurance claim adjustments and to explore the relationship between assessment interviews and interrogation interviews. Shifting to business discourse, Judith Turnbull traces the evolution of a corporate website from its origins in the 1990s to its present-day global version. The diachronic perspective of the study provides interesting insights into how the evolving potential of technology has been exploited by the company to integrate text, colour, layout, images and animation to enhance and enrich the corporate message. The findings also highlight changing socio-cultural concerns and issues which have broadened the corporate discourse from straightforward promotion of a company and its products to the creation of a brand personality for the company which represents, and contributes to, a healthy and sustainable lifestyle for all its stakeholders. Paola Catenaccio looks for signs of discourse change in a 4-million-word corpus of CSR reports in English issued by companies worldwide between 2000 and 2009. In particular, the paper aims to outline the discursive role of mental process verbs, such as believe and think, as well as of other indicators of epistemic modality, with special attention to expressions indicating certainty/uncertainty and knowledge/opinion/belief, looking specifically at the way in which they may function as argumentative indicators pointing to persuasive strategies, typically enacted in the reports, to bring about a paradigm shift. Gillian Mansfield presents a contrastive qualitative analysis of two small corpora of comparable English and Italian advertisements of a cosmetic product published in the countries of origin (USA and the UK) and abroad (Italy), investigated from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. The study explores message content and inherent distinguishing linguistic features in the advertisements. Results from the analysis show the extent to which flexibility, as far as comprehensibility of meaning is concerned, is permissible in the creative manipulation of promotional language across cultures in the globalised world of cosmetic advertising.

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5. Genres in Institutional Contexts Giuliana Garzone identifies and evaluates variations in the use of modal verbs in UK statutes from a short-term diachronic perspective. She compares two different corpora of English Statutes. The former dates back to the 1970s, before the Renton Report, commissioned in 1973 by the Heath Government to achieve greater simplicity and clarity in statute law. The latter includes acts enforced in 2010 and 2011. Special attention is paid to the status and use of shall whose frequency has decreased dramatically. Francesca Santulli also focuses on modal formulas. More specifically, she investigates a corpus of 500 judgments (2000-2005) of the Italian highest courts for civil, criminal and administrative cases, looking at the repetitive patterns occurring in strategic positions, which are functional to marking the progression of argumentation and its transition to the expression of the decision. Her analysis, which acquires a contrastive perspective thanks to the scrutiny of a selection of judgements of the House of Lords (1985-2003), shows the regular occurrence of a deontic structure which exploits the ‘necessity as excuse’ pattern and is then transformed into a performative statement introduced by a conclusive connector. In their study, Julia Bamford and Giuditta Caliendo examine the communication policy of the European Union (EU) and the crucial role played by new information technologies in the discursive construction of the institutions’ supranational identity. By analysing a corpus of informative booklets contained in the EUROPA website, the study highlights the increased agentivization of the EU as well as a more dialogic mode displayed in the discursive strategies adopted in the wake of the 2005 referendum debacle in France and the Netherlands on the Treaty that established a constitution for Europe. Denise Milizia investigates two corpora totalling 16 million words. In her study, interviews, speeches and remarks, statements, and press conferences delivered by the new American administration are compared with those delivered by the old administration, with the aim to uncover the aboutness of the new government with respect to the old. She concentrates on the “buzz collocations” and “buzz idioms” created by politicians to drive home their messages. The study concludes that these “buzz collocations” and “buzz idioms” need to be reworded from time to time, thus proving the temporary nature of patterns of language use in the context of political speeches. Examining a corpus with all the press briefings from January 1993 to May 2011, Cinzia Spinzi and Marco Venuti analyze how the discourse preferences that construct the podiums and the press have changed over 18

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years in their way of projecting the referenced contexts and their subjectivity. The findings show a more prominent interactive presence of the podium as an individual in Clinton’s first term than in the following years, whereas in Bush’s briefings, the podium seems to perform only the “mediator” role. In Obama’s, a higher involvement of the speaker is observed due to the key cluster I think the president, which is used not merely to project an idea but also to mitigate his assertions. Political discourse, and in particular the TV electoral debates held for the first time in the UK on the occasion of the 2010 general elections, is studied by Chiara Degano who finds that modality plays a particularly relevant role in electoral campaigns, where the establishing of consensus rests mainly on the capacity of constructing a certain representation of reality (what is) and of possible alternatives (what should, may, or would be). In an attempt to investigate the degree achieved in the specialization of functions, she focuses on can, used mostly for acclaims, i.e. moves in which the candidate extols his/her virtues, in terms of personal qualities, past achievements and political program, and should, usually employed for attacks on the adversaries.

6. Genres in Academic Contexts Michele Sala examines the language used in legal research article (RA) titles from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Investigating a corpus of 100 legal RAs written in English and published between 1980 and 2010, he proposes an integrated model for analysing RA titles and assessing the effectiveness of the different possible constructions. The application of this model allows him to establish the most appropriate title typology for legal RAs, discuss its prototypicality in relation to the disciplinary epistemology on the basis of legal research, and account for the possible degree of variation in titling practices over time. Marianne Hundt discusses the diachronic change in the use of relative clauses in one particular national variety of English: New Zealand English. The focus is on the choice of relative markers in restrictive relative clauses. The data reveal that in the early colonial days, New Zealand scientific academic writing showed relativizer choices in restrictive relatives that were practically identical to those found in parallel BrE texts. In the 20th century, New Zealand English was initially ahead of AmE in deploying a greater use of restrictive that. At the end of the century, however, BrE caught up with New Zealand English and the two varieties have come to display the same kind of preference in academic writing. Ekaterina Lapshinova et al. provide a description of the new registers

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which emerge when a discipline comes into contact with computer science (“contact” discipline). The researchers discuss the extent to which the linguistic characteristics of the “pure” discipline propagate to the emerging or mixed discipline, and the way these interdisciplinary registers change over time, with particular reference to conjunctive relations. The results emerging from the English Scientific Text Corpus (SciTex), a diachronic corpus of scientific journal articles, show that “mixed” disciplines not only develop features that are different from the “contact” discipline and the respective “pure” discipline but also change their occurrence and use over the years. Laura Pinnavaia’s paper focuses on wordlists and definitions, namely the most ideologically-laden elements in any dictionary. The changes found across the five editions of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (from 1978 to 2009) and prevalently in LDOCE 3 onwards reflect a changed English world both existentially and – more interestingly – socially and culturally. The study shows that later editions of the LDOCE clearly represent a current and global view of the Englishspeaking world, where innovation, tolerance and political correctness reign, paradoxically aided by a tighter use of prescriptive labels regarding tone. The final contribution is by Josef Schmied. Examining a pilot corpus of over 50 MA theses with about 2.5 million words, he investigates variation in culture in terms of the dimensions of academic discipline, gender and ethnic/linguistic background. The results indicate that the variable discipline displays interesting patterns of variation, most of which can be explained by the standard hypotheses of meta-discourse proposed by previous academic writing research. Such an analysis also helps to raise students’ awareness of their linguistic choices between individuality and conformity in their discipline.

Bibliography Askehave, Inger and Anne Ellerup Nielsen. 2005. “Digital Genres: A Challenge to Traditional Genre Theory”. Information Technology & People 18 no. 2, 120-141 Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination . Austin: University of Texas Press. Bazerman, Charles. 1994. “Systems of genres and the enactment of social intentions”. In Genre and the New Rhetoric edited by A. Freedman & P. Medway, 79–101. London: Taylor and Francis,. —. 1997. “The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom”. In Genre and Writing: Issues, arguments, alternatives edited by Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom, 19-26. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton & Cook.

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Berkenkotter, Carol and Thomas Hukin. 1995. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition, Culture, Power. Hillsdale: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates. Bhatia, Vijay K., (2004): Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View. London: Continuum International. —. 1997. “Genre-Mixing in Academic Introductions.” English for Specific Purposes 16, no. 3:181í195. —. 1993. Analysisng Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. Coe, Richard M. 2000. “The New Rhetoric of Genre. Writing Political Briefs”. In Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives edited by Ann M. Johns, 195-205. London: Erlbaum. Devitt, Amy J. 1993. “Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept”. College Composition and Communication 44, 573–586. Fairclough, Norman 1992b. “Intertextuality in critical discourse analysis”. Linguistics and Education 4, 269–293. —. 1993. “Border crossings: discourse and social change in contemporary Societies”. In Change and Language edited by Hywell Coleman and Lynne Cameron, 3-17. Clevedon: British Association for Applied Linguistics. —. 1992a. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway (eds.) 1994. Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor and Francis. Friedman, T. L. 2005. The world is flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Halliday, Michael A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: the Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold Held, David, McGrew, Anthony. 2007. Globalization/Anti-Globalization: Beyond the Great Divide. Cambridge: Polity Press. Korzenny, Felipe 1978. “A Theory of Electronic Propinquity:Mediated Communication in Organizations”. Communication Research 5, 3-23. Kress, Gunter and Theo van Leeuwen .2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold. Louhiala-Salminen, Leena / Kankaanranta, Anne 2005. “Hello Monica, Kindly Change your Arrangements: Business Genres in a State of Flux”. In Genre Variation in Business Letters edited by Paul Gillaerts and Maurizio Gotti, 55-84. Bern: Peter Lang. Martin, James R. 1997. Analyzing Genre: Functional Parameters. In Genre and Institutions. Social Processes in the Workplace and School edited

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by Frances Christie and James R. Martin, 3-39. London and Washington Council: Cassell. Miller, Carolyn R. 1984. Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, 151–167. Nickerson, Catherine. 2000. Playing the corporate language game. An investigation of the genres and discourse strategies in English used by Dutch writers in multinational corporations. Utrecht studies in language and communication. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Orlikowski, Wanda and JoAnne Yates. 1994. Genre Repertoire: the Structuring of Communicative Practices in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly 39, 542-574. Paltridge, Brian. 1997. Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —.1998.: Other Floors Other Voices: A Textography of a Small University Building, London, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. —. 2003. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Trosborg, Anna (ed) 2000. Analysing Professional Genres. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vygotsky, Lev S. 1978. Mind and Society. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Yates, JoAnne and Wanda J. Orlikowski 2002. “Genre Systems: Structuring Interaction through Communicative Norms”. The Journal of Business Communication 39, 13–35. —. 1992. “Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structural Approach to Studying Communications and Media. Academy of Management Reviews. 17 no. 2, 229-326.

PART I: GENRES IN PROFESSIONAL CONTEXTS

CHAPTER ONE TRACING (AND TAGGING!) LANGUAGE FEATURES IN THE HISTORICAL ENGLISH COURTROOM (1649-1856) DAWN ARCHER

1. Introduction In the introduction to this edited collection, Poppi and Cheng explain how genres are simultaneously static and dynamic: that is, they perform – and, hence, come to represent – important discursive actions within particular socio-cultural, historical and/or institutional contexts, whilst also having the capacity to periodically evolve in a way that (re)shapes their communicative purposes. For example, one could argue that it was societal concerns which provoked - and subsequently drove - institutional attempts to codify and/or formalise English courtroom practice from the mid-1600s onwards. These concerns centred around the plight of defendants in the first instance – in, for example, seventeenth-century political show trials and eighteenth-century felony1 trials where England’s penal code “prescribed death by hanging” (May 2003, 3) following a guilty verdict – and only later reflected rising fears in respect to crime and/or developments in policing. Corpora offer a useful means of tracking both the static and dynamic characteristics of genre: hence this edited collection’s aim of bringing together the complimentary approaches of corpus analysis and genre analysis. In response to this aim, the present chapter describes how annotation schemes (Archer 2005) have been used to trace courtroom participants’ discursive practices in the seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. Particular attention is paid (i) to defendants’ creative exploitation of language in what – for them – constituted a very perilous speech activity, and, to a lesser extent, (ii) to defence lawyers’ emerging strategies as the accused speaks trial slowly “gave way to a radically

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different style of proceeding, the adversary criminal trial” (Langbein 2003, 253).

2. Growing Professionalization of English Courtroom Practices Langbein uses the term accused speaks to differentiate felony and treason trials of times past from their modern equivalent and also from historical trials relating to misdemeanour. For seventeenth-century defendants who faced misdemeanour charges were entitled to employ a lawyer to conduct the defence: trials for misdemeanours, in consequence, have always had the feel of a professional contest between opposing counsel (May 2003, 22). In stark contrast, defendants accused of a felony or a treasonable act were denied counsel at this time – in spite of the fact that their “very life was forfeit” (ibid., 15) were they to be found guilty. The reasoning? A belief that legal assistance might obscure a true determination of guilt or innocence. As one contemporary put it: [I]f counsel ... should plead [the defendant’s] plea for him, and defend him, it may be that they would be so covert in their speeches, and so shadow the matter with words, and so attenuate the proofs and evidence, that it would be hard, or long to have the truth appear (Pulton 1609, adapted from Langbein 2003: 35)

The injustice of a defendant facing charges of treason having to face a Crown represented by the Attorney General and the Solicitor General (i.e. the highest-ranking prosecution counsel in the land) became a political hot potato in the wake of some notorious perversions of justice by late Stuart judges,2 and it led to the introduction of the Treason Trials Act of 1696. This 1696 Act gave defendants facing treason charges a right to engage counsel and, in so doing, allowed such trials to quickly evolve into a professional contest between prosecution and defence lawyers from the eighteenth century onwards (as will become clear in this paper). The felony counsel restriction was not lifted until 1836 however, following the enactment of the Prisoners’ Counsel Act. The 1836 Act subsequently spurred lawyers into action in terms of documenting their “professional justifications for the changes it imposed” (May 2003, 5), with the result that felony trials began to take the full shape of today’s (Anglo-American) adversarial contests from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (see Section 5.2). Because of length constraints, I focus on a handful of treason trials representative of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Sections 3-

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4.2, as a means of demonstrating how such treason trials acted as a forerunner of – and as a catalyst for change within – the ordinary criminal trial. I then go on to provide a summary of how interaction within the latter changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Sections 5-5.3, as a means of identifying – discursively – the aforementioned move towards adversarialism in the historical English courtroom.

3. Seventeenth-Century Treason Trials Contrary to the belief that “it require[d] no manner of Skill” for a defendant “to make a plain and honest Defence” (Hawkins 1721, 400) in trials where they were denied legal counsel, seventeenth-century defendants often struggled to respond to the judge’s invitation to address the jury and/or to cross-examine witnesses. Typical factors against them included: (i) (ii)

not being able to prepare for the trial, their actual physical and emotional state, as most were brought to trial from their prison cell in a dishevelled and hungry state, (iii) their inability to talk effectively in this pubic setting, especially given they would not know the precise evidence that would be introduced against them until they heard that evidence in court, (iv) their lack of knowledge of the law and/or the workings of the courtroom, and (v) their inability to override the guilt bias so prevalent at this time, which effectively meant that the burden of proof lay with them (Adapted from Archer 2005: 87-89, and Archer 2010: 215)

Defendants facing treason charges, in particular, found that even when they proved themselves skilful in asking probing questions and/or in speaking effectively to the jury it did not usually lead to their freedom. Consider the Trial of Edward Coleman (1678). Coleman was falsely accused of being a catholic conspirator by Titus Oates (because of his association with the Duke of York, who – according to Oates – was involved in a popish plot). In his trial, Coleman bravely articulated his fear that, in spite of his innocence, “the violent prejudices that seem to be against every man in England, that is confess’d to be a Roman Catholick” at this point in history would mean that “Justice will hardly stand upright”. The judge initially reassured Coleman that he would have a fair, just and legal Trial, but then went on to state:

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[...] Therefore you shall find, we [= protestants] will not do to you [= catholics], as you do to us, blow up at adventure, kill people because they are not of your perswasion; our Religion teacheth us another Doctrine...you are brought here from the necessity of things, which your selves have made; and from your own actions you shall be condemned, or acquitted. (Trial of Edward Coleman, 1678)

Notice how the opposition between we and you effectively positioned Coleman with those Catholics who blew up at adventure, kill[ed] people, etc., and the judge with those whose Religion taught what, for him at least, was a more tolerant Doctrine. Notice, too, the guilt implicature within the claim that Coleman had been brought before the Court because of his own actions (i.e., a necessity...which he had made) and the ordering of condemned and acquitted when stating the possible consequences of those actions. Cumulatively, these features suggest that Coleman was right to fear that justice would be coloured by a ROMAN-CATHOLICEQUALLED-TRAITOR reality paradigm on the part of the judges (Archer 2002, 2011a).3

3.1 Archer’s (2005) Macro Speech Act Categories In Archer (2005, 120-134; 339-345), I document three annotation schemes I have devised to portray: (i)

Interactional information respecting whether a given utterance initiates a turn, responds to a turn or provides a follow-up to a previous response, etc., within a courtroom context; (ii) Macro speech acts that were used in the historical courtroom with some regularity (i.e., COUNSEL, REQUIRE, QUESTION, INFORM, SENTENCE and EXPRESS); (iii) Additional details about questions and answers (their types and functions). My focus, in this sub-section, is the second scheme: in particular, the COUNSEL and REQUIRE categories applied to courtroom trials taken from the Sociopragmatic Corpus (1640-176), henceforth SPC.4 The COUNSEL macro category consists of: x

CAUTIONS - where the S[peaker] strongly counsels the A[ddressee] against pursuing a certain course of action;

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x

THREATS and COERCIONS - where S compels A from or intimidates A into pursuing a certain course of action; and ADVICE and RECOMMENDATIONS - where S commends a certain course of action to A.

The REQUIRE macro category consists of x

x x

x

COMMANDS/ORDERS/INSTRUCTS/DIRECTS - where S wants and expects A to do something, in a way that presupposes S has sufficient authority, and that S and A are in an asymmetrical relationship; DEMANDS - where S wants something to happen, but because s/he expects that A will be reluctant to comply, makes the SA force overt; DESIRES/REQUESTS - where S wants Y to happen and wants to cause A to do Y. Please note: REQUESTs tend to be more dispassionate than DESIREs, the latter having a strength of feeling that often implies strong intention or aim; PLEADS/BESEECHES/IMPLORES/APPEALS - where S wants Y from A, but knows that s/he cannot cause A to do it, in turn implying an asymmetrical relationship. For example, PLEAD appeals to A’s sense of reason and justice, and IMPLORE to A’s emotions (with APPEAL somewhere between the two). In contrast, BESEECHING focuses on A’s action rather than any benefit following from that action (Adapted from Archer 2005, 339; see also Wierzbicka 1987, 39, 54, 70).

When the above tagging schemes were used in conjunction with a Sociopragmatic Scheme –which identifies S and A variables such as SEX, AGE, STATUS and ROLE (Archer and Culpeper 2003) – the results gleaned from the SPC suggest that six defendants facing treason charges (all of whom enjoyed a social status of gentleman or higher beyond the courtroom) sought more than any other defendants to creatively exploit discursive opportunities that might save their lives: by, for example, using directives and counsels instead of remaining solely in an answerer role (being responsible for most of the defendants’ 48 singular and 78 multiple directives identified in the SPC data). The a-typicality of directives generally in the SPC data,5 as well as their use by both powerless and powerful interlocutors in the SPC trials, makes them a particularly interesting phenomenon to explore in some detail.6

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3.2 Defendants’ Use of Directives and Counsels The fact that most of the defendants’ directives clustered together - and often in one turn (i.e. as an utterance containing multiple requests) suggests that (i) they were attempting to bolster the effectiveness of their requests and (ii) they became increasingly desperate as their trials progressed (Archer 2006a). Charles I, for example, requested six times that he be given an opportunity to speak in his 1649 trial for treason. And most of these indicated anxiety on his part, as here: (2) The King.

When I was here yesterday, I did desire to speak for the Liberties of the People of England; I was interrupted. I desire to know yet whether I may speak freely or not.

The King was one of only two defendants in the SPC trial data (both of whom faced treason charges prior to the introduction of the 1696 Treason Act) who made use of REQUIREs and also COUNSELs (in Charles’ case, in the same turn).7 In Charles’ COUNSEL/REQUIRE- see (4) - as with Dr Hewet’s COUNSEL below - see (3) - the force used suggests they were very much aware of the potential face threat of their utterances: (3) Dr. H.

My Lord, I suppose these learned Gent. who are so learned in the Laws will be cautious in what they do against Law, and I hope they will remember what condemnation and execution befell Trecilla .. that ...did misadvise the King to do such and such things, that is much like…this Case of mine: And withal I hope they will remember what befell the Judges in the Case of Shipmoney in the time of the late King, and therefore I hope they will be cautious themselves in doing any thing that is contrary to Law . (Trial of Slingsby, Hewet and Mordant, 1658)

In fact, Hewet’s utterance has the feel of a proposal/suggestion that the Court adopt a certain course of action: see, in particular, his repetitive use of I hope, which served to mitigate the more face-threatening I suppose; and his use of presupposition and implicature within his third person statements, they will remember what condemnation and execution befell … and …they will remember what befell the Judges. Hewet’s possible intention here? To suggest that he was not merely acting in his own interest, but also seeking to help the Court to avoid what had befallen others who had not properly followed the Law.

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The dual purpose of Hewet’s utterance means that it fits the criteria for my strategic ambiguity facework zone (Archer 2011b), i.e., the use of indirectness and multifunctionality in a planned but not a malicious way, such that one attributable intention did not clearly outweigh any others: beyond, that is, a macro implicature that Hewet was innocent.8 In spite of Hewet’s attempts to engage in a level of face maintenance, his behaviour – and, in particular, his continued refusal to plead – was nonetheless looked upon negatively9: principally, it must be said, because the expected - and hence normative - behaviour during the arraignment section of a trial was a guilty or not guilty response to the Clerk’s yes/no interrogative respecting guilt/innocence, and By God and the Country to the Clerk’s whinterrogative, How do you plead?. Most defendants justified their refusal to plead during the arraignment phase “on the basis of a certain legal expertise” or on “libertarian principles” (Cecconi 2012, 107). Charles – as King – emphasised his divine right to rule, and in ways that were atypically aggressive given his defendant status. For example, his self-focussed request, I desire to (in (2) above), became an overtly other-focussed I do require you later in his trial: (4) King.

I say this Sir, That if you will hear me, if you will give me but this delay, I doubt not but I shall give some satisfaction to you all here, and to my People after that, and therefore I do require you, as you will answer it at the dreadfull day of Judgment, that you will consider it once again (Trial of Charles I, 1649)

Notice that Charles – like Hewet – was commending a certain course of action: that he be allowed to address the Court (rather than plead). But the conditionals + will - if you will hear me, if you will give me but this delay - when coupled with the REQUIRE/COUNSEL - I do require you…that you will consider it/as you will answer it at the dreadfull day of Judgment – add a menacing aspect. Simply put, the King appeared to be implicitly cautioning the Lord President not to pursue a course of action which took away his (divine) kingly rights because it would ultimately lead to Bradshaw’s spiritual damnation. Bradshaw’s response to the king – Tis not for Prisoners to require – suggests that judges did not like defendants creatively exploiting language in ways which transgressed discursive boundaries (whether kings or paupers). In fact, such REQUIRES were almost always met with reprimands from the judges, when used by defendants, regardless of their status beyond the courtroom

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(Cecconi 2012): Charles was warned for appear[ing] as a Delinquent, for example.10

3.3 The Saliency of Dispreferred Seconds Some defendants – like political theorist Algernon Sidney11 – sought to verbally trap their judges: (5) Sidney.

L. President

My Lord, will you oblige me that am an ignorant Man and confess myself so, upon hearing my Indictment for things I know not of, a long Thing, presently to raise a point of Law? ‘Tis not we oblige you, Mr Sidney, ‘tis the Law obliges you. We are the Ministers of the Law…Therefore, we sit here only to administer the justice of the Nation. (Trial of Algernon Sidney, 1683)

As the second pair part of (5) makes clear, the Lord President not only recognised the trap, but also sought to counter it using an abrogation or role-switch (Bousfield 2008, 195); that is to say, he explicitly highlighted the Court’s “representative role” as a “mouthpiece” and “administrator” of “ the Law”, not its “author” (Cecconi 2012, 83-4). As Cecconi highlights, defendants’ use of dispreferred seconds - at the point when a guilty or not guilty answer was all that was required - were frequently framed in a negative light: as indicators of their disrespectfulness and/or guilt, for example. In such cases, offensive-offensive adjacency pairs tend to grow in frequency in historical trial data. Consider, for example, the following adjacency pair between Hewet and the Attorney General, taken from Hewet’s trial: (6) Dr H.

Att. Gen.

I hope you will have patience to heare me for vindication of my selfe, and satisfaction of my own conscience and all persons whatever; and withal, for the clearing of your selves that you do not bring blood upon your selves by taking that power that is not justifiable-Truly my Lord this is insufferable; Mr. Doctor hath had as much respect as ever any had. I have attended many, I never saw the like in my time; you have had the patience to heare him oppose your selves, your Authority, your persons, and to strike at the root of all. Mr. Doctor I would have you to carry your selfe with more respect. This shews

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In spite of Hewet’s attempts “to construe the Court’s wants as coinciding with his own” (Cecconi 2012, 85), the Attorney General chastised him for scornful behaviour which, in his mind, demonstrated his guilt. It seems, then, that defendants’ creative exploitation of language resources was not only a very risky strategy, in such activity types, but also one that failed for the most part (not least because of the misuse of treason trials for political gain during the seventeenth century).

3.4 The prevalence of a Guilty Paradigm In many ways, the Attorney General’s emotive outburst (above) is more typical of the way in which judges were portrayed by scribes in the seventeenth-century trial transcripts - i.e., as being patient (initially) but also willing to exercise force: first, in the form of (at times, severe) verbal chastisement and, ultimately, “in the form of physical torture or removal” (Cecconi 2012, 110) when deemed necessary. This said, some seventeenth-century judges – in particular, Scroggs and Jeffries – were overtly biased in favour of the (Stuart) Crown from the outset of a given trial. And even when these judges were not being explicitly faceaggravating, they would often make clear their guilt bias. Consider the following extract, taken from one of the trials which typify the Bloody Assizes: (7) LCJ. Have you any more to say for yourself? Lisle. My Lord, I came but five days before this into the CountryLCJ. Nay, I cannot tell when you came into the Country, nor I do not care; it seems you came time enough to harbour Rebels. Lisle. I staid in London till all the Rebellion was past and over; and I never uttered a good Word for the Rebels, nor ever harbour’d so much a good Wish from them in my Mind: I know the King is my Sovereign, and I know my Duty to him, and if I would have ventured my Life for any thing, it should have been to serve him, I know it is his due, and I owed all I had in the World to him: But tho’ I could not fight for him my self, my Son did; he was actually in Arms on the King’s side in this Business; I instructed him always in Loyalty, and sent him thither; it was I that bred him up to fight for the King LCJ. Well, have you done?

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Lisle. Yes, my Lord. LCJ. Have you a mind to say anything more? Lisle. No, my Lord. (Trial of Lady Alice Lisle, 1685)

As Kryk-Kastovsky (2010, 168) highlights, the presuppositions within Jeffries’ initial utterances reveal his assumption that Lisle’s guilt (at hiding two rebels) meant that she could not possibly have anything to say on her behalf. I would contend, in addition, that this guilty paradigm (Archer 2002, 2011a) explains Jeffries’ failure to be convinced by Lisle’s somewhat eloquent claims that she was absent from the country during the rebellion; that she did not support it because of her loyalty to the King; and that she had brought up her son to be equally loyal. Note, in particular, Jeffries’ dismissive Well, have you done? and Have you a mind to say anything more?, both of which signal his growing impatience with Lisle (most likely because she persisted in claiming her innocence).12

4. The Evolution of the English Treason Trial Two things – the aforementioned Treason Act of 1696 (which gave defendants the right of counsel) and the Act of Settlement of 1701 (which freed judges from their immediate ties to the monarch) – slowly fostered a more detached/less hostile attitude on the part of judges and prosecution counsel in treason trials (Beattie 1986, 246). This does not mean that verbal aggression was no longer evident in English treason trials. It was. But there is evidence of a change in respect to its delivery: by this I mean, lawyers, when interacting with non-friendly witnesses, seem to have preferred indirect, multifunctional face threatening acts (FTAs) that were strategically ambiguous over overtly malicious FTAs like those used by, for example, Jeffries when interacting with a witness in the 1685 Trial of Lady Alice Lisle (Jeffries tried to intimidate Dunne – the witness concerned – into telling the truth using a combination of name calling, insults and accusations, e.g., thou vile Wretch ...How durst you offer to tell such horrid Lyes.).13

4.1 The Treason Trial of Francis Francia (1716) The following extract taken from the 1716 treason trial of Francis Francia provides us with a good example of strategically ambiguous FTAs as well as an opportunity for me to allude to my annotation scheme for questions and answers (documented in detail in Archer 2005, 340-344).

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After being sworn, a witness for the defence (named Meggison) was asked a yes/no question and wh-question by the defendant’s lawyer: (8) Mr. Hungerford. Meggison.

Do you know of any Offers that were made to the Prisoner, and by whom? Upon the Twenty Eighth of September last I was in Mr. Francia’s Room, and Mr. Buckley came in and told him he should be tried suddenly, and there were a great many Witnesses against him; and he would swear against him, because, says he, you have cheated my master of Five Guineas, and won’t swear against Mr. Harvey. (Trial of Francis Francia, 1716)

Meggison’s use of an IMPLY: ELABORATION (Archer 2005, 341) to suggest Francia was offered money for implicating a Mr. Harvey contradicted evidence which had previously been given by Buckley,14 whilst simultaneously framing Buckley as a hoodlum (via his own reported words).15 It is very evident that Meggison was seeking to cooperate fully with the defence lawyer, during this brief interaction; which is to be expected, given she was appearing as a witness for the defence. Any reciprocal cooperation quickly disappeared once Meggison began to interact with the Attorney General, however: (9) Mr. Att. General. Meggison. Mr. Att. General. Meggison. Mr. Att. General. Meggison. Mr. Att. General. Meggison.

Was you in the Room then? I sat upon a little Box at the Bed’s Feet...it was so dark he could not see me. How came you to Newgate? I have been a great many times in Newgate? You dwell there sometimes, don’t you? No, I never did Are you a married Woman? Yes

How came-interrogatives are usually regarded as being non-conducive, but this particular how came-interrogative seems to have contained an incriminatory element as far as Meggison was concerned. She therefore answered with an EVADE (i.e. she did not provide a value for the missing variable explicitly – as requested – or answer in such a way that the missing variable could be inferred) when she said “I have been a great many times in Newgate”. Meggison’s apprehension was probably well placed, because the next question from the Attorney General used a tagged

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declarative structure - You dwell there sometimes, don’t you? – and implicated to those present in court that Meggison had been an inmate at Newgate prison. This might have been what Meggison also inferred by the Attorney General’s How came you to Newgate question. Given how the Attorney General’s questions had been evolving to this point, Meggison would have done well to also view the Attorney General’s next question – regarding whether Meggison was married – with suspicion. Because it turned out that the Attorney General was engaging in a level of character assassination: he was seeking to imply that this particular married woman was associated with men who were not her husband, and, worse, had been incarcerated because of their criminal behaviour. By focussing on how questions cumulatively serve to incriminate a witness over time, and how a witness will seek to refute a lawyer’s incriminations, we can gain a much better sense of the dynamism of the historical courtroom practices. The fact that questions and answers are tagged according to function (as well as type) has allowed me, in turn, to determine how frequent or infrequent such behaviour between lawyers and witnesses was – at least in the SPC data. For example, I have found that prosecution lawyers treated defendants in this way very regularly; and – as shown above – would treat witnesses for the defence in the same way, when the need arose (this was true of both treason trials and felony trials in the eighteenth century). It was very rare that prosecution witnesses and victim-prosecutors were treated in this way for much of the Early Modern English period, however (Archer 2005). But things were beginning to change. And many of these changes were seen, first, in the treason trials of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century.

4.2 The 1716 Trial of Francis Francia – a Very Modern Trial? As I argue in Archer (2010), Francia’s treason trial seems very modern when we investigate the defence counsel’s attempts to construct a countercrime narrative that corresponded to the facts as they wanted the jury to perceive them; that is, from Francia’s perspective. In fact, we see defence counsel pointing out “defects in the Indictment”, engaging in “lengthy legal arguments with the Attorney-General”, cross-examining “prosecution witnesses throughout the trial, questioning the credibility of witnesses and, on occasion, arguing with the judges” (cf. Hostettler 2006, 36). Yet, this same trial also exhibits some important differences in respect to courtroom practice today. For example:

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1.

2.

3.

The defence counsel’s role was such at this time that their interaction with the jury – and, on occasion, witnesses – had to go through the judges (as opposed to being addressed to the jury/witnesses directly). Examination-in-chief and cross-examination procedures were not as strictly defined, such that the Attorney General was able to interrupt one of the defence lawyers as they questioned a friendly witness in respect to the nationality of their defendant, in an attempt to “inoculate” (Lloyd-Bostock 1988, 46) the jury against a developing counter-argument that Francia’s alien status rendered it impossible for him to be a traitor. The defendant was still involved in the (cross-)examining of witnesses at various points in the trial proceedings.

The following exchange between Francis and Townshend was prompted by Townshend’s claim that he did not know Francia had been reluctant to sign his examination: (10) Prisoner. Ld. Townshend. Prisoner. Ld. Townshend.

Was not there any Reluctancy in me to sign it? What do you mean? Have not I answer’d that already? Did not you offer me some Money to sign it? I hope you can’t say such a thing of so much infamy

Although Francia used highly conducive question-types, he lacked the necessary institutional power to achieve his goal. Hence, Lord Townshend was able to imply, via his responses, (i) that he was being asked to (unnecessarily) repeat information he had already provided, and (ii) that Francia’s accusation in respect to his attempted bribe was too scandalous to be taken seriously. Townshend went on to inform the Judges and the Jury that Francia had begg’d so hard that Townshend felt compelled to give him Charity. In response to Townshend’s 177-word FTA, Francia asserted his desire to know who Townshend ever gave five Guineas to beside himself. The rhetorical question served as a counter-FTA because it framed Townshend as someone who was not generous, but, rather, had ulterior motives for giving Francia the money. The implicature of Francia’s utterance was addressed not by Townshend but by a Judge at this point: My Lord says it was out of Charity [...] he says, he never could refuse his Charity to People that begg’d as you did. Francia’s defence

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counsel attempted to come to his aid at this point. But they were careful to address the Judges rather than Townshend directly (in line with point 1., above). Their concern was that, during his 177-word FTA, Townshend had also given evidence of the Substance of a Letter without offering the Letter itself, contrary to the Rules of Evidence. But a judge once again came to Lord Townshend’s aid (for a more detailed discussion, see Archer 2005, 257-259).16

5. Treason Trials as Precursors to the Evolution of Felony Trials In attending to both “the prosecutorial imbalance” and “the subservience of the bench” of the mid-to-late seventeenth century (Langbein 2003, 98), the Treason Trials Act of 1696 can be seen as an official/political means of addressing acknowledged injustices. As Stephen (1863) reveals, some near-contemporaries believed that eighteenth-century assizes and quarter sessions exhibited similar failings. There was also “plenty of Oateses and Bedloes”, according to Stephen (i.e. the perjured witnesses in the Popish Plot trials) whose actions ensured that “scores or hundreds of obscure people” were found guilty of “common burglaries and robberies of which they were...innocent” (1863, 26). This said, there were some important differences between treason trials and felony trials: including the fact that felony prosecutions of the seventeenth century and (much of the) eighteenth century constituted amateur contests between victim-prosecutors (i.e., those people claiming to have experienced a crime) and defendants (those accused of the crime). Hence, we see records where defendants questioned both their accuser and also witnesses against them (Archer 2005).17 Those same trial records also reveal that judges18 were more actively involved in questioning in felony trials than they are today: they would question victim-prosecutors, the accused, and any witnesses, for example.19 As the altercation – or accused speaks – trial gave way to the adversary criminal trial, the (inter)activity of judges and defendants slowly decreased and the (inter)activity of the lawyers increased (Archer 2010). The increased (inter)activity of defence counsel, in particular, was initially occasioned by judges ignoring the strict letter of the law – apparently in response to the more regular appearance of prosecution counsel.20 Nonetheless, the involvement of defence counsel remained rare up to the mid-eighteenth-century in courts like the Old Bailey: and, when defence lawyers were involved, their (inter)activity could differ from one trial to the next; a defendant might be directed to put his or her own questions by

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one trial judge, for example, but be allowed counsel to examine and crossexamine witnesses on his/her behalf by another. In addition, some defence lawyers were told to propose all their questions to the Court as opposed to asking them directly (State Trials, Vol. 17, 1022). Defence counsels were further hampered by the presumption of guilt – until, that is, their evolving courtroom practices (when probing “the weaknesses of the prosecution case” on their defendants’ behalf: Hostettler 2006, 40) led to a paradigm shift (whereby doubt as to guilt or innocence became resolved in favour of the defendant).

5.1 William Garrow This new adversarialism is most evident in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, thanks to lawyers such as William Garrow. For, although the judges initially allowed defence counsel into the felony trial for the limited purpose of assisting the accused in examining and crossexamining witnesses, lawyers like Garrow quickly “developed techniques for evading to some extent the judge[s]’s efforts to confine [them] to the work of cross-examining” (Langbein 2003, 255).21 As he made explicit in the 1800 Trial of John Taylor, for example, Garrow believed that defence counsel’s right to cross-examine opened up an opportunity to address the court on all matters: indeed, he asserted that “what the law of England” would “not permit [him] to do directly”, he would “do indirectly, where” he could – including “indirectly...convey[ing] observations to the fact” and preventing “prosecution witnesses from answering key questions by introducing points of law” (Hostettler 2006 45-46). Not surprisingly, there is plentiful evidence of Garrow using sequences of cross-examining questions to “comment on the evidence, refute or discredit the prosecution case and aggressively battle for the accused” (Hostettler 2006, 41). When Garrow deemed it necessary, he would also engage in character assassination (Archer 2012) and/or refute the capability of a witness to provide intelligible evidence against his client(s). Occasionally, this was even at the expense of offending the judge – as demonstrated by his behaviour in the 1786 trial of William Bartlett.22 Garrow objected to John Rasten, a deaf & dumb man, as a witness for the prosecution, stating there was no way of communicating with him meaningfully. Judge Heath did not agree, adding every body knows that there are certain signs. But Garrow persisted - at which point the judge admonished Garrow:

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Mr Garrow Court Mr. Garrow Court Mr. Garrow Court Mr. Garrow

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You will examine your Witness with some degree of decency your Conduct & behaviour are very improper what you do here is by permission of the Court in a Criminal Case. My Lord I Object to the Witness being examined & I take the liberty to state my objection to the Court. You must examine you[r] Witness. I have a right to my Objection. If you do not examine your Witness you shall sit down My Lord I shall not sit down. Then I shall Commit you So your Lordship may (Trial of William Bartlett 1786; OBP ref - t1786111-30)

In spite of these judicial threats, Garrow went on to describe Rasten as having no more rationality than an Automaton and being no more competent than a learned Pig that was being exhibited to the publick (sic) at that time (OBP supplementary material). We cannot underestimate the significance that lawyers such as Garrow have had upon the evolution of English courtroom practice; in part, because of their willingness to push the boundaries of normative discursive practices.

5.2 The Pursuit of Professional Advocacy By the end of the eighteenth century, defence lawyers had found a means of appearing for the purposes of not only arguing questions of law, but also examining and cross-examining witnesses - thereby ushering “into criminal procedure the divisions between examination-in-chief and crossexamination and between evidence and argument” (Cairns 1998,3). Whilst this helped to grow the law of evidence and to change the nature of judicial involvement in trials (Hostettler 2006, 73), professional advocacy as we know it today was not secured properly until the 1836 Prisoners’ Counsel Act allowed defence counsels to make opening speeches (Cairns 1998).23 According to Stephen, the 1856 trial of William Palmer (for murder) denotes the coming of age of the adversarial criminal trial. Yet, even here, there is evidence that normative discursive boundaries were still being challenged: indeed, the defence counsel, Serjeant Shee, declared in his opening speech “that there never was a truer word pronounced than the words which he [Palmer] pronounced when he said “not guilty” to the charge”. As I argue in Archer (2010, 227), Shee’s comment was controversial as it “press[ed]...his opinion” rather than “his argument upon

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the jury” (Lord Chief Justice’s summing up) and, in so doing, challenged “the division of responsibility between the judge, witnesses and counsel” (Cairns 1998, 144; Watson 1952, 297-8).24 It would seem then, that – like their recent forebears – nineteenth-century lawyers were still “seeking to establish the limits of forensic argument by challenging those limits” (Archer 2010, 227); and in ways that have served to shape today’s (English) criminal system.

5.3 An Afterword A trend evident in Garrow’s time that has continued until today is a belief that it was in a defendant’s best interest to not interrupt/intervene in defence counsels’ arguments. Indeed, Garrow was known to silence his own defendants if they sought to ask questions when he was crossexamining witnesses (Hostettler 2006, 40-1). This trend stands in stark contrast to the earlier belief that a defendant’s “unsworn” and unrehearsed “response to the charges laid was a fundamental determinant of the outcome of a trial” (May 2003, 20; see Section 2). Most historians agree that the professionalization of adversarial practices is responsible for silencing courtroom participants other than the lawyers. Some – like Langbein (2003, 102-3), for example – have also argued that this has proven to be a detrimental move in practice, not least because it has led to the “wealth effect” and the “combat effect”: simply put, the adversarial procedure (as it has evolved) has proven to benefit the most wealthy of defendants and the most skilful of advocates – thereby subverting the emphasis on finding “truth” via the contention of counsel (Prisoner’s Counsel Bill). Unfortunately, how much discursive dynamism remains in today’s adversarial system to allow for further evolutionary re-shapings is beyond the topic of this particular chapter.

Corpora/Primary Sources A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. 2006. Compiled under the supervision of M. Kytö (Uppsala University) and J. Culpeper (Lancaster University). Howell, T.J. 1809–26. Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. Vols. 11–21, A Complete Collection of State Trials . . . with Notes and Other Illustrations Compiled by Thomas B. Howell. Vols. 22–33, A Complete Collection of State Trials . . . from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783 with Notes

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and Other Illustrations: Compiled by Thomas B. Howell . . . and Continued from the Year 1783 to the Present Time. 33 vols. London: R. Bagshaw, Longman and Co. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0).

Bibliography Archer, Dawn. 2002. “‘Can Innocent People Be Guilty?’. A Sociopragmatic Analysis of Examination Transcripts from the Salem Witchcraft Trials”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3(1): 1-30. —. 2005. Historical Sociopragmatics: Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640-1760). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. —. 2006a. “(Re)initiating Strategies: Judges and Defendants in Early Modern English Courtrooms”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7(2): 181-211. —. 2006b. “Tracing the Development of “Advocacy” in two Nineteenth Century English Trials”. In Diachronic Perspectives on DomainSpecific English, edited by Marina Dossena and Irma Taavitsainen, 4168. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2010. “A Diachronic Investigation of English Courtroom Practice”. In A Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, edited by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson, 185-198. London: Routledge. —. 2011a. “Libeling Oscar Wilde: The Case of Regina vs. John Sholto Douglas”. Journal of Politeness Research 7(1): 73-99. —. 2011b. “Cross-Examining Lawyers, Facework and the Adversarial Courtroom”. Journal of Pragmatics 43(13): 3216-3230. —. 2012. “Assessing Garrow’s Aggressive Questioning Style”. In English Historical Dialogue Studies edited by Gabriella Mazzon, 301-320. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Archer, Dawn and Jonathan Culpeper. 2003. “Sociopragmatic Annotation: New Directions and Possibilities in Historical Corpus Linguistics”. In Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: Studies in Honour of Geoffrey Leech, edited by Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Tony McEnery, 37-58. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Beattie, John M. 1986. Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bousfield, Derek. 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Cairns, David J.A. 1998. Advocacy and the Making of the Adversarial Criminal Trial 1800-1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cecconi, Elisabetta. 2012. The Language of Defendants in the 17thCentury English Courtroom: A Sociopragmatic Analysis of the Prisoners’ Interactional Role and Representation. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Culpeper, Jonathan and Dawn Archer. 2008. “Requests and Directness in Early Modern English Trial Proceedings and Play-Texts, 1640-1760”. In Speech Acts in the History of English edited by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, 45-84. Amsterdam/Philadelphia,: John Benjamins. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New York: Pantheon Books. Hawkins, William. 1721. “A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown: Or a System of the Principal Matters Relating to the Subject, Digested under their Proper Heads”. Vol II. London: J Walthoe, Jn. Hostettler, John. 2006. Fighting for Justice: The History and Origins of Adversary Trial. Winchester: Waterside Press. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara. 2010. “Power in Early Modern English Courtroom Discourse”. In Discourses in Interaction edited by SannaKaisa Tanskanen, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Marjut Johansson and Mia Raitaniemi, 153-172. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Leech, Geoffrey. 1980. Explorations in Semantics and Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lloyd-Bostock, Sally. 1988. Law in Practice. London: Routledge. Langbein, John H. 2003. The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press. May, Allyson N. 2003. The Bar & the Old Bailey, 1750-1850. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Pulton, Ferdinando. 1609. De Pace Regis et Regni 193.London: Companie of Stationers.. Stephen, James Fitzjames. 1863. A General View of the Criminal Law of England. London: Howard Clay & Sons Limited. Watson, Eric R. 1952. Trial of William Palmer. Revised Edition. London/Edinburgh: William Hodge. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1987. English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary. Sydney: Academic Press.

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Notes 1

A characteristic of political show trials is that the guilt of the defendant is assumed a priori. Two seventeenth-century political show trials mentioned in this paper are the 1649 trial of Charles I, and the 1678 trial of Edward Coleman. Felony charges include murder, arson, rape, and a wide range of serious property offenses. 2 They include the Popish Plot (1678/9), Rye House Plot (1683) and Monmouth’s Rebellion (1685). 3 As I state in Archer (2005, 270), we have no way of measuring what impression such comments made upon the jury. What we do know is that Coleman was found guilty, and executed at Tyburn on 3rd December 1678, and that Oates, his main accuser, was later found guilty of perjury, and imprisoned. 4 The SPC draws its 245,000 words of speech-related data from the 1640-1760 Trial and Play sections of the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED). Created by Kytö and Culpeper (2006), the CED covers the period 1560-1760 and consists of Plays, Prose, Witness Depositions, Trial Proceedings and Handbooks. 5 Culpeper and I found that 6.5% of the 5,186 utterances in the drama texts, and 11% of the 4,250 utterances in the trial texts, functioned as directives (Culpeper and Archer 2008). 6 For example, we can determine the linguistic complexity of historical courtroom interaction – including (cross-)examination sequences – beyond question-andanswer sequences. 7 Out of the 4,250 utterances making up the SPC trial data, only 38 had the force of a counsel. Most of these were uttered by judges and prosecution counsel (i.e., 18 and 17 respectively). 8 Compare Goffman’s (1967, 14) definition of: (a) incidental face threats, where face damage is anticipated but not planned for, and (b) intentional face threats, where the point is to knowingly inflict malicious face damage. 9 Hewet was ultimately forced to withdraw by the Court, found guilty of high treason against the Lord Protector and Commonwealth in his absence, and put to death. 10 Undeterred, Charles went on to demand that he be heard. The king’s “sledgehammer” approach (Leech 1980) occasioned another rebuke from Bradshaw. Undaunted, Charles continued to press for his right to speak – up to the point of being forcefully removed from the courtroom. Charles was ultimately found guilty, and executed at Whitehall, London, January 30th 1649. 11 Sidney was a fervent opponent of Charles II who was tried as part of the Rye House Plot. He was ultimately found guilty at his trial, and beheaded (7th December 1683). 12 Lisle was ultimately found guilty and beheaded (2nd September 1685). 13 But this was after Dunne refused to answer eleven of the questions put to him. 14 Buckley was a witness for the prosecution, who worked for Lord Townshend (i.e., the Secretary of State) at the time of the alleged crime. 15 Meggison’s response is categorised as an ELABORATION as well as an IMPLY as it provided Hungerford (the defence lawyer) with additional supporting

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information about Buckley apparently threatening Francia with “many witnesses” (which Hungerford had not explicitly requested). 16 In spite of struggling to give his version of events at various points in his trial, Francia was ultimately found not guilty. 17 Defendants also had the right to present their own material witnesses to the fact and/or witnesses to their good character and reputation – but May (2003, 21) suggests “the overwhelming majority of defense witnesses testified solely to character”. 18 As May (2003, 21) highlights, judges did not “act as the accused’s advocate”: rather, they ensured “that the prisoner (as the accused was usually referred to in this period) was not subjected to illegal procedure, and that he or she was given the benefit of any technical loopholes – such as those afforded by an error in the indictment – legally available”. 19 Also in contrast to today, jurors were free to interrupt with questions of their own (Archer 2005). 20 There was no rule forbidding private prosecutors to engage counsel at this time. 21 Garrow is best known for his work as a defence lawyer, having acted as defence counsel in three-quarters of the 961 cases he undertook at the Old Bailey (see the Old Bailey Proceedings Online). 22 Garrow made it clear in the 1800 Trial of John Taylor that “where the law of England does bear me out, I am not afraid of giving offence to any judge”. 23 Defence counsels have been allowed to give closing speeches since the 1865 Criminal Procedure Act. 24 See Archer (2006b) for a keywords-comparison of the opening speeches of Shee and Cockburn (the Attorney General) during the Palmer trial.

CHAPTER TWO THE LANGUAGE OF INSURANCE CLAIMS ADJUSTMENTS: INTERVIEWS OR INTERROGATIONS? GLEN MICHAEL ALESSI

1. Introduction In the United States insurance claims adjusters are hired by insurance companies as independent agents to investigate car and personal injury accidents. Adjusters first interview victims in order to establish an accurate account of events, later producing a written document from the recordings, which reports the victim’s testimony and evaluates testimony reliability. The information is used by insurance companies to ascertain damage liability, responsibility and financial compensation. Adjusters are expected to provide impartial expertise in accurately reporting the dynamics of the accident, including context and chronology. In gathering this information, adjusters normally interview the policy-holder/victim at the scene of the accident. When this is not possible, the adjuster conducts a telephone interview, recorded with the victim’s consent. The assessment interview and resulting report present several areas of interest for linguistic analysis. During the interview, what would appear as consensual information gathered by the adjuster from the policy holder (as client and victim) for the insurance company (as service provider and compensator) in a business context may reflect features of discourse common also to legal or paralegal procedures as in interrogation or deposition. This paper provides a brief overview of lexico-grammatical features found in the assessment interview between the adjuster and the victim/policyholder. At times the adjuster’s language will be seen to perform in a quasi-legal, paralegal manner, relying on questions and conversation management also associated with cross-examination or interrogation.

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This study is the first in a three-stage investigation into adjuster communicative practices which appropriate paralegal communicative practices. This study limits itself to the interview only, while the other two are beyond the scope of this paper. The second stage will address the adjuster’s write-up of the interview in report form, examining whether the degree of witness testimony reliability may be reflected in the adjuster’s choice of reporting verbs in the report and whether the report may act as a paralegal façade, doubling as the insurance company’s own deposition summary. A third stage addresses another important paralegal operation of the adjuster when acting as a settlement authority representative for the insurance company during mediation or arbitration practices.

2. Research Questions Research questions addressed in this study include whether discursive practices of insurance adjusters reflect intertexuality or interdiscursivity as defined in Bhatia (2010), and whether these practices are tendentially ‘paralegal’, mixing interrogation with interview . The term ‘paralegal’, open to interpretation and with localized meanings, is used here in its broadest sense, to refer to non-lawyers engaged in legal work. In the case of the adjuster, it is reflected in simulating discursive practices used by law enforcement agents or lawyers, namely by those who establish and assign guilt with respect to a law. In this case the adjuster would not be applying law, but instead, using communicative conduits similar to interrogation or deposition, which help in establishing responsibility or lack of in small claims accidents. Applying a Bhatian viewpoint informed by critical genre analysis, intertexuality may be created by adjusters when replicating communicative practices, such as question types, that are widely used by the police or lawyers during interrogation and deposition procedures. Interdiscursivity here would imply that the interview and report exist as hybrid constructs in terms of genre in that assessment interviews and reporting have exploited and appropriated linguistic resources associated with other legal genres to create a paralegal hybrid. In other words, to what extent is the adjuster interrogating or crossexamining rather than interviewing? Mediators, lawyers, adjusters and victims themselves may not necessarily be aware of this shift in roles as realised in the communicative practices. In terms of discourse, the adjuster, when faced with establishing compensation, assumes at times a distant or asymetrical stance towards the client – one which is more readily associated with suspicion, accusation and establishing rights and duties, as found in the language of law enforcement, rather than

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interpersonal stances which strive at serving customers or fulfilling private sector contractual agreements/obligations.

3. Materials and Methods This overview shares working definitions of workplace and professional discourse practices as illustrated in Drew and Heritage (1992) , Koester (2010), Gunnarsson (2009), Johnson (in Cotteril et al. 2004) and on the language of interrogation with Shuy (1998), Heydon (2005) and Johnson (in Cotterill 2002). It relies on methodological approaches informed by conversational analysis, in Sidnell et al. (2009), Hutchby & Wooffitt (2008),Ten Have (1999) and Pomerantz (1984, 1987) and critical genre analysis in Bhatia (2010) , corpus-assisted discourse studies in Partington (in Stefanowitch, Anatol Gries, 2006), and ethnographic applications via interviews and correspondence with adjusters. Software tools employed include Wordsmith Tools, (Scott 1996) and Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff 2003). The analysis is based on a spoken corpus of 17 taped and transcribed adjuster-victim recorded telephone interviews, lasting on an average of 25 minutes each and comprising a total of 98,936 tokens. Transcription followed conventions found in Jefferson (2004). All information in the transcriptions regarding identity of persons, places or events, was anonymised by the adjuster before allowing access for analysis. The Interviews were produced by two insurance adjustment agents, and in some cases may have been mediated by secretarial help in the final production. The adjusters considered these interviews to be highly representative of those in circulation elsewhere, and they were deemed particularly objective, reliable, accurate and representative of good practice by the insurance companies who commissioned them. The analysis relied on close reading of transcriptions for identifiable tactics in interviewing including, question types, turns, discourse markers, backchannels and adjacency pairs. This overview is intended only to manually identify regularly occurring lexico-grammatical elements and discourse features in the interviews which may be operating in a more paralegal than business communication function: features which appear more imposing, regulatory and impersonal than accommodating, persuasive or interpersonal.

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4. The Assessment Interview 4.1 Opening and Closing Disclaimers Each telephone interview begins with a formulaic opening legal disclaimer requiring accident victims to confirm their identity and agree to be recorded. The interview date and the victim’s full name are stated as part of documenting evidence. The type of accident is mentioned (automobile accident) as a characterisation of a mutually understood experience. A two-part question soliciting a single answer follows. The victim, when answering ‘yes’ to the first part of the question is coerced into giving permission to the interview when affirming second part. Agreement to be recorded is assumed to be affirmative by the adjuster, and compliance to be interviewed is being indirectly required rather than openly requested. It should be noted that accident victims being interviewed can be served with a subpoena if they refuse to be recorded. Example 1 Adjuster: This the 31st October of the year XXXX. I’m going to be speaking today with u:h Jay Reeve er Reds about an automobile accident and Mr. Reds are you aware I’m recording this and do I have your permission? Victim: Yes sir

Each interview ends with a formulaic closing disclaimer as illustrated in (ex. 2) containing vague language, including everything, true, best, and recall. These allow the adjuster complete flexibility in interpreting these terms, creating further asymmetry. Example 2 Adjuster: yeah all right Jay sounds good to me u:h let me confirm that everything you told me has been true and the best you can recall ? Victim : You bet Adjuster: And you’re aware I’m recording this and I had your permission Victim : Yes sir Adjuster: And your name is Jay Reds Victim : Correct

The first interrogative is posed as a self-referential affirmation (“ let me confirm” ) in a binomial question, which, like in the opening disclaimer, begs one affirmation from two separate questions . Another binomial question is posed by using a sequence of three separate verb

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tenses: a present, a present progressive and a past simple (you’re aware I’m recording this and I had your permission) with “recording” as explicitly echoed from the opening disclaimer. The relational “had” in the past simple accuses that permission had already been unconditionally permitted from the beginning. Again, two questions are requiring a singular affirmative answer. Official identification, stating name and surname, is repeated in the closing disclaimer. This formulaic redundancy and explicitness elicits information as a public declaration (on tape) and acts similarly to witnesses taking an oath in court when stating “I hereby swear…”, rendering whatever is said legally binding. 4.1.1 Question Types Nine identifiable categories of questions used by adjusters surfaced from close reading of the interviews., Several commonly used question types used by the adjuster were observed in this context as possibly conditioning content and quantity of the interview responses. The gatekeeper quality of the adjuster’s questions should not be considered intentional manipulation, but must be seen as gauging information to present a case which best serves the interests of the insurance company. When used to guide and select information, the questions appear semi-scripted, routine, and seeking answers which fit a pre-established template or agenda. 4.1.2 Yes/No Questions The adjusters focused on short polar questions intending to elicit minimum response (yes/no) answers, and encouraging responses without explanation, interpretation or tentativeness. Most questions were “Do” and “Did” + you, he, she, they or name, with relatively fewer open questions) with Wh-word and an initial auxiliary, requiring explanation, interpretation or extended turns by the interviewee. Binary and polar questions were common, at times posed as two questions in one, such as those found in the disclaimers. Example 3 Did you go sit down and get your regular shoes on? Example 4 Did you take any steps forward or did you let go of the ball right there?

4.1.3 Speculation Questions At times polar questions were expressed vaguely to elicit a fuller explanation.

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Chapter Two Example 5 Do you have any idea what caused Ray to fall down?

4.1.4 Topic-Fronted Questions Some questions were prefaced with specific contexts, then followed by one or more polar questions. Initial contextualisation allowed the adjuster to control focus, before narrowing the answer with shorter and more grammatically simple yes/no or polar questions. Example 6 Ok, and what about witnesses to the incident that would have seen the actual fall, did you talk to anyone afterwards that said (****) are you aware of anyone that had seen… Example 7 And the lighting conditions, were lights on or was this a dimmed light?

4.1.5 Catch- you- out Questions Here the adjuster’s questions could be interpreted as testing the interviewee’s ability to accurately remember , and, as if in a crossexamination, he is looking for contradictions. Binary choice was a common feature of these questions. Example 8 “was that a clear substance or was it a coloured substance?” Example 9 “was this at night or in the morning or during the afternoon?”

4.1.6 Questions the Adjuster Already Has Answers for Adjusters may occasionally ask redundant questions, already knowing the answer, which attempt to elicit contradiction or confirmation of the facts. Example 10 Adjuster: Ok, and Mr. Parker, let’s describe him, we got a male (0.2) is he white, black, Asian, Hispanic? (0.2)Victim: WhiteAdjuster: I know, but how old do you estimate him to be?

4.1.7 Adjuster Answers Own Question Adjusters may use a ‘finish my sentence’ or ‘answer my own question’ formulation, especially when gathering predictable information, as when filling in a questionnaire . As with “So” initial questions, the adjuster here is making assumptions or is attempting to set a faster pace to interview.

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Here, the adjuster actually speaks on behalf of the interviewee, compounding the asymmetry and controlling of turns. Example 11 Adjuster: And your family, which will be yourself? (0.2) Example 12 Adjuster: And your name is Julie, middle initial I, last name Chavez?

4.1.8 Politeness Hedged Questions The politeness-hedged expression“at all” when surfacing in the interviews, was made frequently to encourage more exhaustive or explicit comments from the interviewee. Example 13 Adjuster: do you remember at all ? Example 14 Adjuster: Had you guys been doing that at all prior to that ?

4.1.9 “Ok ,“OK and”, “and” Initial Questions “OK”, “OK and “or just “And ” initial questions appeared regularly in all the interviews. They established a demanding pace and positioned the adjuster as being in command of turn-taking. The word repetition and word-initial parallelism leads interviewees to anticipate an uninterrupted question-answer chain (Heydon 2005: 98) . The repeated use of these forms renders them formulaic and impersonal; however; they might cooccur with full first name vocative tag perhaps to recognize listener individuality (Biber et al. 1999: 1110) or to re-tag the recording with participants’ names for clarity, coherence or for interview cataloguing purposes. Though appearing innocently routine, a series of these questions can seem repetitive, insistent and to be exacting on the interviewee. Example 15 and your home address Ann? Example 16 and the home phone number ? Example 17 and your date of birth? Example 18 Ok, and your occupation? Example 19 and was automatic score keeping there or was it manual score keeping ?

4.1.10 “So” Questions or Declarative Questions Prefaced questions “so” were widely used for summarizing answers, checking adjuster understanding and making deductions and assumptions about what was said. Declarative questions such as these are used in police

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interrogations to elicit answers which conform, cooperate or satisfy the questioner’s bias or to confirm preferred response (Blimes 1988). While bias or preference can neither be proven nor be excluded in the adjuster interviews, the frequent use of “so”prefaced questions along with “and” prefaced questions, add to controlling the narrative sequence by changing or introducing topics (Johnson in Cotterill et al. 2002: 96 ). The interviewee in the role of victim, but not necessarily considered a “ suspect complies with the questioner’s expectation by giving minimal responses, and asking questions only when there has been potential misunderstanding. The adjuster used “so” prefaced questions in these cases to “evaluate and label” earlier responses by the interviewee ( Francis 1994), while at the same time encouraging the victim to make convincing statements ( Johnson in Cotterill 2002: 96 ) . By dominating the narrative sequence and building expectation, it is the adjuster in this case who can be thought of as telling or retelling the story instead of the victim (Johnson in Cotterill et al 2002: 91). Example 20 Adjuster: Do you know how long Mr. Cannon has lived here? Victim: Maybe 8 or 9 years. Adjuster: So, he’s been here a long time. (ASSUMPTION, RETELLING ) Example 21 Victim: I didn’t get information from Bruce, but I called the board right away, and one of the board of the directors said she was behind Bruce when the incident happened. Adjuster: So, she saw it happened. (ASSUMPTION, RETELLING ) Example 22 Adjuster: And was there any damage to the white Suburban? Victim: No. Adjuster: Okay, so no damage, and no contact (ADDING INFORMATION) Example 23 Adjuster: Okay, and so they knock at your door and tell you that your son dislodged a rock in some landscaped area? (ASSUMPTION, ADDED INFORMATION, RETELLING ) Victim: No, not landscaped. There was a hole in the ground. Example 24 Adjuster: I’m just trying to get a grasp because you’re describing this as excruciating pain. Victim: Yeah.

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TIM: But you wait a week. So ahh…a common person is going to think why you wait a week. (RE- INTERPRETATION, ADDING INFORMATION, RETELLING )

4.2 Discourse Markers The telephone interviews frequently used discourse markers and conversational approaches which could have contributed to controlling narrative sequence and to signaling asymmetry. Sentence-initial “OK” ,” all right”, or repetition as part of the victim’s previous response, are the most widely used back-channel markers or fillers which lead into the next question. Many back-channeled responses are fronted with previously unknown or unsolicited information. This is then followed by specific open-questions, seeking clarification or information from the victim as policyholder . Example 25 Victim: Oh, I had a knee replacement Adjuster: Knee replaced? Ok when did you have the knee replaced?

Repetition often took the form of response repeating and paraphrasing in order to either summarize and elicit more specific details, or to check the facts. Here, the adjuster acts as a gatekeeper, controlling the interview and being less pressured than the interviewee. Example 26 Adjuster: Ok (.) And what kind of damage was there to the u:h (0.2)silver sedan Victim:U:h (0.2) the (0.2)that one had a lot of rear damage Adjuster: A lot of rear damage? Victim: Yeah Adjuster: So it had heavy rear damage? Victim: Yeah

When during the course of the interview, witnesses revealed information which was potentially contentious, the adjuster often became increasingly insistent, as if cross-examining, Example 27 Adjuster: Be more specific (0.2) Any problems with the with the surface (.) leading up to the limit line (.) u:hm with your footing

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Chapter Two Example 28 Adjuster: Ok (0.2 )let’s (0.2) be more precise even than that (.) you got to the limit line, right?

4.3 Conversation Management Questions regarding the physical conditions at the scene of an accident largely reflect chronological order, or how the events unfolded in real time. Most of the interviews limited themselves to the description of these physical facts or corroborating evidence. Questions appeared highly influenced by, if not semi-scripted, from selected categories found in the “Factual Details” section of Magarick’s Casualty Investigation Checklists (Magarick 1985: 51), a well-known and widely used standard reference which provides categories of inquiry for small claims adjustments. When soliciting factual accounts of time, place, atmospheric conditions, the adjuster appears to be not only recording what the interviewee said, but also is testing the reliability of the witness’s memory as in ex.28 where multiple choice questions are employed, as if being quizzed. How accurate the answers are perceived will be later evaluated in the adjuster’s report /deposition. Example 29 Adjuster: ok, we must stop here (.) When he slipped where was he in relation to the fault line, is he on it, behind it or over it?

Interviewees frequently used expressions to hedge certainty, especially if the issue was contentious. These hedges were most apparent in the use of “probably” or in modals such as “could have” or “might have” expressing hypothesis. These hedges alert the adjuster to the possibility of false testimony. Further doubt is suggested by the use of a combination of hedges. Example 30 Interviewee: I’d say probably his (0.2) I’m thinking that probably

When, instead, the questioning appears uncontentious, victims use minimal responses or expressions of certainty e.g. “you bet”,“sure” or “that happened”, limiting their feedback to the most essential, and surrendering their turns to the adjusters; much like the same turn-taking dynamic found in telephone helpline dialogues or even in doctor-patient dialogues, where asymmetry is well-defined by expertise.

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5. Results and Conclusions Initial results based on manual analysis reveal repetitive and highly predictable wording, formulaic question types and question sequencing in order to best establish and confirm shared knowledge and accurately recall events. Interviews began with closed questions requiring standardized minimal responses. Further on, adjusters employed Wh-questions requesting more detailed yet often more tenuous facts and interpretation by interviewee. “So” prefaced declarative questions were widely used and acted as implied accusations or a presumably shared assumptions , as found in cross-examination (Heydon 2005). “So” prefaced questions were generally used to restate and summarize information given by the interviewee in the previous turn. Open questions encouraged unsolicited information, providing clues which would contribute to witness testimony evaluation. The adjuster manages and controls the entire conversation, eliciting information through attentive and strategic use of backchanneling, name repetition, and tags. Initial conclusions position the communicative processes as moving from gathering and reconstructing of factual information via assessment interviewing techniques to a final summary report, evaluative in part, which is mediated by the adjuster. During the interview the adjuster may use question typologies and conversation management that shift the interview from neutral information gathering to evaluating veracity of witness testimony. Adjusters encourage spontaneous and unsolicited information through open-questions only after confronting factual minimal response answers from closed questions. These unsolicited and unmonitored answers may prove critical in conditioning reliability of testimony and assigning fault. Some questioning techniques may unknowingly elicit contradictions, corrections or silences as response on the part of the victim, much like during interrogations, where those questioned are held to remembering with accuracy, even if self-accusatory. While the communicative purpose of information gathering may appear straightforward to both parties as to reassemble factual information, the interview can be compared to common paralegal discourse practices of interrogation and deposition interview, in that the interviewee’s testimony is under constant evaluation for its veracity. The policy holder–victiminterviewee, rather than facing charges, is under constant scrutiny by the adjuster, whose role is to limit compensation. Rather than determine punishable guilt, the adjuster determines compensable merit. These adjuster-victim telephone interviews establish communicative practices, which are in the Bhatian sense, an appropriated paralegal hybrid,. These

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practices postition themselves somewhere between interviewing , typical of routine customer-service discourse , and investigative discourse, which more closely resembles interrogation. Note: I am indebted to Prof. Alan Partington – Università di Bologna, Facoltà di Scienza Politica, for valuable insights, input and support with regard to this paper. Note: A PowerPoint presentation of this research was presented at the 2nd International Conference of Law Language and Professional Practice, May 2012, under the auspices of the Seconda Università di Napoli, Caserta, Italy.

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Hutchby, Ian, and Robin Wooffitt. 2008. Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity. Johnson, Alison. 2004. "So...?:Pragmatic Implications of So-Prefaced Questions in Formal Police Interviews." In Language in the Legal Process, edited by Janet Cotterill, 91-110. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction”. In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the first Generation, edited by Gene H. Lerner, 13-31. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jordan, Michael C. 1986. "Unauthorized Practice of Law by Insurance Claims Adjusters." The Journal of the Legal Profession 10: 171-88. Koester, Almut. 2006. Investigating Workplace Discourse. London: Routledge. —. 2010. Workplace Discourse. London: Continuum. Kritzer, Herbert M. 2006. "Commodification of Insurance Defense Practice." Vanderbuilt Law Review 59.6: 2053-2093. Magarick, Pat. 1985. Casualty Investigation Checklists. New York, NY: C. Boardman. Pomerantz, Anita M. 1984. "Giving a Source or Basis: The Practice in Conversation of Telling 'How I Know'". Journal of Pragmatics 8: 60725. —. 1987. "Descriptions in Legal Settings." In Talk and Social Organization, edited by Graham Button and John R.E. Lee, 226-243, Vol. 1 Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters. Richards, Keith, and Paul Seedhouse. 2005. Applying Conversation Analysis. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Ross, Hugh Laurence. 1970. Settled out of Court: The Social Process of Insurance Claims Adjustments. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Shuy, Roger W. 1998. The Language of Confession, Interrogation and Deception. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Sidnell, Jack. 2009. Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stefanowitsch, Anatol, and Stefan Thomas Gries. 2006. "Metaphors, Motifs and Similes across Discourse Types: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies ( CADS ) at Work." In Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, edited by Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Thomas Gries, 267-304. Berlin: M. De Gruyter. Warren, Martin. 2009. “The Phraseology of Intertextuality in English for Professional Communication”. Language Value 1/1: 1-16.

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—. 2011. "Realisations of Intertextuality, Interdiscursivity and Hybridisation in the Discourses of Professionals. In Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise. Genres and Trends, edited by Giuliana Garzone and Maurizio Gotti, 91-110. Bern: Peter Lang.

CHAPTER THREE TRACKING THE EVOLUTION OF GENRES: THE CASE OF CORPORATE WEBSITES JUDITH TURNBULL

1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to trace the evolution of a corporate website from its origins in the 1990s to its 2011 global version, thus adding a diachronic perspective to the many studies on this specific genre which have focused on various aspects of a corporate website within the context of corporate communication (Garzone 2009; Koller 2007; Turnbull 2011; Salvi 2013). As Miller (1984) emphasized, genres are rooted in social practices. They express relations that reflect current social beliefs about the positioning and action of human individuals in space and time. Therefore, by following a diachronic approach we can observe a genre ‘in the making’ (Bazerman 1988; Yates and Orlikowski 1992) and see how a company has developed its website in response to changing social values and contexts, new business challenges and strategies and technological advances. In the 1990s the world and social practices were very different from today and the study has to be made against the backdrop of a changing world and, in particular, the use of computers as well as the attitudes and values of people. The impact of computers on everyday life, both at work and in the home, has been immense. According to the International Telecommunication Union (the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies), there were 276 million personal computers in use in the world in 1996 and by June 2008 this number had hit one billion. In addition, in 2002 13.4% of households throughout the world had Internet access, but by 2011 this figure had reached 34.1%, with 68.4% of individuals per 100 inhabitants using the Internet in Europe and 53.4% in the Americas. Computer literacy has

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become a necessity, not just in the workplace, but also for managing everyday life, whether buying goods, booking planes, trains or theatre tickets, banking, dealing with bureaucracy, e-learning or searching for information of any kind. These 15 years have also seen fundamental changes in the environment in which a company has to operate and consequently the way it presents itself to the world. Greater social awareness has led to ethical consumerism, whereby the consumer may choose which goods to purchase according to the ethical or unethical behaviour of businesses. Investors are also tending to look beyond just productivity, profitability and share prices, and give due consideration to the ethical profile of a business and the risks involved should corporate reputation be damaged (Pruzan 2001: 52). Consequently, firms now take their stakeholders’ demands for greater transparency and Corporate Social Responsibility very seriously and realize that long term profits can increase as a result of adopting an appropriate policy (Tregidga, Milne and Kearins 2008; Balmer, Fukuwawa and Gray 2007). Over this period corporate communication has undergone necessarily rapid and radical changes in order to respond to the new conditions. Until the 1980s corporate communication consisted in two parts: public relations, which dealt primarily with communications with the press, and marketing concerned with the actual selling of the company’s products (Cornelissen 2011). They have gradually become integrated so that Corporate communication is a management function that offers a framework for the effective coordination of all internal and external communication with the overall purpose of establishing and maintaining favourable reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the organization is dependent. (Cornelissen 2011: 5)

In the midst of fierce competition and a myriad of commercial messages that bombard people every day, an organization needs to stand out from the rest and position itself clearly in the minds of its stakeholder groups with a strong corporate identity, corporate image and corporate branding (van Riel 1995; Löwensberg 2006; Balmer, Fukuwawa and Gray 2007). Companies are now invested with a ‘brand personality’ founded on a set of values and traits with which stakeholders can identify (Koller 2007: 114). Inevitably technology and the Internet have reshaped business communication, both internally and externally. In 1998 websites were not even mentioned by Gray and Balmer (1998) as a fundamental element of corporate communication alongside nomenclature, graphic design, logo,

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mission statements and so on. Nowadays “A company’s website is the window through which much of the world will see it. Increasingly, when a group’s name is mentioned – perhaps as a potential investment, maybe because of a crisis or criticism – people will turn to its site to find out more.” (Bowen Craggs & CO 2011). Although the globalizing nature of the Internet and the World Wide Web has made the dissemination of information much easier, faster and pervasive, it also has a downside, as it makes it more difficult for the company to control and police information about the organization. As a result, a corporate website serves as a stable official source of information about the company. Since the early days of this new medium, which has in the meantime become one of, if not the most important channel of communication, companies have had to define and redefine the communicative purpose(s) of their websites and in doing so have established what we now know as the typical conventions of the genre. It is, perhaps, more correct to talk about a website as a “hypergenre” (Bondi 2009: 115), as each section is a genre in itself. Some are specific to the web (Homepage, FAQs), but they use informative, narrative or descriptive modes to achieve different communicative purposes within the site. It has in fact been a journey of self-discovery for companies. The study has been carried out on just one company’s website in order to trace its development as closely as possible. The website belongs to Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch corporation that produces some of the world’s leading consumer products in food and beverages, personal and home hygiene.

2. Corpus: Construction and Composition One of the obvious difficulties involved in the diachronic study of websites is the ephemeral nature of web-based material; companies regularly and frequently update or reinvent their websites and at the same time remove the older versions. Nowadays the presence of web archives means that many of these can now be accessed and the Way back machine archive (available at http://archive.org/web/web.php) was used to collect the data for this paper. There are notable gaps in the archive, which condition the selection of texts to be included in the corpus and rarely is the whole website archived on a single date. But if a link is missing on the selected date, the search engine will automatically redirect to the nearest available. Although some pages are totally missing, it has been possible to reconstruct most of the website for each chosen date.

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Four versions of the Unilever website were selected at 4 to 5 year intervals, starting from the first ‘hit’, that is the earliest version to be found in the archives dating back to December 19, 1996, and later versions from 2001-2, 2007 and lastly the 2011 global version of the website.1 Although the dates were chosen a priori, they “conveniently” represent four distinct “styles” of the website showing the development of the concept of a corporate website. Even allowing for some missing pages and links, especially in the earlier versions, Table 1 shows how the size of the website has mushroomed over the fourteen years. However, these are not absolute figures. The sections with financial information, details about brands as well as pdf documents, which have become increasingly numerous in the more recent versions, were not included in the corpus, as these sections have an excessive use of numbers and names which would skew the quantitative analysis. The table also indicates the sections of each version included in the corpus. 1997

2001-2002

2007

2011

General Information

Our Company Environment Society

Our Company Our values

About us Sustainability Innovation

5,839 words

15,298 words

80,179 words

113,015 words

Table 1. Size of subcorpora

3. Theoretical Background: Genre Theory and Web Genres The concept of genre helps to gain a better understanding not only of the linguistic characteristics of texts, but also of their macrostructure, which appears to be organised according to genre expectations and conventions rooted in the socio-cultural context (Gotti, Berkenkotter and Bhatia 2012: 10). Although corporate websites are part of the professional activity of a company and its corporate communication, the worldwide reach of the Internet as a medium creating a potentially vast and varied audience imposes the need for a broad approach to the analysis in order to capture both the professional and social practices reflected in the genre.

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Genre studies have followed different orientations. Genres may be understood as a class of communicative events which help members of a discourse community achieve shared communicative purposes, the focus being on professional, academic and institutional contexts (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993). The communicative purpose of the genre shapes the text and provides it with a specific form and internal structure. However, the concept of ‘communicative purpose’ has in time become complex and hard to define, as a text may have multiple communicative purposes, some ‘official’ and some ‘hidden’ or underlying (Askehave 1999; Askehave and Swales 2001). Furthermore, the idea of a discourse community, with specific and common interests, is problematical for the audience of a corporate website, which will nowadays include many types of stakeholders perhaps even with conflicting interests or people just casually surfing the net. Therefore, this study will adopt Miller’s view of genre as social action, whereby “a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centred not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (1984: 151). (This, however, may take us back to the thorny question of communicative purpose). Within the North American rhetorical tradition, genre is a “large-scale typification of rhetorical action which acquires meaning from situation and from the social context in which the situation arose” (1984: 163). It is a response to an external ‘exigence’ and can therefore help to give some insights into the changes in society and their corresponding changes in the website. In a later paper, Miller refers to the term ‘rhetorical community’, which seems to provide an appropriate definition for the type of audience visiting a website. A rhetorical community is “a virtual entity, a discursive projection, a rhetorical construct. It is the community as invoked, represented, presupposed, or developed in rhetorical discourse. […] It ‘exists’ on a discourse hierarchy, not in space-time” (Miller 1994: 73-74). Furthermore, “contemporary rhetorical communities are not a single unified whole but a mix of numerous limited or local communities and of individuals who typically participate in not one but several of these communities” (Zappen, Gurak and Doheny-Farina 1997:401). However, the social rhetorical approach is not sufficient to deal with the complexity of a website. Very early on, after the advent of the Internet, scholars realised that traditional genre theory could not account fully for the new cybergenres, as they were called. It was suggested that functionality had to be taken into consideration, alongside the traditional classification of content and form (Shepherd and Watters 1998). These functionalities, the capabilities afforded by the new medium, were identified at that time as browsing, email, search, discussion, interaction,

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online enquiry and ordering (Shepherd and Watters 1999). Some of these functions have been taken up by corporate websites, such as browsing, contact through email or, in the case of the more purely commercial websites which sell their products directly online, ordering. Askehave and Nielsen later proposed that the medium has to be taken into account because it “adds unique properties to the web genre in terms of production, function and reception which cannot be ignored in the genre characterization” (2005: 125). In the specific case of a corporate website multi-medianess and hypertextuality (the non-linear transmission of text created by its non-hierarchical organization and the numerous links provided on web pages) are of particular relevance. The multi-medianess of the web, with the capability to combine words, images, sound and animation, gives the text “a rich polysemous potential where the web user is ‘invited’ to participate actively in assigning meaning in the process of text consumption” (Askehave and Nielsen 2005: 125). The multi-modal resources can reinforce each other, fulfil complementary roles or be hierarchically ordered (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001: 20). Similarly, Lemke refers to the interaction between word, image and sound-based meaning as ‘hypermodal’, which is not just a juxtapositioning of semiotic modes in a text, but a multiplying of their explicit and potential interconnections (2002: 300). Hypertextuality also impacts forcefully on the production and organization of text, by dividing information into independent pages, but also facilitating connections and intertextuality through links between pages and sections of the websites, in order to develop or extend a topic at the wish of the reader. Hypertext, however, does not only affect the production of the text, but also its reception. Askehave and Nielsen (2005) suggest that it activates two modal shifts in reading: the reading mode and the navigating or linking mode. Devitt (2009) seems to provide a solution to this multi-faceted approach to the analysis of a website in the very title of her paper “Refusing of form in genre studies” and proposes to explore genre by a fusion of substance, form and action. She defines form as “all material embodiments of genre, linguistic and textual elements that might vary from one genre to another. Most obviously, then, form includes words, sentences, organisational structure, format, layout and other visual elements” (2009: 33). By reclaiming the importance of form and making it into an all-inclusive, comprehensive umbrella term for the many aspects of a web text, it will be possible to analyse the increasing complexity of the conceptualization of a website.

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4. Analysis The analysis has been made in two parts, a division which follows the form-content demarcation of the characterization of genres. The first concentrates on the form, the visual, organizational and multi-medial aspects of the different versions of the website, as the potential of technological advances began to be exploited. The second part focuses on the content, the topics dealt with and the linguistic features of the website and relies on quantitative as well as qualitative analyses. For each version the most important semantic domains were identified with the use of the WMatrix programme and a list of the most frequently occurring content words was drawn up with the ConcApp concordancer in order to assess changes in the type of corporate discourse adopted by Unilever. Together they indicate how the conceptualization of a corporate website and its communicative purposes have developed and matured over the years.

4.1 Visual Aspects 4.1.1 The 1996 Version The earliest version of the website immediately reveals its rudimentary design. The opening page is dominated by very intense and striking colours (blue and red), which dwarf the text. The logo of the company appears in the top left-hand corner establishing the identity of the company, which is, in turn, reinforced by the pictures of two of the company’s products against a strongly contrastive red background. The visitor is welcomed in both English and Dutch and the whole website is duplicated in the two languages, reflecting the origins of the company. The opening page is simply an index of the contents of the website: General Information, Financial Information, Addresses (the equivalent of the Contact us section today) and an Index (a site map). If we follow the General information link, the next page provides another list of contents for this section (Introducing Unilever, Unilever’s organisation, Unilever Brands, Environment Report), which, after clicking on Introducing Unilever, leads to yet another page with an index for Introducing Unilever, in a process rather like Russian nested dolls. The information in each section consists of one page of text. The logo stands at the top left of the page next to the title and below there are once again photographs of products or people holding the products with the brand names in full view. The only links to other parts of the website are at the bottom of the page, Next page, Previous page, Contents page,

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indicating how the website is organized along the lines of a book, as if you were turning the pages in a strictly linear sequence. Indeed, the website seems to have been conceived simply as the electronic version of the company’s brochure and the close connection between the two is also made evident by the link “Click here to order printed copies of Introducing Unilever”. 4.1.2 The 2001 Version Five years later the initial page opens with a small window in the middle of the page addressing the visitor directly and inviting him to enter the site to find out more, as if he were physically opening the door to enter the building of the company’s HQ. There is no longer an index on the next page, but something which is beginning to take on the semblance of a homepage. The menu bar is strangely positioned in the bottom right hand corner, the opposite to the starting point of a reading path, but it provides direct links to the sections on Our company, Brands, Environment and society, Finance, Careers news and Search. The information provided on the website is therefore beginning to be organized in a way we would expect today without the sequential Next page, previous page. It is interesting to note the Careers news which suggests a broadening of the communicative purposes of the website. The layout of the individual pages in the sections is also becoming more familiar. The Unilever logo stands in the top left hand corner of the page with a column below listing the links taking the reader to other pages, but only within the same section of the website. Nevertheless, the reader is beginning to acquire some control over the order of reading and his ‘traversal’ through the website. Just below the logo and the title of the page there are two or three colourful images of people, coming from different parts of the world, thus representing the global nature of the company’s business. At the bottom of the page on the right there is a link to return directly to the Homepage. The website appears to have begun to exploit some of the flexibility offered by hypertext. 4.1.3 The 2007 Version Moving on yet another five years there is a completely different layout and a Homepage which bears most of the characteristics which distinguish the genre today. The predominant colour is blue against a white background and at the very top of the page a new logo is positioned next to a picture of a child and mother. The information and links are organised

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hierarchically; there is a central block indicating the main three sections of the website: Our brands, Our values and Our company, which will be of interest to a more general public, such as consumers, but also to more specialized audiences. Each topic is distinguished by its own colour, which is carried through on the pages relevant to the section. Two special topics are highlighted below, with a number of direct links to pages in one of the sections, which aim to attract the attention of consumers in particular. Other links to sections which may be considered to carry more specialized information can be found below: News and Media, Investor centre and Careers. At the very bottom of the page there appears for the first time another genre typical of websites, FAQs alongside a Download library, Contact us and site. What is most striking, however, about this version is the much more vivid colour scheme which is adopted and reflects a new approach to the communicative purpose(s) of the website. The visual presentation is deliberately communicating something about the character or ‘personality’ of the company and no longer acts as just the framework for the text. It is communicating the company’s identity, how the company sees itself and more importantly, how it wants to be seen. The new logo is composed of many icons, representing the variety and complexity of the company’s activities and values which are embodied in its products and operations. The page is full, but compact. The colours are light, very bright and strongly contrastive (blue for the homepage, orange for the brand section, green for values and pink for the company), suggesting a dynamic, busy company. There are also a number of other new interesting features in this version, which once again reflect a changing approach to the website and more extensive exploitation of the capabilities of a website. Firstly, a long list of countries suggests different versions of the website are available, showing an apparent growing sensibility to the cultural, social and economic differences that exist in the countries where the company operates. Secondly, there is a fast-track to connect certain types of visitors, investors, journalists, CSR analysts, food professionals, suppliers, directly to the specialised information they are seeking, thus responding more directly and immediately to the specific needs of a diversified audience. And lastly, a slogan is positioned opposite the logo at the top: “feel good, look good and get more out of life”. This would suggest a ‘commercialisation’ of the website, which is no longer viewed as basically informative, but also as promotional in a hard-selling manner with its marketing messages.

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4.1.4 The 2011 Version The homepage of the 2011 version has once again undergone another change of layout and approach. Its prime communicative function would appear to be as an image builder. The homepage adopts a more subtle and sophisticated choice of colours which creates a serious and professional look and is dominated in the centre of the page by a large picture representing one of the social programmes promoted and financed by Unilever. Indeed, the hierarchy of information and links has undergone a significant redistribution of items. The navigation bar providing links to the general information about the company and its activities (About us, Our Brands, Sustainability and Innovation) is now in a less prominent position and links to the more specialised sections (Investor Centre, the Media Centre and Careers) are also placed at the very top of the page next to the logo. They have drop down menus with ‘leads’ which act “as appetizers or previews of what is to come” (Askehave and Nielsen 2005: 134): (1) Find out about our history, mission and corporate structure, and the way we do business. Find out about our long-standing commitment to sustainability and responsible business practice and read case studies from around the world. Learn how Unilever’s innovations build leading brands and develop our capacity to meet consumer needs for nutrition, hygiene and personal care.

Further ‘appetizers’ are given below in Company news, Latest for Investors (Share Price), Careers at Unilever and a word cloud, exploiting a fairly recent technological device for visual impact, for Our brands. Other smaller links are listed below, but all for more specific, technical and financial topics. Other affordances offered by the medium and taken up by the website include animated cartoons to explain business concepts such as the value chain or interactive games as, for example, to find out how young your heart is. Although there is quite a lot of text on the homepage, it is mostly very schematic in menus, with the exception of two slogans: “Inspiring billions of people to take small everyday actions that add up to a big difference” and “We meet every day needs”. Other pages bearing information on the various topics now have a triptych layout with links to other pages of the same section on the left and on the right related links to other parts of the website, pdf documents or external links.

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4.2 Textual Analysis The four corpora were first run through Wmatrix2, a software developed at Lancaster University to identify the most significant semantic domains in each subcorpus. 1996 Green issues Business: selling

2002 Science and technology Green issues

Business: generally Cleaning and personal care Other proper names Objects generally

Other proper names Business: generally Business: selling

Substances and materials Cause/effect Science and technology Belonging to a group

Money and pay

Education

Degree Helping Cleaning and personal care

2007

2011

Business: generally Cleaning and personal care Food

Business: selling Farming and horticulture Food

Business: selling

Helping

Other proper names Belonging to a group Farming and horticulture Green issues Health and disease Helping

Substances and materials Cleaning and personal care Health and disease Green issues Other proper names Business: generally

Table 2. Key semantic domains Some of these domains are totally predictable, such as Cleaning and personal care, Business: generally, Business: selling and Proper names, given the nature of the website and the company. But it is interesting to see how the prominence of some themes has changed in time. The Green issues domain is present in all four versions, but gradually becomes less ‘key’, perhaps rather surprisingly, falling from first position to second, then eighth and again eighth in 2011. Food appears in 2007 for the first time in third place and remains there in 2011 showing the prominence it has acquired. Similarly Farming and Horticulture also enters the list in 2007, but in seventh position and moves to second place in 2011. Helping also makes noticeable progress from ninth and tenth positions in 2002 and 2007 to fourth position in 2011. Health and disease also acquires some prominence.

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We saw with the 2007 version how the website was taking on specific characteristics- a new logo, more colourful and complex layout, which were helping to create a corporate brand and convey Unilever’s ‘brand personality’ of vitality and activity. With the help of Wmatrix, which provides a word list for each domain, we can see how these core values have been incorporated into the discourse of the company. Two examples will suffice. In the case of Green Issues the domain revolves around the lemma environment. These are examples of its use in two of the versions: (2) Unilever cares for the communities in which it operates: for example, it believes that a fundamental part of being successful is having a sound environmental policy. This is increasingly expressed in the way Unilever designs and makes its products. (1996). We recognize the need to align economic growth, environmental protection and social progress for a sustainable future. (2007)

In 1996 environmental is directly connected to business and success. Later in 2007, and the same idea is reiterated in 2011, the three objectives of the company, economic growth, environmental protection and social progress, are combined together within the overriding objective of a sustainable future. We can therefore see that green issues have lost some of their ‘keyness’, because they are being integrated into the broader concept of sustainability. Another interesting domain is Food. An important ‘new entry’ in the word list in 2007 was malnutrition and in 2011 we can also find school meals, a square meal, convenience foods, calorific value and, particularly significant, eating disorders. All these suggest a much deeper conception of Food, not just promoting the company’s products, but also informing, even educating, people about the relationship between food, health and wellbeing, conveying the sense of responsibility the company feels towards consumers and society as a whole. It is interesting to note how the contrasting, but equally important, food problems of both the richer and poorer parts of the world are taken into consideration, reflecting the global interests of the company. This broader vision of the company’s responsibilities is illustrated very clearly by the use of the word promote. In 2011 the domain helping lists among its top 20 words promote and promoting, terms which could suggest primarily business and selling objectives. However, as the following examples show, promote has acquired a very broad range of collocations: promote – respect for human rights / education in poverty-

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stricken rural areas / a positive attitude to disability / water quality education / the health of employees / hygiene, nutrition, empowerment and environmental awareness. If we compare the most frequently occurring content words in the 4 corpora, the same picture emerges. The following lists were created with the ConcApp concordance and word profiler. 1996 products business environmental product market category local markets new companies years environment performance use industrial world customer groups company development

2002 0.94 0.92 0.73 0.48 0.43 0.37 0.37 0.37 0.37 0.36 0.36 0.30 0.30 0.30 0.29 0.27 0.25 0.25 0.24 0.24

new business research environmental brands consumers care companies centre home personal children products work company people science performance year project

2007 0.36 0.35 0.35 0.30 0.29 0.27 0.27 0.24 0.24 0.24 0.23 0.22 0.21 0.21 0.20 0.20 0.19 0.18 0.18 0.18

business products health people use water environmental world new work working sustainable local hygiene food consumers development corporate brands global

2011 0.47 0.39 0.34 0.33 0.30 0.29 0.28 0.27 0.25 0.23 0.21 0.21 0.19 0.19 0.18 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.16 0.16

people business health products sustainable water use new suppliers programme work consumers oil world working help global local development tea

0.34 0.34 0.33 0.33 0.32 0.24 0.23 0.22 0.21 0.19 0.19 0.18 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.16 0.16 0.15 0.15

Table 3. Most frequently occurring content words In 1996 the focus is on business words: products, business, market, companies, groups, and once again in 2002 it is still very much business oriented. In 2007, although business and products still lead the list, we find health followed by people, use, water, hygiene, reflecting a broader, less business and more social picture of the company’s activities. In 2011 people actually heads the list, followed by business, health, products, sustainable, thus confirming the idea that the company is incorporating its values into its discourse. The word people is interesting because it is all-inclusive – covering all stakeholders, consumers, employees, customers, suppliers, and anybody who may benefit from the numerous social projects undertaken by Unilever. By the use of the generic, all-inclusive noun Unilever wants to draw all into its vision of collaborating together in the ‘value chain’, where each participant can

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contribute in some way. Frequent collocates of people are our, young, help(ing), all over the world, around the world. Abbreviated verbal forms (you’d, you’ll, you’re, you’ve) started to appear in the 2007 version, suggesting a less formal and more personal approach; this also coincides with the change in layout and colours, which has been suggested as an opening to other stakeholders such as consumers. The table below shows the changes also in the use of you, which gradually became more frequent over the first decade, but has since fallen drastically as the use of people has become more extensive. 1996 2002 2007 2011

YOU 0.0344% 0.1763% 0.2257% 0.1020%

PEOPLE 0.1376% 0.1959% 0.3392% 0.3415%

Table 4. Use of you and people Another distinctive feature which has emerged over the years is the use of slogans in homepages and repetitions in the text. When the reader moves from one page to another or from one section to another, s/he often gets a déjà vu feeling. The concordance lines below are just a small selection of the examples of the phrase help people from the 2007 version: (3) 1 on. Together they developed the Heart Age tool to help people assess their heart health. As part of our Sustaina 2 ichele and her team developed an internet tool to help people calculate the age of their heart in comparison wit 3 ion to improve their health and well-being. We help people feel good, look good and get more out of life with 4 e: We work to create a better future every day We help people feel good, look good and get more out of life with 5 eryday. Health, hygiene & beauty Unilever aims to help people feel good, look good and get more out of life. At 6 logy. And throughout we've created products that help people get more out of life – cutting the time spent on h

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7 have set targets across our product portfolio to help people improve their hygiene habits and increase the prov 8 and business innovations that will effectively help people live healthier for longer. What progress has alrea 9 ition, hygiene and personal care with brands that help people look good, feel good and get more out of life' was 10 create a better future every day with brands that help people look good, feel good and get more out of life. Uni 11 or sensational food and moods! Knorr Our products help people make every meal a little more special. Lipton Maki 12 well-being programme called Lamplighter; and we help people manage their weight through our SlimFast range in 13 ogies that – when translated into products – will help people remain healthy in their mid and later years. Why i 14 iarrhoea spread quickly. Our home care products help people to live healthy and hygienic lives. Today, through

Key phrases may be repeated in a number of pages to make sure the message reaches as many visitors as possible, as there is no default order of reading a website after the Homepage. Unless a catchphrase is repeated on different pages, some visitors may not come across it. But it also indicates the new approach and change in the communicative purposes of the website; instead of primarily targeting investors with information about the company, it was becoming more promotional and aiming at a wider audience, including ethical consumers and ethical investors, also in response to the growing and changing use of computers by ordinary people.

5. Discussion The diachronic perspective of the study has produced interesting insights into how the predictable evolution of technology has been exploited by the company to integrate text, colour, layout, images and animation to enhance and enrich the corporate message. The findings also highlight changing socio-cultural concerns and issues, so that the corporate discourse has broadened from a straightforward promotion of the company

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and its products (also with the intent to present the company as “a qualified trading partner” Askehave 1999) to the creation and projection of a brand personality for the company. The prime communicative purpose of the website therefore seems to have become image-building. The company, its products and operations want to represent a healthy and sustainable lifestyle for all, but also appear as socially responsible and as actors in the realization of this lifestyle. Unilever portrays itself as a provider, educator, empowerer (Tregidga 2008; Turnbull 2013), indeed as a “Global Benefactor” (Breeze 2012) playing a proactive and constructive role in society. Since its inception the website has become a multi-tasking channel, growing exponentially in size and in the range of topics it deals with in order to accommodate a growing audience of stakeholders with varied interests such as potential investors, consumers, customers, community and suppliers. However, an interesting and increasingly important opening, introduced as early as the 2002 version, is the Careers section which targets prospective employees and has become a standard feature of corporate websites. The Home page deserves a special mention because it is a webgenerated genre, which came into existence with the Internet and remains peculiar to it. Starting simply as an index page, it has gradually evolved into a complex “notice board”, signposting the various sections and topics in a hierarchical organisation of menus and links. Obviously the Homepage is the first meeting point between company and visitors, so the impression it produces is fundamental. As the use of computers has grown, enabling an increasing number of people to access information on the Internet, a corporate website has had to adapt to its new audiences. In particular, it is interesting to remember the changes between the 2007 and 2011 homepages from a more direct and aggressive marketing strategy to a softer approach where financial and business news, including share prices, returned to the fore or at least a more prominent position. Although greater emphasis is being placed on sustainability in its broadest economic and social sense in business (hence the photo and links about the social programmes in the centre of the page), profitability is a prerequisite of sustainability (Tregidga 2008:13) and hence there has been a re-evaluation of the business and financial section of the website leading to a new balance in the Homepage. It can also be supposed that the way a visitor approaches a website has changed over the years. Initially a reader could move through the whole website collecting all the information provided. Nowadays, the size and organization of the website makes it essential for the reader to select where

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he wants to go, thus intensifying the use of the navigating reading mode. As a consequence, the visual impact of the website has become even more important, firstly to help orientate the reader and, secondly, to persuade him to delve deeper into the labyrinth of information. Certainly the findings of this study can in no way be considered as conclusive as only one corporate website has been examined. Furthermore, Unilever operates in a market with products that touch upon our everyday lives. Different products in different sectors could generate different approaches, form and content, topics and registers, which reflect the relationship the company wants to establish with the audience of its website. This paper has considered the past and present of a corporate website. As far as the future is concerned, the creativity of website designers will no doubt unleash new ideas which will guarantee the continuing evolution of the genre. Already corporate websites are opening up more extensively to social media and applications and so the process of adapting to a changing world will continue.

Bibliography Askehave, Inger. 1999. “Communicative Purpose as Genre Determinant.” Hermes 23: 13-23. Askehave, Inger, and John Swales. 2001. “Genre Identification and Communicative Purpose: A Problem and a Possible Solution.” Applied Linguistics 22, 2: 195-212. Askehave, Inger, and Anne Ellerup Nielsen. 2005. “Digital Genres: a challenge to traditional genre theory.” Information Technology and People 18, 2: 120-141. Balmer, John M.T., Kyoko Fukuwawa, and Edmund R Gray. 2007. “The Nature and Management of Ethical Corporate Identity: A Commentary on Corporate Identity, Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics.” Journal of Business Ethics 76, 1: 7-15. Bazerman, Charles. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge. The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bhatia, Vijay. 1993. Analysing Genre - Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. Bondi, Marina. 2009. “Perspective and position in museum websites.” In Point of View: Description and Evaluation across Discourses, edited by Sara Radighieri and Paul Tucker, 113-127. Rome: Officina Edizioni.

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Bowen, David, and Keith Craggs. 2011. Index of corporate web effectiveness. www.bowencraggs.com. Breeze, Ruth. 2012. “Legitimation in corporate discourse: Oil corporations after Deepwater Horizon.” Discourse and Society 23 1: 3-18. Cornelissen, Joep. 2011. Corporate Communication: A Guide to Theory and Practice. London: SAGE. Devitt, Amy. 2009. “Re-fusing Form in Genre Studies.” In Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre, edited by Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, 27-47. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Garzone, Giuliana. 2009. “Multimodal Analysis.” In Handbook of Business Discourse, edited by Francesca Bargiela Chiappini, 155-165. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,. Gotti, Maurizio, Carol Berkenkotter, and Vijay K. Bhatia. 2012. Insights into Academic Genres. Bern: Peter Lang. Gray, Edmund R., and John M.T. Balmer. 1998. “Managing Corporate Image and Corporate Reputation.” Long Range Planning 31, 5: 695702. Koller, Veronika. 2007. “ǥThe World’s Local Bank’: Glocalization as a Strategy in Corporate Branding Discourse.” Social Semiotics 17, 1: 111-131. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold. Lemke, Jay. 2002. “Travels in hypermodality.” Visual Communication 1, 3: 299-325. Löwensberg, David. 2006. “Corporate image, reputation and identity.” In Exploring Public Relations, edited by Ralph Trench and Liz Yeoman, 237-251. Harlow: FT/Prentice Hall. Miller, Carolyn. 1984. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151-167. —. 1994. “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre.” In Genre and the New Rhetoric, edited by Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, 57-66. London: Taylor and Francis. Pruzan, Peter. 2001. “Corporate Reputation: Image and Identity.” Corporate Reputation Review 4, 1: 50-64. Salvi, Rita. 2013 (in press). “Intercultural Issues in Virtual Professional Settings.” Textus 1, 2013. Shepherd, Michael, and Carolyn Watters. 1998. “The Evolution of Cybergenres.” IEEE, Proceedings of the 31st Hawaii International Conference on System Science. http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu.

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Shepherd, Michael and Carolyn Watters. 1999. “The Functionality Attribute of Cybergenres.” IEEE, Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Science. http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu. Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: CUP. Tregidga, Helen, Marcus Milne, and Kate Kearins. 2008. (Re)Presenting Sustainable Organizations: A New Discursive Identity. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Anaheim, USA Aug 8-13. www.acis.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/Markus_Milne_Research Programmes/Re_Presenting_Sustainable_Organizations.pdf. Turnbull, Judith. 2011. “How 'glocal' is corporate discourse? A case study of a multinational’s website.” In Intercultural Interactions in Business and Management, edited by Rita Salvi and Hiro Tanaka, 73-90. Bern: Peter Lang. —. 2013. “Building, enhancing and defending reputation in a corporate website”. In Space, time and the construction of identity: discursive indexicality in cultural, institutional and professional fields, edited by Rita Salvi and Janet Bowker, 293-317. Bern: Peter Lang. Van Riel, Cees. 1995. Principles of Corporate Communication. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Yates, Joanne, and Wanda J. Orlikowski. 1992. “Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media.” The Academy of Management Review 17, 2: 299-326. Zappen, James P., Laura J. Gurak, and Stephen Doheny-Farina. 1997. “Rhetoric, community, and cyberspace.” Rhetoric Review 15, 2: 400419.

Notes 1

Available www.unilever.com, accessed September-October 2011. Software developed by Lancaster University (Rayson 2005) which includes a semantic tagger “to assign a pre-programmed meaning category to every word [...]. The program then compares the frequencies of individual categories to […] the British National Corpus. The “keyness” (i.e. statistically significant over-use or under-use) of a particular semantic domain in the texts under scrutiny is established using a log-likelihood test (Koller 2007: 117). 2

CHAPTER FOUR THE DISCURSIVE ENCODING OF CHANGING BUSINESS VALUES IN CSR REPORTS: A CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION PAOLA CATENACCIO

1. Introduction The last couple of decades have seen a steady increase in interest in social themes in both business literature and practice. Over these years, debate about the role and function of business in society has been rife, progressively leading to a redefinition of the business/society relationship and the emergence of a business paradigm strongly reliant on the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (henceforth CSR), which postulates greater attention on the part of corporate actors to social issues and values, the furtherance of social and environmental goals being a priority alongside the maintenance of financial viability. Despite its hegemonic status in today’s business environment, there is no consensus in the literature about how exactly CSR is to be understood (cf. Nielsen & Thomsen 2007; Cramer, Jonker, & Heijden 2004; Sweeney & Coughlan 2008). This has led to considerable definitional uncertainty. Provisional and often partial definitions of CSR abound and have evolved over the decades as a result of changing public expectations (Lee & Carroll 2011, 117 citing Carroll 1999, Waddock 2004, Wartick & Cochran 1985, Wood 1991), but to this day CSR remains in many ways an underdetermined concept (Gond & Moon 2011, 4), and therefore, as shall be shown below, one subject to considerable discursive negotiation. In very broad terms, it can be said that by CSR is generally understood the undertaking, on the part of companies, of voluntary and discretionary actions and behaviours which go beyond the mere pursuit of financial profit to include a concern for the general wellbeing of society and of the environment. Contemporary notions of CSR date back at least to the

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1950s: Bowen’s Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (1953) is usually credited with being the first book in which such responsibilities are explicitly defined as “the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society” (Bowen 1953, 6). If the concept in itself is therefore not new, its rise to hegemonic dominance is fairly recent, having occurred in the last twenty years or so. Its impact on contemporary business practices has been unprecedented: it has spread worldwide in a manner which has been not only extremely rapid (cf. KPMG 2011), but also to a great extent fairly homogenous (even though local peculiarities continue to exist; cf. Usunier, Furrer & FurrerPerrinjaquet 2011), so that CSR has recently become a truly global phenomenon (Bhur & Grafström 2007, 22) which has profoundly influenced the evolution of corporate and professional practices all over the world. Its impact has been compounded by the substantial changes in the conceptualisation of business in society that the adoption of CSR has brought about, which have been said to amount to a “paradigm shift” in the Kuhnian sense, in that they entail an unprecedented shift in the interpretative paradigm used for the comprehension (and social reproduction) of reality (Jonker & Marberg 2007) from a traditional one based on the profit orientation of business to a novel one, in which the corporation is seen as socially oriented. This chapter seeks to unveil discursive signs of this paradigm change in contemporary CSR discourse. The theoretical underpinnings of the investigation lie in a constructivist approach to language and discourse which sees discourse and social reality as mutually interdependent and, indeed, mutually constitutive (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999). Under this perspective the rise of CSR can be seen at the same time as a symptom and a cause of the progressive establishment of a new discourse of business which is gradually complementing – and sometimes even replacing – conventionally accepted assumptions about the role of business in society. As highlighted above, changing such assumptions entails a shift from a view of profit as the one and only underlying motive in a business’ actions, to a conceptualisation of businesses as social actors who firmly maintain an economic, profit-oriented role, but accept that such role may be subsumed under a higher-order social function which takes precedence over the pursuit of profit. Such shift has not occurred overnight, but rather is the result of a still ongoing discursive negotiation which takes place in multiple sites of engagement in business discourse, of which the dedicated branch which goes under the name of CSR reporting (from which the dataset for the

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research conducted in this chapter is drawn, as described in Paragraph 3 below) is a prime candidate for analysis.

2. Competing Assumptions, Paradigm Shift, and Authorial Stance A key tenet of this study is that embedded in discourse are assumptions and beliefs which frame, enable and constrain its interpretation. These assumptions and beliefs are generally part of the “shared common ground” which is relied upon by interactants engaged in communication, and as such do not need to be explicitly mentioned in text and talk; rather, they are posited as a given which is typically left unsaid, even though discourse will bear traces of it in its surface manifestations. At times of discursive struggle (such as the one between old and new paradigms entailed in the rise of CSR), however, it may be expected that assumptions and beliefs upon which arguments are based be featured more explicitly in discourse, as the speaker or writer cannot take the audience’s alignment with their position for granted, previously held assumptions still potentially maintaining a degree of validity while new ones are being introduced, often in a manner which subsumes or redefines the old ones. The latter are therefore also likely to be featured, or at least implied, in discourse, as they constitute the background against which the newly emerging assumptions underlying CSR discourse are pitched. By hypothesising the presence of competing sets of assumptions in CSR discourse I am here embracing, following Bakhtin (1935/1981) and Vološinov (1995), a dialogistic and heteroglossic view of discourse as embedding multiple voices and positions. I am also postulating that such multiplicity of positions be identifiable and attributable in texts through the analysis of discursive devices which signal the text encoder’s stance and position towards different propositions, which can be neutral, but are more often polarised, endorsing or rejecting such propositions in ways that can be more or less cautious or committed. Such an approach is suited to the investigation of changing values and assumptions on a broader societal level because, as Martin & White (2005, 95; emphasis added) note, when speakers/writers announce their own attitudinal positions they not only self-expressively ‘speak their own mind’, but simultaneously invite others to endorse with them the feelings tastes or normative assessments they are announcing. Thus declarations of attitude are dialogically directed towards aligning the addresses into a community of shared values and beliefs.

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In fact, as Thompson & Hunston (2000, 5-6; emphasis added) highlight, [e]very act of evaluation expresses a communal value system, and every act of evaluation goes towards building up that value system. This valuesystem in turn is a component of the ideology which lies behind every text. Thus, identifying what the writer thinks reveals the ideology of the society that has produced the text.

Based on the above, the analysis conducted in this chapter investigates selected aspects of authorial stance in respect of definitions of existing and emerging conceptualisations of the role of business in society, with a view to identifying the linguistic strategies deployed in their negotiation within CSR discourse, and determining their pragmatic effects in terms of the progressive establishment of a new interpretative paradigm.

3. Materials and Method The research reported in this study has been conducted on a corpus of CSR reports, i.e. reports issued by companies to inform their stakeholders about their economic (as different from financial) performance. These reports include information about the companies’ social and environmental impact, as well as about the corporate policies in place for the effective management and monitoring of these aspects of corporate performance. The choice for corpus composition has fallen on CSR reports as it is to this genre that the most articulated textual manifestations of corporate CSR conceptualisations and policies are entrusted. Moreover, collecting materials belonging to the same genre guaranteed greater homogeneity, an important factor in corpus based research. The corpus collected for the investigation consists of 150 social and environmental reports in English retrieved from online sources, for a total of around 4 million words. A first group of reports were retrieved from a CSR reporting dedicated website (); this original nucleus was then integrated with awardwinning reports retrieved from other sources (most notably the website of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, , an international body representing the accounting profession throughout the world). The corpus gathers reports issued mainly by European and North-American companies, and has therefore a distinctly Western focus. The time-span covered goes from 2001 to 2008 (years of publication), but reports are identified based on the fiscal year they report on, which is one year behind compared to the date of publication. Thus, a document referred to as “2001 report” is a report published in 2002 which

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provides an account of the CSR activities carried out by the company in 2001. It is to be noted that the reports are not evenly distributed over the period considered; instead, their distribution follows the gradual expansion of CSR reporting over the years. Table 1 below provides an overview of corpus composition, with details for each of the subcorpora: Fiscal year of reporting 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Overall

Number of reports 7 7 14 15 25 26 27 29 150

Words

Standardised TTR

100,708 205,609 383,485 422,789 752,246 584,494 783,228 789,573 4,022,132

39.91 40.49 40.13 39.34 38.22 40.49 39.27 39.45 39.47

Table 1. CSR Corpus composition For what concerns method, this study takes a mainly qualitative, discourse-analytical perspective, relying on corpus-assisted methodologies for the retrieval of preliminarily selected linguistic and phraseological features which are then analysed qualitatively. A first step in the research will focus on the identification of propositions which are presented in the corpus as being undisputably true, based on the hypothesis that the manifestation of strong authorial commitment to the truth value of a given proposition may indicate the intention, on the part of the author, to establish or confirm principles contained therein which play a fundamental role in the construction of CSR discourse. Secondly, attention is turned to the strategies deployed in the discursive construal of the compatibility of business and societal objectives (one of the most contested areas in the CSR debate, and a point still subject to much controversy). It is expected that the identification of these strategies may reveal the attitude of business writers towards this issue, thereby providing an indication of the perception of the state of the debate on the part of business actors. Finally, the function of the perspectivising expression we believe that – one of the most frequent clusters in the whole corpus – is examined and its framing role in CSR discourse discussed.

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4. Certainty, Uncertainty and Inferential Doubt The identification of markers of commitment to the truth value of propositions can provide insights into what the writer wants to present as undisputable and what, on the other hand, he or she wants to present more tentatively, thereby opening up dialogically to other opinions and positions. A given state of affairs can be presented as certain or otherwise with respect to the speaker’s knowledge (or beliefs) about the situation at hand. Examples (1)-(4) below illustrate this point: (1) […] obviously companies need to be profitable to survive. (ING 2002) (2) While the link between socially responsible investing (SRI) and enhanced financial returns has yet to be fully proven, the performance of sustainability indexes suggests that SRI returns are as high, and for certain products may even exceed traditional investment forms. The rationale for such returns appears to be logical; companies that apply strong values in the management of economic, environmental and social performance are likely to develop a loyal and committed workforce. (ING 2000) (3) Business is an integral part of society, providing essential products, jobs and other economic benefits. (Ø) (Roche 2006) (4) The primary responsibility for Nutreco companies anywhere is to ensure products are safe and conform to regulations in production and market countries. (Ø) (Nutreco 2003)

As can be easily seen from the examples, example (1) features a certainty marker, while example (2) displays several indicators, highlighted in the text, of a more cautious commitment to the truth value of the propositions embedded. Examples (3) and (4), on the other hand, contain a zero epistemic marker, but are interpreted as being entirely averred by the speaker. This is of course not unusual, as in communication the tacit agreement is that statements which are not qualified for doubt are to be interpreted as being true (Grice 1975). Rather, it is the explicit manifestation of certainty which would appear to suggest that something has to be stated emphatically because its truth value is not entirely undisputed. As Simon-Vandernberger & Aijmer (2007, 31-32) point out, […] markers of certainty mark something special, since strictly speaking they would be unnecessary information. As a result an epistemic marker

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Based on the above, it can therefore be hypothesised that a search for markers of epistemic certainty in the corpus may provide insights into meanings and views whose status is not (or no longer) undisputed, but whose persisting validity the speaker wants to emphasise, thereby taking a heteroglossic perspective (i.e., recognising the existence of dialogistic alternatives; cf. Martin & White 2005: 98 ff.), albeit one whose effect is to engage with alternative voices for the purpose of dismissing them. That this is indeed the case is confirmed by the examples retrieved through a search for epistemic certainty indicators, which are rather limited in number in the corpus, but which almost invariably occur in contexts featuring the explicit mentioning of disputed assumptions: (5) Though obviously companies need to be profitable to survive, financials should not be their only driver. A stable development that benefits all stakeholders also requires that companies give shape to corporate social responsibility (CSR). (ING 2002) (6) The business stakes are obviously important to ING, but there is also a social side to it. (ING 2002) (7) […] businesses run their operations according to two basic principles. First and foremost, of course, is how to provide a good product. […] However, the question is then automatically linked to the second principle – the awareness of responsibility. That means offering a product that has the least possible environmental impact, both in the short and long term. (Schiphol 2002) (8) As investors, it is obviously important to us that pharmaceutical companies maintain overall profitability. But the mainstream financial community is still struggling in its attempts to find appropriate tools and models to measure the importance of emerging markets to future business [because they are not seen as profitable]. (Nordisk 2003) (9) Clearly, our greatest responsibility as a public company is creating value; this is the most significant contribution we can make to society. But we are convinced that success is also determined by the way we create value and contribute to the communities in which we operate. (Fortis 2005) (10) Corporate social responsibility clearly has costs. As well as direct costs, management attention is given to matters other than the day-to-day activities of the business. However, there are substantial benefits. (Nutreco 2001)

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In examples (5)-(10), certainty markers invariably occur in association with statements referring to a profit-oriented business paradigm, where they appear to serve the discourse function of reassuring a potentially sceptical interlocutor that such profit orientation is not questioned by the adoption of CSR practices. This suggests that a distinction must be made between the epistemic meaning and the rhetorical function of these adverbs and other expressions of epistemic stance. As White (2000) has argued, speakers make use of epistemic or evidential systems for a variety of reasons which do not primarily have to do with the assessment of their own or the hearer’s knowledge, but rather – as mentioned above – serve the function of engaging dialogically in argumentation with alternative voices (ranging from differing assumptions, to other texts, to the presumed opinion of potentially sceptical listeners or readers), taking up a position which is in alignment with or diverges from an alternative position or voice. Thus, in the examples above the deployment of adverbs of certainty emphatically indicates the writer’s alignment with the position put forth in the propositions within which such adverbs occur, and a simultaneous distancing from alternative positions which may deny such propositions, through a process which Martin & White (2005) call dialogic contraction. Another point which is especially worthy of notice is the co-occurrence of certainty indicators with concessive structures. Adverbs of certainty occur in the conceded proposition, reinforcing the common ground assumption on which the concession relies. However, they are promptly countered (though not cancelled) by the following asserted proposition, which puts forth another position which the speaker presents as even more valid than the conceded one. Let me illustrate this point with reference to example (6) above, which is reproduced below (6b) for the sake of convenience: (6b) The business stakes are obviously important to ING, but there is also a social side to it. (ING 2002)

The relationship between the two propositions which make up (6b) can be represented as follows: P. And, contrary to expectations, Q,

where P and Q represent respectively the conceded and the asserted propositions. The two propositions are compatible (and), and the unexpectedness of their compatibility is conveyed in (6b) by but, which signals procedurally that the assertion goes counter the expectations raised by P. In other words, and with reference to aspects of commitment to the

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truth value of the propositions involved, both propositions are presented as true, with the latter (the assertion) being favoured by the speaker over the former (the conceded one), which, however, retains its validity – a validity which the encoder is particularly keen to emphasise through the use of the epistemic indicator obviously. My interpretation of the examples presented above is that they are indexes of a discursively orchestrated shift in the conceptualisation of business in society from a competing to a converging paradigm. Whereas existing assumptions about the business-society relationship would normally warrant the inference that, given a claim as to the centrality of profit to business activities, a concurrent proposition containing the claim that social responsibility is central to business should not be admissible, and that, by the same token, claims as to the centrality of social responsibility to business would be normally taken to deny the possibility of a profit orientation, the concessive structure in which the two propositions are embedded enables them both to be simultaneously true. Thus, epistemically strong claims about the persisting profit orientation of business are accompanied by equally strong (and indeed more valid, by virtue of their asserted status within concessive structures) claims as to the need for responsible behaviour. The two positions are presented as predictably incompatible on the basis of the assumptions underlying the principles of profit-orientation, but in fact perfectly compatible when novel assumptions – based on the compatibility of social responsibility and business objectives – are brought to bear on their interpretation. Example (11) below clearly illustrates the need to move past the issue of incompatibility in order to fully embrace the CSR imperative: (11) Our CSR ambitions cannot be considered in isolation from our financials. They are both essential parts of Akzo Nobel’s objectives. To a certain extent, our financials and CSR influence each other, although the exact financial value of CSR is difficult to calculate. Many would argue that they are two different worlds, and that a company acts in either one of them. We do not agree. Indeed, from our point of view – and in keeping with our philosophy that CSR is an integral part of doing business – CSR and our financials are inseparable. As we become more successful embedding CSR into our daily business practices, the more obvious this relationship will become. (Akzo Nobel 2004)

In this passage, CSR ambitions are argued to be inseparable from financial success. The opening sentence contains a negation (cannot), which is defined by Martin & White (2005, 118) as a typical “resource for introducing the alternative position into the dialogue, and hence

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acknowledging it, so as to reject it”. Thus, the claim made in the sentence is implicitly responding to a counterclaim the contents of which are made explicit later in the text (“many would argue that they [i.e. CSR ambitions and financials] are two different worlds, and that a company acts in either one of them”), followed by a second denial (“we do not agree”) and a restating of the position (“from our point of view… CSR and financials are inseparable”). The actual nature of the relationship between CSR and financials, however, is unclear: the writer recognises as much, hedging the proposition in which it is presented (“to a certain extent, our financials and CSR influence each other”) and acknowledging that “the exact financial value of CSR is difficult to calculate” (again, a sign of heteroglossic engagement with alternative positions). Thus, the inseparability of CSR and financials is posited as something that is currently still under debate and difficult to prove, but which will become “obvious” in the future. In this way, old and new conceptions of the role and function of business are contrasted, the superiority of the novel one being stated, rather than fully argued for, and presented as a matter of opinion and belief (“from our point of view”) which will rise to the epistemically stronger status of obviousness as evidence of the beneficence of the mutual influence of CSR and financial becomes available.

5. The Construal of Compatibility The example discussed above highlights the importance, in the discursive construal of CSR, not only of reassuring investors about the continuing profit orientation of businesses, but also of overcoming still widespread scepticism about the compatibility of such profit orientation and CSR. Although rarely mentioned in explicit terms, this concern features regularly, albeit mostly covertly, in CSR discourse, its surfacing being signalled by recurrent phraseological structures having a considerably consistent distribution across the reports analysed. One of these is the 4-gram at the same time, which I have identified in previous research (Catenaccio 2011) as playing a special role in the corpus. Although the overall frequency of the cluster is not overly high (it occurs 321 times in the corpus, corresponding to a frequency of 0.008%), it is made more significant by the fact that with a few exceptions in which it occurs in its literal meaning as an adverb of time, it is invariably used to convey a weak contrastive meaning juxtaposing business and CSR goals. A sample of concordance lines featuring at the same time is provided below:

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allocation of responsibilities. us from our competitors. low by European standards. the Benelux region as well. from these infrastructures, we our environmental impact and than their predecessors, but more than 80% in 2005. the needs of the region, which strategy to all employees. the costs of pensions rise. benefit the environment, while

At the same time, At the same time At the same time, At the same time, at the same time at the same time at the same time At the same time, at the same time At the same time, At the same time, at the same time

we challenge the the combination however, women are we want to explore contribute to their lower our costs. There lighter and therefore a number of social incorporates and we want to invest in many companies are reducing our energy

Concordance 1. Selected concordance lines for at the same time.

A closer look at the context in which the phrase at the same time occurs clarifies its meta-discursive role in guiding the interpretation of the propositions which precede and follow it. The following examples illustrate this point: (12) We will be able to create sustainable businesses generating a return for our financial stakeholders while at the same time contributing to sustainable development. (Phillips 2005) (13) The systematic efforts to reduce environmental impacts will be supported by our five-year Environmental Strategy, launched in 2003. It addresses the environmental issues and highlights the challenges we believe are key to ensuring the future success of our business, striving at the same time for a balance with the global ecosystem. (Novo Nordisk 2003) (14) Our Coatings business is focused, has a global reach and is committed to innovation; at the same time, environmental responsibility is a major feature of our product range. (Akzo Nobel 2004)

In all these examples, at the same time is used as a discourse marker indicating – besides the feature of simultaneity conveyed by its literal meaning – also a degree of perceived contrast between the two propositions. In fact, at the same time, together with while, is a particularly interesting discourse marker, specifically because of the multiple – and sometimes ambiguous – meanings it can convey. A study by Oates (2001) mentions at the same time as a discourse marker having particularly “ambiguous cueing relations” (Oates 2001, 153). Oates provides examples from the ICE corpus which show that the phrase “can be used as a

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discourse marker to cue contrast and as a temporal adverb to cue simultaneity, but in some cases it may be difficult to distinguish its role”. As an example of the latter she quotes the sentence “work is hard, and at the same time interesting and worthwhile”, pointing out that different coders found it difficult to identify the specific meaning of at the same time, or rather the specific meaning cued by at the same time as to the relationship between the two different sets of adjectives attributed to work. Leaving aside those cases in which at the same time is quite clearly simply a time adverbial, it appears that in the majority of other cases, the phrase indicates that the simultaneous occurrence of two events, or presence of two characteristics, is to an extent unexpected. In highlighting that “at the same time is [a] multi-meaning linking adverbial that often expresses an underlying message that differs from its surface meaning,” Liu (2008, 507) insists on its concessive/contrastive nature, stressing that when expressing concession or contrast, the adverbial on appearance does indicate a simultaneous/sequential relationship but in reality it expresses incongruity […]. The concessive use of at the same time is typically found in the discussion of complex issues that involve opposing perspectives. It allows the speaker/writer to cover both sides by providing a good transition from one perspective to another. (Liu 2008, 507; emphasis added)

While I am not entirely sure that the relation cued by at the same time in examples 12-14 above is always clearly concessive, it seems to me that the phrase is used to indicate the simultaneous validity of the two propositions it links in the face of potential mild scepticism on the part of the reader. The difference between what I will refer to as “strong” concessivity and the milder version channelled by at the same time can be seen by comparing the two examples that follow: (15) Corporate social responsibility clearly has costs. As well as direct costs, management attention is given to matters other than the day-to-day activities of the business. However, there are substantial benefits. Responsible corporations become a source of expertise for society. Also, they become aware of emerging issues that may become mainstream concerns and, by anticipating these, they can establish new sources of profit as well as avoid future liabilities. (Nutreco 2001) (16) We will be able to create sustainable businesses generating a return for our financial stakeholders while at the same time contributing to sustainable development. (Phillips 2005)

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In example 15, the relation between the two propositions is clearly concessive, in the sense that the first proposition acknowledges a common charge which is laid at CSR initiatives, and the second one – while not denying the truth value of the first one – puts forth another perspective presenting it as “more valid” than the one conceded. Note also that the adverb however could be easily replaced by at the same time, with little change for the interpretation of the passage as a whole. In the case of example 16, on the other hand, [while] at the same time could not readily be replaced with a concessive connector. The one construction which I believe would yield an interpretation close to the one conveyed by at the same time would probably be not only … but also, in which but used in its concessive meaning is combined with the additive adverbial also. The prevalence of at the same time as a discourse marker linking propositions which typically have to do with the pursuit of business goals on the one hand, and with commitment to corporate social responsibility on the other suggests – without highlighting it – a degree of incongruity between the two propositions, which is acknowledged and instantly cancelled by emphasising their de facto coexistence. A similar effect is achieved through the use of connectors such as the above-mentioned not only … but also, which is also well represented in the corpus. Examples containing this connector are reported below: (17) This calls for an active policy which is based not only on financial indicators and goals, but also takes social and sustainability criteria into account. (Rabobank 2001) (18) Customers want and expect Dell to be a socially responsible leader and to provide products and services in ways that not only serve their personal or business interests, but also support the broader concerns of the community and the environment. (Dell 2002) (19) We are increasingly being judged by our relationships with, and impacts on, employees, the local community and society at large. Our ability to integrate corporate citizenship and sustainability into our daily business is therefore critical not only to our reputation but also to our commercial success. (Ford 2002) (20) P&G is committed to providing a harassment-free work environment. This is the right thing to do not only from a social perspective but also from a business perspective because it enables employees to contribute to their highest potential. (P&G 2002)

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In all these cases the connector not only … but also links two propositions (or phrases), of which the former is expected, and the latter unexpected, although it is not in a mutually exclusive relation with the former. In this case as well, as was the case with at the same time, the two potentially incongruous (or at least not typically found together) perspectives, whose mutual incompatibility is silently acknowledged and then immediately overcome as non-problematic, relate to CSR commitments on the one hand, and business objectives on the other. It is important to point out that the incongruity between the two propositions/characteristics may be partially cued by the discourse marker, but is in fact only properly understood through reliance on the shared common ground of the participants in the communication act. In other words, for the reader to accept the writer’s intended meaning, it is necessary that they share the same assumptions, which, in the case at hand, postulate a relationship of mutual exclusivity at worst, or difficult coexistence at best, between business objectives and social commitment. Thus, the choice of discourse markers and linking words and phrases which indicate a degree of incongruity or less-than-habitual combination, but at the same time emphasise additive relations is particularly effective at a stage in the formation of the discourse of corporate social responsibility in which existing beliefs and assumptions – i.e. the existing doxa on the function of business in society – are being challenged and replaced with new doxa which see social responsibility as a component of business. The use of expressions such as at the same time (as well as not only…but also) to link propositions referring to the two above-mentioned domains suggests that the compatibility – or at least the unproblematic contiguity – of these two domains is still at least to an extent contested. It is meaningful, I believe, that the perceived potential incongruity is signalled through discourse markers cueing unexpectedness, rather than downright mutual exclusivity, as this makes it easier to progressively neutralise the element of unexpectedness while maintaining the additive component, so that the combination of business orientation AND social commitment becomes normalised.

6. Willing New Principles into Being: The Role of We Believe That in CSR Discourse In the example discussed at the end of Paragraph 4, reproduced in 11b below, the claim about the inseparability of CSR and financial objectives was introduced, first, in response to an implicit claim to the opposite, and

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second – upon being mentioned for the second time – accompanied by a perspectivising expression (“from our point of view”) which relativises the claim itself, turning it into a matter of opinion: (11b) Our CSR ambitions cannot be considered in isolation from our financials. They are both essential parts of Akzo Nobel’s objectives. To a certain extent, our financials and CSR influence each other, although the exact financial value of CSR is difficult to calculate. Many would argue that they are two different worlds, and that a company acts in either one of them. We do not agree. Indeed, from our point of view – and in keeping with our philosophy that CSR is an integral part of doing business – CSR and our financials are inseparable. As we become more successful embedding CSR into our daily business practices, the more obvious this relationship will become. (Akzo Nobel 2004)

As highlighted in much literature on metadiscourse (see Hyland 2005), perspectivising devices play a discursive function which is to some extent akin to that of epistemic indicators or other attitudinal discourse markers. More specifically, expressions such as we believe, we think, we expect and the like are typically used to frame the propositional content of a given utterance, subjectifying it and making the presence of the author (and therefore his/her stance) manifest in the text. As a result, they may provide insights into the way in which certain issues are framed in discourse – i.e. whether they are matter of opinion, belief, knowledge etc. Based on the above, in this section attention is turned to the analysis of the perspectivising expression we believe that (the verb believe having a frequency of 0.02%, and ranking 613). This expression appears consistently in contexts in which the company’s commitment to CSR is outlined, as shown in the concordance lines below: capabilities and intentions. Respect for All Individuals. The Individual are Inseparable Customers Employees their local communities. Handset Reuse and Recycling Equality and Opportunity. are often ‘end of pipe’ solutions. Corporate behaviour. In addition, ACCOUNTABILITY –

We believe that We believe that We believe that We believe that We believe that We believe that We believe that We believe that we believe that we believe that

people work best when all individuals can and doing what is right for competition in a our employees are our environmental each employee has a this approach is not the concept of established

Concordance 2. Selected concordance lines for we believe that.

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Even a cursory reading of the concordance lines suggests that while retaining a subjectifying function, the discursive use of believe indicates a sense of commitment rather than being used as a purely perspectivising expression. This discourse function of believe has been highlighted in the literature: Although most interpersonal Complement Taking Mental Predicates express a median modal value [Halliday 1994], it is possible for some CTMPs, notably I think and I believe, to realise a stronger sense of commitment on the part of the speaker that could adequately be paraphrased by probably. In this connection, Aijmer (1997) talks of the “deliberative” use of I think, which heightens the speaker’s commitment. This deliberative function was shown to apply to I believe too (van Bogaert 2006). Seeing that such instances also realise a position of modal commitment to a given proposition in the here-and-now, they qualify as performative, interpersonal CTMPs. (van Bogaert 2010, 405)

The contribution of we believe that to the meta-discursive framing of corporate social responsibility is particularly evident in example 21 below, which highlights the juxtaposition between (lack of) epistemic certainty and belief (all emphases are added): (21) While we have yet to measure the impact our commitment to corporate accountability and transparency has on our financial performance [ÆWE DO NOT KNOW], we know anecdotally that members and employees are attracted to VanCity, and remain at VanCity, because of our values and contributions to our employees, local communities, and the environment. We also know that communicating our performance in a credible and meaningful way is essential. Engaging our members, employees, and community leaders in measuring our performance has immense value to VanCity. It helps us understand and keep on top of what matters most to those who influence our long-term success, and provides a more ‘holistic’ picture of our performance in order to improve. And over the long term, reporting our performance in a meaningful and credible way – warts and all – and demonstrating a commitment to continuously improve performance, builds loyalty and trust. We also believe that conducting a social audit to rigorous international standards and publishing an externally verified report on performance has many business benefits, including enhanced reputation, a way to differentiate ourselves from other financial institutions, improved economic, social, and environmental performance, improved risk management, strengthened internal management systems, and reduced costs due to operational efficiencies. (Vancity 2002)

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Especially worthy of notice in the text above is the fact that the company declares to espouse a belief in the benefits of socially responsible behaviour despite its lack of knowledge about the specific financial advantages that may ensue from it. This is extremely important, because it shows a shift, in the episteme of the contemporary business world, from knowledge to belief. The role played by believe in framing the discourse of CSR becomes even more evident when the cluster we believe that (the most frequent 3gram centred on we, with 285 occurrences in the corpus) is seen in association with the second most common we-centred cluster, we are committed to (232 occurrences), examples of which are reported below: privacy of every employee “The consumer is boss!” To investors. As part of this, that they are correct. Environmental responsibility accelerating these efforts. The reference year 2001. SATISFACTION at VanCity Confidentiality. Customers: Fairness. Environment: Health and Safety: who have impaired hearing has been started, and mobile handsets but conditions of employment, Employees and shareholders. from the previous year. – managing impacts.

we are committed to We are committed to we are committed to We are committed to We are committed to We are committed to we are committed to We are committed to we are committed to we are committed to we are committed to we are committed to we are committed to we are committed to we are committed to We are committed to We are committed to We are committed to

protecting the meeting the needs providing accurate providing timely being the world’s maintaining a being the providing high levels providing our sustainable the health and serving them ensure that that least working with a enabling staff to continuously identify and operating our sites

Concordance 3. Selected concordance lines for we are committed to.

Both we believe that and we are committed to can be seen as framing devices embodying a commissive component (Searle 1976), i.e. they are used to make promises about future behaviour, the former by indicating the premises upon which the predicted behaviour is based, and the latter by outlining the desired (and implicitly predicted) outcome. Accordingly, both expressions are typically used to introduce CSR-related objectives, which are thus embedded in structures which highlight firstly the belieflike nature of social responsibility (which is framed as a matter of conviction leading to action, rather than as a matter of knowledge), and, secondly, its voluntaristic spirit. The combination of belief and

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commitment seems to suggest that the grounds for CSR engagement are not subject to the same rationalising principles which frame business objectives, but are rather located on a different plane – one in which the construction of corporate ethos plays a key role, and where commonly held opinions about the essentially self-interested nature of business must be replaced with trust in the ethical nature of corporations.

7. Conclusions This paper has looked at the discursive representation of changing interpretative paradigms of the role of business in society in a corpus of CSR reports. The focus of the study has been on the investigation of dialogic engagement in respect of different conceptualisations of the business-society relationship, followed by an analysis of the discursive framing of CSR as a business imperative. Starting from the identification of adverbs and other markers of certainty, which were hypothesised to be likely to occur in contexts where the explicit mentioning of pivotal principles in business discourse was felt necessary, it has been shown that their occurrence is most frequent in argumentatively-framed passages in which existing assumptions about the role of business in society are contested. These epistemic markers emphasise the persisting validity of existing assumptions, but at the same time argue for their inclusion in a higher-order conceptualisation of business where profit exists alongside responsibility – a conceptualisation for which the writer expresses an even stronger degree of commitment. Thus, markers of epistemic certainty act in fact as cues to a lack of certainty – if not on the part of the writer, certainly on the part of the envisaged reader. Building on this finding, the second part of the paper has focused on issues of (un)expectedness in the representation of CSR as part of the business proposition, identifying a number of recurrent features in the corpus aimed at fostering a shift from the commonly held belief that profit and social commitment are mutually exclusive to the novel conviction that they can be mutually enhancing. Fostering such conviction is not unproblematic, as it involves a change in deeply ingrained assumptions. The frequent use of mild contrastive/concessive structures (of which at the same time is a prominent example) seems to acknowledge this difficulty, while simultaneously framing it discursively in such a way that emphasises CSR commitment as “added value”. Finally, the perspectivising verbal expression we believe that has been investigated. This expression has been shown not only to carry a subjectifying meaning, but also – and more importantly – to indicate

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interpersonal commitment. More specifically, we believe that (together with we are committed to) emphasises the value-driven (and belief-, rather then knowledge-driven) nature of CSR discourse, indicating the emergence of a new conceptualisation of the role of business in society which in a sense is being “willed into being” through discourse. Although justifications of CSR involvement are frequent in CSR reports, and are often framed in business terms, voluntaristic commitment and ethicsgrounded belief remain the dominant conceptual paradigm for CSR discourse, which acknowledges the difficulty of accepting the postulate of the compatibility of profit- and social orientation, but overcomes it by appealing to higher grade ethical imperatives.

Bibliography Aijmer, Karin. 1997. “I think – An English Modal Particle.” In Modality in Germanic Languages. Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Toril Swan and Olaf Jansen Westvik, 1-47. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bakhtin, Mikail. 1935/1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, edited by MichaelHolquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhur, Nola, and Maria Grafström. 2007. “The Making of Meaning in the Media.” In Managing Corporate Social Responsibility in Action. Talking, Doing and Measuring, edited by Frank den Hond, Frank G. A. de Bakker, and Peter Neergard, 15-31. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bowen, Howard R. 1953. Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. New York: Harper and Brothers. Carroll, Archie B. 1999. “Corporate Social Responsibility: Evolution of a Definitional Construct.” Business and Society 38/3:268-95. Catenaccio, Paola. 2011. The discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility in the genre of the CSR report: cultural keywords and priming effects. Paper presented at the conference Specialised Genres: Past, Present and Future, Università di Roma 4, Roma, 14-16 April 2011. Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Norman Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cramer, Jaqueline, Jonker, Jan, and Angela van der Heijden. 2004. “Making Sense of Corporate Social Responsibility.” Journal of Business Ethics 55.2:215-222. Gond, Jean-Pascal, and Jeremy Moon. 2011. Corporate Social Responsibility in Retrospect and Prospect. Exploring the Life-Cycle of an Essentially Contested Concept. Nottingham International Centre for

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Corporate Social Responsibility, Research paper No. 59-2011. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/business/ICCSR/research.php?action=sin gle&id=78 Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Halliday, M. A. K. 1994 [1985]. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold. Hyland, Ken. 2005. Metadiscourse. Exploring Interaction in Writing. London: Continuum. Jonker, Jan, and Angela Marberg. 2007. “Corporate Social Responsibility quo vadis? A Critical Inquiry into a Discursive Struggle.” Journal of Corporate Citizenship 27:107-119. KPMG. 2011. International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2011. http://www.kpmg.com/PT/pt/IssuesAndInsights/Documents/ corporate-responsibility2011.pdf Lee, Sun Young, and Craig E. Carroll. 2011. “The Emergence, Variation, and Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Public Sphere, 1980–2004: The Exposure of Firms to Public Debate.” Journal of Business Ethics 104.1:115-131. Liu, Dilin. 2008. “Linking Adverbials. An Across-Register Corpus Study and its Implications.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13.4:491-518. Martin, J. R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nielsen, Anne Ellerup, and Thomsen, Christa. 2007. “Reporting CSR – What and How to Say it?” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 12.1:25-40. Oates, Sarah Louise. 2001. “Generating Multiple Discourse Markers in Text.” MPhil Thesis. ITRI: University of Brighton. Searle, John R. 1976. “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts.” Language in Society 5.1:1-23. Simon-Vandernberger, Anne-Marie, and Karin Aijmer. 2007. The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Sweeney, Lorreine, and Joseph Coughlan. 2008. “Do Different Industries Report Corporate Social Responsibility Differently? An Investigation through the Lens of Stakeholder Theory.” Journal of Marketing Communication 14.2:113-124. Tengblad, Stefan, and Claes Ohlsson. 2009. “The Framing of Corporate Social Responsibility and the Globalization of National Business

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Systems: A Longitudinal Case Study.” Journal of Business Ethics 93:653-669. Thompson, Geoffrey, and Susan Hunston. 2000. “Evaluation: An Introduction.” In Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, edited by Susan Hunston and Geoffrey Thompson, 1-27. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Usunier Jean-Claude, Olivier Furrer, and Amandine Furrer-Perrinjaquet. 2011. “The Perceived Trade-Off between Corporate Social and Economic Responsibilities: A Cross-National Study.” International Journal of Cross Cultural Management 11.3:279-302. van Bogaert Julie. 2006. “ ‘I guess’, ‘I suppose’ and ‘I believe’ as Pragmatic Markers: Grammaticalization and Functions.” BELL Belgian Journal of English Language and Literature. New Series 4:129-149. —. 2010. “A Constructional Taxonomy of I think and Related Expressions: Accounting for the Variability of Complement-Taking Mental Predicates.” English Language and Linguistics 14.3:399-427. Vološinov, Valentin N. 1995. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matjka and I. R. Titunik. London: Roudledge. Waddock, Sandra. 2004. “Parallel Universes: Companies, Academics, and the Progress of Corporate Citizenship.” Business and Society Review 109.1:5-42. Wartick, Stephen L., and Philip L. Cochran. 1985. “The Evolution of the Corporate Social Performance Model.” Academy of Management Review 10.4:758-769. White, Peter. 2000. “Dialogue and Inter-Subjectivity: Reinterpreting the Semantics of Modality and Hedging.” In Working with Dialogue, edited by Malcom Coulthard, Janet Cotterill, and Frances Rock, 67-80. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Wood, Donna. J. 1991. “Corporate Social Performance Revisited.” Academy of Management Review 16.4:691-718.

CHAPTER FIVE MAKE UP OR MADE UP? INTRA AND INTERLINGUISTIC MESSAGES IN THE GLOBALISED WORLD OF COSMETIC ADVERTISING GILLIAN MANSFIELD

1. Introduction Twentieth-century advertising of cosmetics has developed enormously over the years due to the increasing amount of space devoted to it in women’s magazines and, in the last decade or so into the present millenium, on corporate websites as well. This is partly due to the emancipation of women in the sense that they are no longer seen as relegated to their exclusive role as mother and homemaker but also as financially independent and, for want of a better expression, looking to ‘catch a man’ (Dade 2007). The aim of this particular sector of advertising was, and indeed still is, to sell women an ideal aesthetically and sexually attractive image of themselves. This is carried out by means of numerous persuasive strategies that rely on the pragmatic force of the verbal text as well as the visual components that are presented for added impact (Barthel 1988; Gunn 1973; Pointer 2005, Tungate 2011). As Bignell (2002, 31) claims, “The aim of ads is to engage us in their structure of meaning, to encourage us to participate by decoding their linguistic and visual signs and to enjoy this decoding activity.” Further to this, Tungate (2011, 256) particularly notes the reliance of cosmetic advertising on the verbal element of the text claiming that “[i]f the beauty industry has changed the way we look, it has done so chiefly with the written word.” As far as the cosmetic advertisement is concerned, this chapter will focus on decoding both the denotational and connotational meanings that are conveyed through the bringing together of verbal and visual signs to relay particular

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messages to the potential female customer. This process of interpretation is what Barthes (1977) refers to as mythical meaning, a social phenomenon, in the sense of the way people and products are viewed. Thus, in our case, the analysis will not simply focus on the product (the cosmetic) or on the person (the woman), but on the encoded concepts of feminine beauty, sexual allure and sensual pleasure (Barthes 1977, Dade 2007) that the various verbal and visual signs contribute to. This chapter thus proposes to show how advertising licence, that is, total freedom allowed to the copywriter in manipulating language forms for communicative purposes, has increasingly made its mark over the past century. In a contrastive qualitative analysis of advertisements regarding cosmetic products promoted in the countries of origin (USA and the UK) and abroad (Italy), texts will be compared in a diachronic and synchronic perspective, according to their message content and distinguishing linguistic and visual features, with a view to establishing to what extent advertising licence has or has not changed since the early 1900s. Taking inspiration from Bhatia’s (1993, 2002) studies regarding genre analysis as a reflection of the complex realities of the world of institutionalised communication, results from the analysis will show the extent to which flexibility, as far as comprehensibility of meaning (Grice 1975) is concerned, is permissible in the creative manipulation of promotional language across cultures in the globalised world of cosmetic advertising.

2. Aims of study Marketing strategies of all kinds of commercial products are always a rich source for linguistic analysis. In a global environment, where foreignizing and domesticating strategies1 are at work (Venuti 1995), the copywriter of the cosmetics ad frequently resorts to a highly creative language that incorporates not only information about the product (its ingredients), but also about the intended effect it will have on the skin and on the wearer herself in an overall context of allure, seduction and desirability (Barthes 1977; Dade 2007). This chapter will provide a discussion of such phenomena as information packaging, lexical boosting, the coining of new words, relexicalisation and unusuality (Partington 1996), as well as word patterning in advertising creativity and licence in order to determine the specific language features that go to make up the language of description pertaining to cosmetic products. Significant findings will be subsequently further examined by using the Webcorp to discover whether recurrent features are limited primarily to cosmetics or extended to other kinds of

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products or services, or indeed, other semantic fields, such as house furnishings and decoration, clothing and bed linens. Finally the findings will also discuss similar linguistic recurrences in Italian texts to account for the use of unusual and seemingly incomprehensible noun phrases composed of a mixture of Italian and English lexis that describes the ingredients and purpose of individual products.

3. Methodology The analysis was carried out following Bhatia’s (2002, 17) three-fold framework of discourse analysis, first discourse as social practice: “How is discourse constrained by social practices, identities, and social structures?”, secondly as discourse as genre: “why do people construct discourse the way we [sic] do, and what makes this possible?”, and finally discourse as text: “What features of lexicogrammar are statistically and / or functionally distinctive?” To answer these questions in the context of cosmetics advertising, a small corpus of comparable English and Italian texts was collected from the UK/USA and Italian corporate websites of some of the leading worldwide cosmetics manufacturers (e.g. Revlon, Max Factor, Elizabeth Arden, Clinique) and a selection of women’s glossy magazine advertisements of the same brands over the period 2010-2013. For contrastive purposes, web searches (Google Images) were carried out for earlier advertisements from the same cosmetics companies as well as resorting to previous studies (e.g. Dade 2007). After a preliminary examination of the material, a restricted area of analysis was delineated according to two main categories: 1) choice of lexis, including collocation, collocation mixes, relexicalisation, function of adjectives, manoeuvring of phonology (particularly with homophones) through wordplay and punning; and 2) noun phrase structure and information packaging in English and Italian. Since wordplay and punning create an overlapping of meaning as well as unusual combinations of words in the ads, ambiguity is highly likely created in the same sentence. Thus it was necessary to refer to Grice’s cooperation principle (1975) and indicate where his maxims are violated.2 Another focus of the analysis was on colour; for this reason Anishchanka, Speelman and Geeraerts’ (2010) tripartite representational cline was a useful tool in the categorisation of colour descriptions. The recurrent linguistic features and lexical choices in the advertising copy and product descriptions on the webpages were classified according to their message content and projected impact on the reader. Where unusual lexical choices (with their surrounding collocates) and lexical

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boosting were identified, for example in the colour descriptions of lipsticks, concordances were carried out in an attempt to decipher the rhetorical strategies adopted to create the pragmatic intent of these groupings, according to the image evoked in the overall implicit message of persuading the potential customer to buy the product. The emerging semantic prosody was also taken into consideration where unexpected “negative” words took on a more positive connotation in the context of cosmetic advertising (e.g. lethal look; Just Bitten) with respect to sexual allure and effect of the product on the wearer . Long strings of complex noun phrases with extensive premodification, into which technical information was packed, were also isolated for a closer examination of the kind of information contained in the component parts. And finally for contrastive purposes between more global or more local settings, particular attention was paid to Italian advertisements of make up and beauty products in the light of any code-mixing or foreignizing strategy by means of the retaining of English words in the Italian noun phrases.

4. Findings and Discussion 4.1 Strategies for lexical choice According to Delin (2000, 132), lexis in ads is likely to be familiar, positive (and thus more persuasive) and memorable. The fact that ads are memorable, she claims, suggests that “some breaks from the ‘ordinary’ pattern are desirable.” Furthermore, she links the above characteristics to Leech’s (1990, 9ff) categories of meaning: affective (positive and negative evaluation of the object being referred to), connotative (real world associations with the concept referred to), and collocative (the placing of a word near to others). A preliminary examination of the lexical choices in the UK/USA magazine ads confirmed the above classification; it was immediately evident that products are described in order to be remembered.

4.2 Synaesthesia One of the most frequent strategies adopted by the copywriter is that of intensive lexical boosting and the inclusion of unusual collocates in the form of rhetorical devices, such as the synaesthetic metaphor which is defined by Pennarola (2009, 68-69) as

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a particular kind of metaphor associating terms which belong to sensory domains: for example, sight and hearing (Lips that scream with colour, Rimmel); touch and taste (Velvet. The irresistible hot chocolate, Cadbury); sight and touch (For colour at its softest, L’Oréal). In advertising it represents a hedonistic invitation to enjoy all the senses.

This particular strategy was already in vogue in the 1950’s as seen in a Revlon 1957 ad (Figure 1) for lipstick and matching nail varnish. There is lexical boosting where the colours are described in the bodycopy as being delicious, thus favouring the sense of taste accentuated in the bodycopy:“Persian Melon … it’s the most delicious shade this side of paradise. A luscious golden melon with a coral flavor for lips and matching fingertips!” The repetition of melon in the second sentence emphasises the fruit more than the lipstick which is focused on nevertheless in the image in the bottom-right corner. The whole picture also emphasises the sexual allure of the model in a provocative pose, the whole length of her long legs evident to where her dress falls open. The dress she is wearing is red, the same colour as the cosmetic; the part of her body covered in the dress is to the right of the ad, where the verbal information is packed.3

Figure 1. Revlon Persian Melon Lipstick (Dade 2007, 50)

A more recent Clinique ad for lipstick (Figure 2) incorporates no less than four senses into its message: sight, smell, touch and taste in a colourful visual image of pots or dishes of liquid, each with the same colour as the accompanying fruit.

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Figure 2. Clinique Lipstick

From the bodycopy we read that the lipstick is called Lip Smoothie (touch), it is luscious and juicy (taste); its ingredients, as the coloured visual emphasises, offer “a healthy-looking dose” (sight); it is also fragrance-free (smell). Yet what is particularly interesting is the less than logical collocation mixes of the senses, where colours (sight) are conceived according to their taste and their consistency: “Brushed on luscious colour and shine in 10 juicy, moisture-rich blends.” This particular ad offers an example of the current trend of Nutricosmetics, where the potential customer is informed that the product is beneficial healthwise (here the ingredient Vitamin C as an anti-oxidant, as well as the fact that the product has been tested for allergies). The term luscious is also extended to mascara, which will give eyelashes a “luscious look”.

4.3 Noun Compounding and Collocation mixes Following on from the above example, eye make-up was often described in terms of the “look” it would offer the wearer: “lash look” was a frequent noun + noun compound with both more and less predictable lengthy premodifications (often resorting to synaesthesia) describing the properties of the mascara, as revealed by a search using Webcorp: the perfect lash look the smudge-free lash look a perfectly separated, defined and lengthened lash look a soft & separated, yet intensely black lash look Volumised, Extended, Lifted Lash look luscious lashes today! Eyelash Extensions Luscious Lash Look $180

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Collocation mixes adopting the synaesthetic metaphor force the reader to equate sight with taste (“mouth-watering colours”). Indeed, according to her lexical knowledge, she may well expect a more familiar construction “a delicate shade of + colour”, but be confronted with “a delicious shade of + colour” with further unexpected mixing of the senses as in “marshmallow pink, shell pink, grape nectar”. A Webcorp search also afforded an extension of this unit of meaning to accessories (“the popular ‘Two Tone shoulder Bag’, in a delicious shade of Merlot”), clothing (“their sheeny shint skirt is a delicious shade of blue”), and bed linen (e.g., “fabulous Cornish blankets made exclusively for us. A delicious shade of cream with chocolate and turquoise stripes”). As is evident from the above examples, the co-text remains with food and wine collocates to describe colour (Merlot, cream with chocolate). The lipstick colours in the subcorpus provided copious examples following this trend where colour is implied in the sense of taste in the component parts of compound noun groups (noun + noun): “cocoa wine, caramel glace, coffee break, rum raisin, chocolate velvet” (taste and touch), “champagne on ice, chocolate cherry, raspberry bite”; or noun groups with adjectival pre-modification: “spicy cinnamon, spiced brandy, iced mocha, iced spice, mulled wine, wild berries, stormy coffee”.4 The name of a lipstick can also imply sound that connotes a sense of happiness, for example Pink Giggles, and fragrances refer, naturally but not only, to the sense of smell but taste and sight as well, as in the following example of “Lily & Spice” that recalls a nursery rhyme describing little girls. The dramatic effect gained with unusuality and relexicalisation (Partington 1996) can be noted in the juxtaposition of components in the noun phrases of the “Man-eating colours” and “lethal lipstick colours” kind, where the implicit message highlights the seductive effect the product will make. Indeed, the reader is more familiar with the expression “looks that kill”, connoting negativity, but in the context of cosmetic ads it is a different matter, it is the colour that kills, since the lemma “kill” is chosen to connote a sense of attraction.

4.4 Colour combinations Let us now see whether our own analysis of colours fits into Anishchanka, Speelman and Geeraerts’ (2010) tripartite representational cline that they trace between direct colour (e.g., pink), descriptive naming (rose pink) and evocation (morning calm).5 According to the above classification, the corpus did not produce examples of a colour tout court

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(apart from Revlon’s claim to its own colour red in “Revlon Red”) but it provided copious examples of the other two categories, which describe the colour in some way by using objects or substances in pre-modifications (“Porcelain Pink, Soft Shell Pink, Soft Silver Red, Sandalwood Beige”) or even without any specific reference to a colour, but what the copywriters presumably associate it with in order to evoke a certain effect on the potential buyer (“Champagne on Ice, Foiled Passion, Sparkling Cider, Tiger Lily, Wild Berries). We can extend the above classifications further by adding some of the prevalent rhetorical strategies that emerge. There may be, for example, intertextuality6 with clear references to films, literature, sayings and songs (“Gentlemen Prefer Pink, Pinkerbelle, Rose and Shine, In the Buff, Toast of New York, Wine with Everything”). Alliteration (with or without the basic colour alluded to) is common (“Cha Cha Cherry, Fuscia Fusion, Midnight Mauve, Paparazzi Pink, Plush Purple, Porcelain Pink, Pink Cha Cha, Ravish Me Red, Revlon Red”). Other colour descriptions clearly rhyme (“Think Pink, Wink for Pink”). Furthermore, the customer’s imagination is stretched in those cases where an emotional or provocative state is evoked (“Bold Berry, Flushed, Flirt, Foiled Passion, Heart Throb”), or there appears to be no rhyme or reason for the choice of name: “Paparazzi Pink, Pink in the Afternoon, Baby Berry, Nude Attitude, Perkiest Pink, Modernist Pink, Posh Pink” although most of these examples have some form of personification in their meaning. Thus we have seen the importance of connoting colour, a strategy that appears to have been introduced from the time when women were allowed more freedom out of the home and considered in their own right and own femininity. There are simpler noun group constructs in the colour range of Gala lipsticks in the 1940s (Figure 3) with reference mainly to objects (cock’s comb, cyclamen, chestnut, lantern red, red sequin”:

Figure 3. Gala colours in the 1940s (Dade 2007, 39)

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The dramatic effect is evident in the lexical boosting of the colour name (Dynamite) and visual. We can also note a rare example of selfglorification of the company (“Another color triumph by Revlon”) which confirms the importance of colour:

Figure 4. Revlon Dynamite (Dade 2007, 36)

4.5 New words The creativity of cosmetics companies is evident nowadays in the coining of new words to describe their products “plumalicious” (Revlon), “choco-licious” (Revlon), and “berrylicious” (Elizabeth Arden), which again highlight synaesthesia with a recognisable suffix, taken from the lemma “delicious” and added to the initial component, that is, a noun denoting tempting food (fruit or chocolate). Similarly Revlon’s message tends to consist of redundancy in the noun group of a lipstick described as “super lustrous petaluminous”. Max Factor also adopts a strategy for the compounding of the lines of its lipsticks and nail varnishes: “Lipfinity” and “Nailfinity”. Advertising in general has a liking for wordplay (see also Pennarola 2009) and cosmetic bodycopy is no exception. Revlon incites its customers to use its mascara and “Be fabulash” by punning. Sephora is likewise prone to manoeuvring phonology in the coining of “Bare Escentuals” with the homophone “essentials”.

4.6 Semantic prosody Results also provided examples of unexpected semantic prosody where negative connotations become positive: the concept of plumpness is quite

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acceptable when describing lips as being made plumper thanks to a particular lipstick and by an ingredient (Ceramide Triple Complex) that helps to keep the skin moisture with a hapax legomenon “skin-plumping” : LIPSTICK Ceramide Ultra Lipstick: Coral Show Off Your Lips. Show Off Your Lipstick. This lustrous, color-saturated lipstick, infused with Volulip™ delivers brilliant moisturizing color, lasting comfort and shine for a plumper, fuller looking lips. Lips look fuller, more defined ... feel youthfully smooth, soft and nourished. Ceramide Triple Complex helps strengthen and retexturize skin's appearance and hold vital skin-plumping moisture within the skin. Lips look fuller and younger.

Again, bitten lips, like nails, are, from an aesthetic point of view, undesirable.

Figure 5. Revlon Just Bitten Lip Stain

The bodycopy of the Revlon ad (Figure 5) reads: NEW JUST BITTEN lip stain bite your lip Ripen your lips with a juicy light wash of berry-kissed color. For a look you can’t resist, dot the apples of your cheeks with

Stain usually has negative connotations (stain on the carpet, coffee stains,…). However, to create positive associations, the semantic field of food, and in particular fruit, relating thus to taste is highlighted by the

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choice of “ripen”, juicy, berry, apples.” It is worth noting that the Revlon line Just Bitten is also extended to nails, again highlighting incongruity in the naming of a product that offers positive aesthetic features in the visual and a negative one in the verbal text. In this case, the visual obviously prevails over the verbal. The act of biting can have positive connotations and thus a positive effect. “Pinch” too is something that often hurts but not when it refers to the colour of cheeks; again a dynamic verb contributes to the creation of colour in a person’s cheeks. Sexual allure (Figure 6) is created through the use of a product, but as we have noted, lexical choice may provide less frequent connotations or secondary meanings of a lemma. NEW Pinch Me™ Sheer Gel Blush from Revlon. In 4 tasty shades.

Figure 6. Superdrug pout paint

Superdrug promotes a lipstick called “pout paint”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “pout” as: v. push one’s lips or bottom lip forward as an expression of silky annoyance or to make oneself look sexually attractive.

While the first definition implies a negative semantic prosody in the act of moving lips to express a negative attitude, the second confirms the positive connotations of the meaning intended in the naming of the product. This has also a lot to be said for Grice’s (1975) maxim of clarity; however, the reader is likely to understand the message according to the

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second definition, assisted by the visual which disambiguates, and which focuses on the model’s expression with slightly parted lips. Let us now move on to the next part of our analysis, where we will notice further examples of Grice’s maxim of clarity being stretched to the limit in terms of comprehensibility.

4.7 Strategies for noun phrasing With reference to the complex structuring of information content, cosmetic ads abound in extended pre-modified noun phrases that describe the intrinsic quality and purpose of a product in English. The following examples show how the number of component parts that modify the head word is increased: Revlon Grow Luscious Plumping Mascara (5 words) NEW Revlon Grow Luscious Plumping Waterproof Mascara (7 words) REVLON LUXURIOUS COLOR™ DIAMOND LUST™ EYE SHADOW (7 words) NEW! REVLON AGE DEFYING WITH DNA ADVANTAGE™ CREAM MAKEUP (9 words)

The above noun phrases are not restricted to nouns or adjectives, but also verbal structures (Grow Luscious), or highly complex embedding (Age defying with DNA advantage cream makeup). If we now look more closely at the information content of the following extended noun phrases, we can see that it is divided into smaller units of meaning: NEW / Chubby Stick/ Moisturizing /Lip Colour Balm Vitamin C/ Lip Smoothie / Anti-Oxidant /Lip Colour Sheer Tint Release /Advanced Multi-Protection /Anti-oxidant/ Moisturizer

In the first example, working back from right to left from the head, we note the properties and functions of the cosmetic: the head word is balm, which is qualified as colour balm, and then its location of use, lip colour balm (a three noun compound); then if we continue leftwards, we discover what it does, it moisturizes; then the actual shape of the product is included, a stick; but what kind of stick, a chubby one; finally there is emphasis on the novelty, the fact that either it did not exist before or that it is an updated version, i.e. new. As noted earlier, these noun phrases are allowed grammatical licence where the lexical boosting with a modal verb is embedded: CERAMIDE Ceramide Eye Must Haves Set

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The results from a contrastive analysis of the above phenomena of information packaging in relation to foreignising and domesticating strategies (Schäffner 1995, Venuti 1995) provided similar yet different messages in present-day promotional cosmetic ads published in Italy. However, the extensive noun phrasing has the added complication of English terms that are not necessarily understandable to an Italian readership even in the increasingly globalised world of marketing. Indeed, the mixing of languages in complex Italian noun phrases presents new hybrid compound forms at the extreme end of the scale of interpretability, as the following examples show: … dall’esclusivo Hyaluronic Acid Nano-Vector, un pool di acidi ialuronici (Dermolab) Amarena make-up si ispira al cubo colorato per creare il Beauty Box … riceverai un trattamento gratuito di 7 Ceramide Gold Ultra Restorative Capsules Trattamento Ristrutturante Intensivo per Viso e Collo. EYE LINER PROFESSIONALE GLITTER EFFETTO SOLE Arricchito con l’esclusiva CPT Technology contenuta nei trattamenti Ceramide Plump Perfect Ultra Skincare, il nuovissimo Make Up Ceramide distende e rassoda la pelle del viso per un incarnato più naturale, giovane e luminoso Nuova maschera Viso Turnaround 15-Minute Facial

While the emphasis in modern times is to reinforce not only credibility and reliability in the validity of the product together with safety in its consumption, it would seem that a potential Italian buyer, who has no extensive knowledge of English, will be simply confronted with impressive looking scientific credentials. That is not to say that the same does not occur with the native speaker who might likewise be taken in by the elaborate information without really knowing or bothering to find out what 7 Ceramide Gold Ultra Restorative Capsules really are. One strategy that assists comprehension is translation in the text: … La nostra formula esclusiva Super Anti-Oxidant Complex ha un’azione così potente come nessun altro anti-ossidante da noi testato

The above example shows a clearly recognisable equivalent, while another bodycopy might explain the meaning of peeling with its translation as “esfoliazione”. Other borrowings have come quite naturally

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into the Italian language (e.g., “look”, “glamour”) without any change of meaning in the transposition from one language to the other, although the part of speech may be forced into use as another category, as in the following case, from an original English noun that functions as an adjective in the Italian structure (“per ciglia meravigliosamente glamour”). The creation of new lexemes in Italian, on the other hand, seem to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, as with the suffixing in “liftato” derived from the recurrent lifting in cosmetic language.7 Finally, the persuasive element of the descriptive language of cosmetic advertising is present in both local and global marketing strategies. Whereas on the one hand, we may find that products are “beautifully priced”, on the other we note their “prezzo seducente”, thus returning us to Barthes’ (1977) mythical meaning of beauty products.

5. Conclusions In conclusion, taking inspiration from Bhatia’s (1993, 2002) studies regarding genre analysis as a reflection of the complex realities of the world of institutionalised communication, this chapter has attempted to identify the strategies employed in the advertisements of cosmetics in both a diachronic and synchronic light. Copywriters were certainly at work manipulating language as far back as the 1940s and even earlier. Yet what is quite apparent is that their inventiveness has increased over the years by creating new descriptions through a continuing evolution in meaning extensions, in particular to colour terminology alongside the ever developing image of feminine beauty in relation to sensuality and sexual allure. The synaesthetic metaphor in particular and the colours elaborated by means of relexicalisation and unusuality evoke mental images in the multidimensional meaning of nouns (see also Graumann 2007). To add to the word play identified in the analysis, the topic of this chapter focussed mainly on two characteristics of the language of make-up – lexical choice and information structuring of the noun group. Indeed, this language is all “made up” to encode the mythical image of feminine beauty as dictated by the fashion of the time (e.g. Nutricosmetics). While the concept of feminine beauty is likely to remain a constant in the years to come, future studies are more than likely to incorporate new linguistic forms of advertising licence that will not only attract the potential buyer to a particular product (even though the technical details may impress without being understood) but also convince her that she will obtain the desired effect that the descriptions evoke and the images portray.

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Bibliography Anishchanka, Alena, Speelman, Dirk and Geeraert, Dirk. “Fom rose pink to morning calm: Descriptive and evocative color names in advertising, abstract available at http://www.uni-landau.de/anglistik/LAUD10/ abstracts/anishhanka.htm. 2010. Last accessed 12/02/2013. Barthel, Diane. 1988. Putting on appearances: Gender and Advertising. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, London: Fontana. Bhatia, Vijay. K. 1993. Analysing Genre: Language in Use in Professional Settings. London and New York: Longman. —. 2002. “Applying Genre Analysis: a multi-perspective model,” IBÉRICA 4: 3-19. Bignell, Jonathan. 2002. Media Semiotics. An Introduction. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, Dade, Penny. 2007. All Made Up. 100 years of cosmetics advertising. London: Middlesex University Press. Graumann, Andrea. 2007. “Color names and dynamic imagery”. In Speaking of colors and odors, edited by Martina Plümacher and Peter Holz, 129-140. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Grice, Paul. 1975. "Logic and conversation". Syntax and semantics. 3: Speech acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Gunn, F. 1973. The Artificial Face: A History of Cosmetics, Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Kelly-Holmes, Helen. 2005. Advertising as Multilingual Communication, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leuwen. 1998. Reading Images – The grammar of visual design, London: Routledge. Leech, Geoffrey. 1966. English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain, London: Longman. Mansfield, Gillian. 2007. “Fra comunicazione multilinguistica e comunicazione pragmatica nei cartelli stradali e nella pubblicità cartacea.” In Il Traduttore Visibile, edited by Teresina Zemella, 123160. Parma: Monte Università Parma. Partington, Alan. 1996. “An all-American villain. A corpus based study of relexicalisation in newspaper headlines.” Textus 9:1: 43-62. Pennarola, Cristina. 2009. Nonsense in advertising. «Deviascion» in English Print Ads, Napoli: Liguori Editore.

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Pointer, Sally. 2005. The Artifice of Beauty: A History and Practical Guide to Perfumes and Cosmetics, Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Schäffner, Christina and Helen Kelly-Holmes. 1995. Cultural Functions of Translation, Clevedon Philadelphia Adelaide: Multilingual Matters. Séguinot, Françoise. 1995. “Translation and Advertising: Going Global.” In Cultural Functions of Translation, edited by Christina Schäffner and Helen Kelly-Holmes, 55-71. Clevedon Philadelphia Adelaide: Multilingual Matters. Soanes, Catherine and Angus Stevenson. 2008. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eleventh Edition, revised. Tungate, Mark. 2011. Branded Beauty: How marketing changed the way we look, Philadelphia: Kogan Page. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. “Translation and the Formation of Cultural Identities.” In Cultural Functions of Translation, edited by Christina Schäffner and Helen Kelly-Holmes, 9-25. Clevedon Philadelphia Adelaide: Multilingual Matters. Wyler, Siegfried. 2007. “Color terms between elegance and beauty. The verbalization of color with textiles and cosmetics.” In Speaking of colors and odors, 113-128, edited by Martina Plümacher and Peter Holz. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Notes 1

“Domestication is the strategy of making text closely conform to the culture of the language being translated to, which may involve the loss of information from the source text. Foreignization is the strategy of retaining information from the source text, and involves deliberately breaking the conventions of the target language to preserve its meaning.” (Gile, Daniel 2009). Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training. Amsterdam Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co. pp. 251–252). 2 See Grice’s maxim of manner: avoid obscurity of expression; avoid ambiguity. 3 See Kress and Van Leuwen (1998) for the significance of the positioning of elements in an image. 4 See Pennarola (2009, 31-32) for a detailed classification of possible noun phrase structuring, and Wyler (2007, 120) for colour classification in cosmetics “according to the modification of a noun denoting an object by an adjective which is neither a color name nor an adjective referring to tonality or saturation: […] rich cocoa, spiced cider, gilded mist, exotic terracotta, rouge gipsy.” 5 The examples are theirs. 6 Intertextuality: the complex interrelationship between a text and other texts taken as basic to the creation or interpretation of the text http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/intertextuality (last accessed 28.05.2013). 7 See Mansfield (2007) for further analysis.

PART II: GENRES IN INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS

CHAPTER SIX MODALITY AND PERFORMATIVITY IN LEGISLATIVE TEXTS ACROSS JURISDICTIONS: THE CASE OF SHALL GIULIANA GARZONE

1. Aim and Scope In the last few years the drafting of legislative and, more in general, normative texts in English has undergone considerable changes in many jurisdictions, mainly under the more or less direct influence of the Plain Language and Plain English movements, which have been very active in certain regions of the world, in a general context where increasing emphasis is being laid on the need to make legal texts more comprehensible for law professionals and lay citizens alike (for an overview cf. Williams 2011). The main aspects of English legal texts on which these movements have focused their critical attention are: intricate syntactic structures (including the one-sentence rule) and discontinuities, verbosity, recourse to words deriving from Latin and French and to obsolete Middle English words today hardly utilized in any other area of communication, recurrent use of archaic or convoluted and unnecessary phraseology and routines, etc. (cf. among others Cutts 1998). Arguments have been put forth in favour of a linguistic and stylistic improvement of legal texts, with some of the proposals for change being universally accepted, while others have attracted objections, giving rise to a debate, in some cases rather animated (cf. among others Kimble 1992, 1994-1995; Garner 1996/2007; Cutts 1998, 2001; Cutts and Wagner 2002; Foley 2002; Lauchman 2005; Asprey 2010). Amongst the most controversial areas for which improvement has been advocated, there is the use of modals, and in particular the use of shall.

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Recourse to the latter modal has traditionally been indicated as a distinctive trait of legal discourse, but according to critics it is frequently used “mindlessly” (Kimble 1992: 72) and “promiscuously” (Garner 1998: 940) in legislative discourse on account of its largely context-dependent (Asprey 1992: 82) and ambiguous meaning (Lauchman 2005: 47), all too often performing the function of a purely stylistic trait (Bowers 1989: 294; Foley 2001: 194). In this intellectual climate and under the pressure of Plain Language movements, which in some countries have also led to the setting up of Plain Language Commissions, in various jurisdictions shall has been completely expunged from legislative drafting. Among such countries there are New Zealand, Australia and South Africa (cf. Williams 2006: 238-239). This chapter deals with issues related to the use of shall in legislative texts in countries where it is still in use, firmly grounding the discussion in data thanks to recourse to automatic text interrogation routines (Scott 2010) and enlarging the focus to consider other modals deployed in parallel to, and in replacement of shall. The starting point is the analysis of corpora of legislative texts from the U.K., the U.S. and the European Union. In light of the results obtained, attention then focuses specifically on developments that have occurred in the U.K. in the last four decades, relying on data extracted from two other corpora, collected in 1973 and 2010-2011 respectively. In the conclusions, for purposes of triangulation, some other normative genres for which it has not been possible to collect similarly large corpora are also considered (international contracts, memoranda of understanding, international conventions). The aim is to draw a picture of the status of shall in various jurisdictions worldwide, in a context where, in line of principle, increasing contacts and exchanges in English among professional and legal cultures brought about by globalization may warrant the hypothesis that an ever greater homogenization in legal drafting styles is under way. A related further focus of analysis is on the devices utilized to replace shall in the contexts where it is not used any more, with a view to assessing their viability and their effectiveness in terms of clarity and accessibility. For this purpose, the discussion will rely not only on notions drawn from the relevant literature in linguistics and in legal studies, but also in contiguous disciplinary areas, such as the philosophy of law and philosophy of language, which may provide scientific instruments to shed light on the actual meaning of shall and its usefulness (or uselessness) in legislative/normative texts.

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2. Methods and Materials In light of the above considerations, the analytical toolkit used in this study includes corpus linguistics, which guarantees that observations are rigorously based on specific material evidence, avoiding the gratuitous generalizations derived from personal experience and impressions which have often characterized research on these issues, linguistic and discourseanalytical studies of modality and of legal discourse, as well as the literature on the pragmatics of legal communication produced within the field of the philosophy of language, the philosophy of law and modal logic. As regards materials, the starting point for this study is the analysis of three main corpora, consisting of legislative texts issued respectively in the U.K. (General Public Acts), the U.S. (Federal Acts) and the E.U. (Directives and Regulations), which are taken to be representative of English legal usage in three main legal systems and jurisdictions in the Western world. The texts were collected in 2006 by a doctoral student, Paola Vignati, for her PhD project under my supervision and were later partially integrated in order to obtain three corpora of similar sizes so that data could be easily compared. Most of the legislative measures contained in the corpora were enforced in 2005, except for the U.K. corpus, which includes some texts of 2006, as the number of statutes (General Public Acts) passed in 2005 was not sufficient. Table 1 shows the characteristics of the three corpora. U.K. Number of files Tokens Types Standardized TTR

29 1,175,549 7,340 21.46

USA 426 1,175,281 13,009 26.40

EU 1,024 1,060,250 11,242 28.21

Table 1. Characteristics of main corpora It is to be noted that – as can be seen in Table 1 – the number of files included in each corpus is uneven, on account of the considerable length of U.K. Acts of Parliament in comparison to usually much shorter U.S. statutes and even shorter E.U. Directives and Regulations. When, in the second part of the chapter (cf. §4.3.1 below), attention focuses specifically on the U.K., two other corpora of U.K. statutes, collected respectively in 1973 and 2010-2011, are used in order to look at the phenomena analysed in a short-term diachronic perspective. Finally, in

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the discussion of findings, data relative to other corpora of different legal text genres discussed in studies of the same topic by other authors will be examined briefly.

3. Modal Verbs in Legislative Texts and Problems with Shall The debate on the actual meaning of shall in legal discourse, and criticisms arguing for the need to limit its usage in normative texts or suppress it altogether, essentially centre on its ambiguity in meaning (e.g., among many others, Garner 1998: 940; Nunberg 2001) which allegedly makes its real value difficult to interpret for professionals of the law, and hardly comprehensible for the layman. In particular, among the problems that experts have blamed on shall is the fact that this modal is one of two (the other being will) which are traditionally described and prescribed to be used in standard English to express futurity. Therefore – the argument goes – in legislative texts confusion may arise between pure future and the specific legal meaning of shall (e.g. Bázlik and Ambrous 2009: 65-66), which most authors see as essentially deontic. However, one should consider two main elements: first, in contemporary English the use of shall to express pure futurity is actually rare (cf. Coates 1983: 185), especially in non-British varieties, and evidently bound to subside and disappear altogether in time, except in a very limited number of specific contexts (e.g. in first person questions, e.g. Shall we dance?, and especially in British English); second, cases where shall is actually used only for future reference are by definition in the first person (“In the first person ‘shall’ foretells”, as the first line of an old nursery-rhyme went: cf. Joly and O’Kelly 1990: 359), while according to the tradition – essentially based on prescriptive grammar 1 – in the second and third person shall acquires a deontic colouring, which can be seen as the origin of its legal meaning: this solves all possible misunderstandings, as in legislative texts first-person use of shall is virtually non-existent. It is also to be considered that, as Fries already made clear in a historic paper in the late 1920s, and is now widely recognized by grammarians, all English modals “look to the future for fulfilment” (Fries 1927: 87-88), at least when they are not used in an epistemic sense. Indeed, according to Heine (1995: 29), a variable degree of future-orientedness is one of the five conceptual properties of all modals, including must. Another, more fundamental, problem raised by critics of the use of shall is its actual semantic value in legislative texts – apart from its

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function as a tense marker examined above. Most authors take it for granted that its function is that of imposing an obligation (a sort of extension of its value in what was traditionally called “coloured future” in prescriptive grammars (starting from Fowler 1908), qualifying as deontic. For instance, Trosborg (1995) sees shall as imposing “a high degree of obligation” like must (1995: 34), so that it typically “expresses an obligation in legal acts” (Trosborg 1995: 42). This use by necessity requires that shall should have an animate subject (person or institution) or agent, which is either made explicit, as in Example (1) below, or simply recoverable, as in Example (2) where it is used to express a prohibition: (1) The Commission shall from time to time issue guidance as to: (a) the manner in which local authorities are to exercise their functions under this Act, and (b) […] (U.K. - Gambling Act 2005 25(1))2 (2) No allotment shall be made of shares of a public company offered for subscription unless (a) the issue is subscribed for in full, or (b) […] (U.K. - Companies Act 2006, 4(1))

The inevitable consequence of this exclusively prescriptive interpretation of the meaning of shall is that only its occurrences with an animate personal or institutional subject or actor seem admissible and useful, while occurrences in the passive when no agent is mentioned or recoverable, or those with an impersonal or inanimate subject, seem to be illegitimate and devoid of meaning (how can an obligation be imposed on an abstract entity or a thing?), therefore totally superfluous, as within this line of argument they appear as mere indicators of legal register. This leads some authors, like Bowers (1989: 34), Trosborg (1997: 136) and Thornton (2005: 367), to conclude that shall should only be used “when an obligation is imposed on a person” (Thornton 2005: 367). i.e. a human agent that is specified or recoverable from context, on the basis of the idea that shall is incapable of conveying any other notions. As will be seen in the next few paragraphs, this conviction is erroneous, being based on the false premise that shall in itself is purely deontic, and leads to the consequent formulation of an essentially unjustified rule restricting its use to cases where the subject is a person. It is quite odd that among so many authors that have discussed this problem, sometimes in passionate tones, no one should have thought of going beyond general considerations grounded in linguistics or in legal practice and looking for insights from other disciplines interested in the same problems, as Bice Mortara Garavelli (2001: 56ff) has done, for instance, in discussing legal Italian, intending “to analyse with sufficient

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subtlety linguistic objects which have too often fallen victim to conceptual approximation” (Mortara Garavelli 2001: 57, my translation, emphasis added). What emerges if one consults the rich literature on speech acts and legislative discourse produced in the areas of the philosophy of law and philosophy of language is that, in actual fact, in legal discourse, in addition to specifically deontic (i.e. prescriptive) meaning, shall can also have a performative (i.e. adeontic) value (cf. e.g. Conte 1994a, 1994b; Di Lucia 2001; 2003: 55f.). See the following example: (3) The declaration shall apply, until revocation, to all supplies from the same producer. (EU - Commission Regulation (EC) No 1043, 30/06/2005).

In this case the verb form does not indicate any obligation; it rather produces the extralinguistic effect set out in the utterance (i.e. the effect of applying to all supplies from the same producer) for the only fact of being stated. In other words, it is performative and has a typically ‘thetic’ function in that it “poses”, i.e. establishes, the state of things it expresses.3 In specifically legal terms this property is defined ‘constitutive’ (cf. e.g. Carcaterra 1990/199: 222ff). Another example can be found in (4): (4) There shall be a body corporate to be known as the Charity Commission for England and Wales (in this Act referred to as “the Commission” (U.K. - Charities Act 2006: 6(1))

This utterance is constitutive (thetic) in that it establishes the Charity Commission for the only fact of stating its existence: at the very moment of its enactment, the Act itself produces the effect provided for in its content, with no need to take any further action. That a prima facie deontic form may take on an adeontic function is a well known phenomenon also in other languages, e.g. the modal sollen in German (Spiegelberg 1968), the future imperative and the constitutive subjunctive in Latin (Spiegelberg 1935: 54-56; 74; cf. Di Lucia 2003: 5465).4 The fact of potentially conveying more than one meaning is not peculiar to shall, being a distinctive property of all modals (e.g. Coates 1983: 11ff; Heine 1995). It is important to note that the various possible meanings of each modal often co-exist, with one of the components prevailing in each single instance. While – as pointed out above – in all cases there persists an element of futurity, must and may can be epistemic

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or deontic; in the case of shall, a deontic and a performative component co-exist. See the following example: (5) In subsection (6), the reference to Her Majesty’s private estates shall be construed in accordance with section 1 of the Crown Private Estates Act 1862. (U.K. - Animal Welfare Act 2006, §60(7)).

Here the verb form shall be construed on the one hand imposes on anyone reading the Animal Welfare Act 2006 the obligation to read it in accordance with the 1862 statute referred to; on the other hand, the verb form in its stative value performatively establishes the results of such a construction process, postulating that specific interpretation for the provision. Something similar can be seen in the following statement: (6) Section 100 of TCGA 1992 (exemption for authorized unit trusts, etc) shall be amended as follows. (U.K. - Finance (no_2) Act 2005 §20(1))

In this case the verb form deontically imposes the obligation to perform the action of amending, and at the same time establishes the result of such an action, i.e. the amended text.5 What these two meanings – deontic and performative – have in common is that they both guarantee that a certain state of things will come into existence or that a given action will be performed6 (cf. Garzone 2001: 165). In the next section, data obtained from the analysis of the three main corpora are examined and discussed analytically. The discussion will exclude occurrences of shall in subordinate clauses.

4. Modal Verbs in Legislative Texts across Jurisdictions: Corpus Analysis The first step in the study presented in this chapter is the examination of frequency lists obtained from the three corpora, considering all modals and semi-modals involved in legislative expression, most of which in drafting manuals and guidelines are indicated to be potential shallsubstitutes, and have been consistently used as such. This will help outline an overall picture of the use of shall and other modals and semi-modal forms in each corpus, presuming that a lower count of shall will be compensated for by an increase in one or more of the alternative options.

Modality and Performativity in Legislative Texts across Jurisdictions

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The results of the analysis are shown in Table 2 below, where all data affected by noteworthy variations are highlighted in boldface.

Shall Must Is to7 Are to May Might Can Could Should Will Would Ought to

U.K. tokens 1,175,549 Count % 1,843 0.15 3,274 0.26 1,340 0.11 578 0.05 6,672 0.53 84