Cultural identities in international, interorganisational meetings: a corpus-informed discourse analysis of indexical we

Abstract

To date, there have been very few studies employing corpus techniques in the analysis of intercultural interactions. This study analyses the indexing of cultural identities in international, interorganisational meetings. The approach used draws on methods and insights from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, professional communication, intercultural studies and identity studies. It explores how a statistically significant single item, we, in specialised corpora of authentic professional meetings, signals different identities at different moments in the unfolding discourse. Specifically, two research questions are answered:

1. What cultural identities are explicitly indexed in business meetings through we?

2. What can corpus linguistics contribute to IC studies?

While the first question comprises the bulk of the paper, the second question is discussed in the final section, along with limitations of the approach applied here.

現在まで、コーパス分析法に基づく異文化間相互行為 (Spinizi, 2011) の先行研究はごくわずかしか行われていない。本研究では異文化間および組織間のミーティングにおける、参加者の文化的アイデンティティ示唆について分析する。本研究はコーパス をベースとしたディスコース分析法を行い、プロフェッショナルコミュニケーション研究、国際文化およびアイデンティティ研究に基づき分析結果を解明する。 これらの分析では実際の国際ビジネスミーティングにおける対話を編纂したコーパス使用し、ミーティング中に展開される対話中の単語“we”の使用について統計分析を行う。さらに単語“we”の使用によるアイデンティティ示唆およびそのタイミングについて言及している。

本研究の研究テーマは下記の通りである：

1. ビジネスミーティングにおける、単語“we”の使用によって示唆される文化的アイデンティティ

2. コーパス言語の異文化研究への貢献

本研究の主要研究テーマは上記１となる。文字制限を考慮し、研究テーマ２については論文最終章にて議論を行った。

Keywords:

• ‘we’
• professional discourse
• cultural identities
• corpus linguistics
• international meetings
• interorganizational meetings

Acknowledgements

I would like to genuinely thank the two anonymous reviewers who offered perceptive, critical yet encouraging comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper, and to the editors for further feedback and support. I would also like to thank Tony Young and Alex Gilmore for comments on the paper.

Notes on contributor

Michael Handford is Professor of the Institute for Innovation in International Engineering Education at the University of Tokyo, where he lectures graduates on professional discourse analysis and professional intercultural communication. He also works as a communication consultant at several Japanese companies.

Notes

1. Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus, copyright Cambridge University Press. Directors Profs Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy. Extracts 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 are taken from the CANBEC corpus.

2. The CCC corpus is funded by a grant from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, No. 25370423. Copyright M. Handford. Extract 5 is taken from the CCC corpus.

3. SOCINT is part of the CANCODE corpus, copyright Cambridge University Press. Directors Profs Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy.

4. The shortest meeting, meeting 3, contains 10,412 words in total. Meetings 1 and 2 are longer, therefore, only the first 10,400 words of these meetings were analysed.

5. It is the top keyword in the other two meetings.