Linguistics: Lunchtime Seminar with Dr. Matteo Fuoli
Time: 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Venue: Room 5040, Level 5
Language is a fundamental tool companies use to achieve a number of key business objectives, such as persuading customers to purchase their products, winning the trust of investors and engaging with stakeholders on social media. While this is a widely-acknowledged fact, cross-disciplinary research combining insights from business studies and linguistics is still scarce. In this talk, I will present two studies in which I use the tools of linguistics to systematically analyze and assess the effects of business communications in two different domains. The first study focuses on corporate social responsibility reports and investigates how companies use language persuasively in these texts to win the trust of stakeholders. The second study seeks to understand what communication style works best for responding to customer complaints on Twitter. By presenting these studies I am to show that theories and methods of linguistics can help us gain fresh insights into the features and effects of business communication.
Key publications:
Fuoli, M. and Hart, C. (2018). Trust-building strategies in corporate discourse: An experimental study. Discourse & Society, 29(5).
Fuoli, M., van de Weijer, J., and Paradis, C. (2017). Denial outperforms apology in repairing organizational trust despite strong evidence of guilt. Public Relations Review, 43, 645-660.
Fuoli, M. (2017). Building a trustworthy corporate identity: a corpus-based analysis of stance in annual and corporate social responsibility reports. Applied Linguistics. doi:10.1093/applin/amw058
Fuoli, M. and Paradis, C. (2014). A model of trust-repair discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 74, 52–69.
Twitter handle: @MatteoFuoli