Talking at Work

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxxvi

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2. Pragmatic Markers at Work in New Zealand

   • Bernadette Vine

   Pages 1-25

3. Narrative and Informational Dimensions of AAC Discourse in the Workplace

   • Eric Friginal, Lucy Pickering, Carrie Bruce

   Pages 27-53

4. Spelling as a Last Resort: The Use of Spelling in Workplace Interaction by Speakers with a Speech Impairment

   • Julie Bouchard

   Pages 55-77

5. “I Love Red Hair. My Wife Has Strawberry”: Discursive Strategies and Social Identity in the Workplace

   • Laura Di Ferrante

   Pages 79-97

6. Profiling Agents and Callers: A Dual Comparison Across Speaker Roles and British versus American English

   • Martin Weisser

   Pages 99-126

7. A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of Nonunderstanding in Outsourced Call Center Discourse

   • Stephen Skalicky, Eric Friginal, Nicholas Subtirelu

   Pages 127-153

8. Dealing with Angry Western Customers in Asian Call Centres: A Cultural Divide?

   • Jane Lockwood, Steven James Finch, Neil Ryder, Sarah Gregorio, Ruby De La Cruz, Benjamin Cook et al.

   Pages 155-178

9. Identifying Linguistic Features of Medical Interactions: A Register Analysis

   • Shelley Staples

   Pages 179-208

10. Examining the Discourse of Mental Illness in a Corpus of Online Advice-Seeking Messages

    • Gavin Brookes, Kevin Harvey

    Pages 209-234

11. Identifying Adherence Behaviors through the Study of Patient Talk in English and Spanish

    • Viviana Cortes, Ulla Connor

    Pages 235-253

12. Creating and Exploring Spoken Corpora of Health Communication for Second-Language Training Purposes

    • Leif French, Stephanie Lapointe

    Pages 255-280

13. Back Matter

    Pages 281-284

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This book offers original corpus research in a range of workplace contexts including office-based settings, call center interactions and healthcare communication. Chapters in this edited volume bring together leading scholars in the field of corpus analysis in workplace discourse and include data from multiple corpora. Employing a range of qualitative and quantitative analytic approaches including Conversation Analysis, Linguistic Profiling and Register Analysis, the book introduces unique specialized corpus data in the areas of Augmentative and Alternative Communication, nursing, and cross-cultural communication, among others.

• call center discourse
• healthcare discourse
• specialized corpus data
• cross-cultural communication
• Augmentative and Alternative Communication
• communication
• corpus linguistics
• discourse
• linguistics
• science
• semantics
• social science
• sociolinguistics
• Corpora
• discourse analysis

“Talking at Work is an amazing collection of eleven chapters addressing various aspects of workplace interactions ranging from the pragmatics of interacting with colleagues, to angry call center interactions to interactions with health care providers. Talking at Work also explores less commonly addressed aspects of workplace communications including the discourse of AAC (Augmentative or Alternative Communication) devices and strategies. In addition to the range of topics covered, it also showcases a variety of analyses. Altogether, Talking at Work provides rich linguistic descriptions of a variety of workplace interactions.” (Randi Reppen, Professor, Northern Arizona State University, USA)

“While the general workplace types will be familiar to readers, many of the specific contexts are likely to be new – such as office interactions that depend on augmentative and alternative communication devices and healthcare interactions that consist of teenagers andmedical providers on an advice website. The language foci and analytical methodologies, too, are diverse. More typical quantitative techniques from corpus linguistics and more qualitative approaches such as conversation analysis co-exist comfortably in the book, and language is investigated at all levels - words, grammar, pragmatic markers, speech acts, and more. Readers interested in workplaces will find new perspectives on workplace discourse. Corpus linguists—even those not focused on workplaces—will be interested to learn about the expansion of corpora and corpus techniques in recent years.” (Susan Conrad, Professor, Portland State University, USA)

• Literature and Languages, Texas A&M University - Commerce, Commerce, USA

  Lucy Pickering

• Applied Linguistics and ESL, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

  Eric Friginal

• English, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

  Shelley Staples

Lucy Pickering is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics & TESOL and Director of the Applied Linguistics Laboratory in Texas A&M University–Commerce, USA.  Her research interests focus on discourse analysis, prosody, SLA and corpus research.


Eric Friginal is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of International Programs at Georgia State University, College of Arts and Sciences, USA. His recent book, Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics: A Guide for Students (2014) is co-authored with his doctoral student Jack A. Hardy.


Shelley Staples is Assistant Professor of English Applied Linguistics/SLAT at University of Arizona, USA. Her research focuses on corpus analyses of specialized spoken and written registers, particularly for applications to health care communication. She recently published The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions (2015). 

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