By Matteo Fuoli and Monika Bednarek

In recent years, there has been growing interest within corpus linguistics in triangulating data and/or methods. This includes combining multiple corpus linguistic techniques, or integrating corpus linguistic analysis with other research methods and data such as interviews or experiments.

To make a contribution to this area of corpus linguistics, we have recently completed a new case study of emotional labour in Twitter webcare interactions, where we combine lexical (frequency) analysis with move and dialogic analysis.

We demonstrate our approach to triangulation using a corpus of Twitter interactions involving passengers and airline customer service agents during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis explores how agents perform emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) in their responses to customers complaints.

The dialogic analysis showcases a novel use of parallel concordance software (originally developed for multilingual corpora), where we use the parallel concordance tool to examine conversational patterns. More specifically, we repurposed this tool for the analysis of dialogic patterns by configuring it in such a way that customers’ tweets were treated as the ‘original’ text and webcare agents’ responses as the ‘translated’ text. This enabled us to retrieve instances of various kinds of emotive language and inspect how they are responded to across interactions (Figure 1).

Such analysis can look beyond messages produced by a single participant to examine turn exchanges between interactants in a corpus. In our case study, we used dialogic analysis to determine how given emotions expressed by the initiator – the complaining customer – are addressed by the responder – a customer service agent.

This dialogic analysis was combined with lexical (frequency) analysis, used to identify micro-level linguistic devices that are used for emotional labour. In addition, move analysis (annotation via UAM Corpus Tool) enabled us to account for the totality of pragmatic acts that are performed and to map them onto emotional labour strategies.

We believe that integrating dialogic analysis is important – especially in corpus-based discourse analysis – because it counters accusations that corpus linguistic studies neglect examining discourse structure or conversational interaction, focusing on patterns across texts rather than patterns within texts.

The relevant article ‘Emotional labor in webcare and beyond: A linguistic framework and case study’ is available here (https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1ef4d1L-nhPmXW). It is currently available for free until 17 April 2022. No sign up, registration or fees are required.

References

Hochschild, A. (1983). The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.