Linguistic variation in the discourse of outsourced call centers

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7750752
AutoresEric Friginal (0000-0001-5956-3674, Georgia State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen10
Número6
Páginas715-736
Fecha de publicación2008-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaDiscourse Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1461-4456 • E-ISSN: 1461-7080
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1461445608096570
OpenAlexW1997537326
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas14
Referencias citadas11

This study explores linguistic variation in outsourced call centers involving Filipino call-takers and American callers engaged in various types of customer service transactions. The specific goals of this study are: 1) to establish the statistical co-occurrence of linguistic features in outsourced call center discourse; and 2) to examine how the speakers use these features and patterns of speech based on role (as agent or caller), gender, and the types of service transactions (or `accounts'). The data for analysis come from a corpus of call center texts collected in the Philippines ( N of texts = 364, approximately 453,630 words). The research design follows a quantitative multi-dimensional framework developed by Biber (1988) for the extraction and interpretation of linguistic co-occurrence in the corpus. Three linguistic dimensions are extracted and interpreted microanalytically: 1) Addressee-Focused, Polite, and Elaborated Information vs Involved and Simplified Narrative; 2) Planned, Procedural Talk; and 3) Managed Information Flow. Results show that the discourse of agents and callers are different in linguistic and textual composition across these extracted dimensions. Similarly, accounts and participants' gender are both found to affect linguistic choices in the transactions

Business · Call centre · Linguistics · Narrative · Politeness · Sociology · Computer Science · Digital Communication and Language · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Psychology