Talking at Work

“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 and medical 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)