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

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Talking at Work

Part of the book series: Communicating in Professions and Organizations ((PSPOD))

Abstract

This chapter attempts to demonstrate how using semi-automated corpus-annotation techniques could “objectify” the evaluation of agent and caller speech in customer contact call centres. This is achieved, in part, by profiling particular speaker or speaker groups through an analysis and comparison of the speech acts and other linguistic features used by Filipino agents and callers from American and British language backgrounds. Results suggest that pragmatics-related features of call centre discourse may be indicative of a speaker’s or speaker group’s performance and language variety. The discussion here demonstrates that it is in fact possible to profile individual speakers or groups in specific ways, as well as to judge their efficiency as communicators, at least to some extent. At the same time, it is evident that the behaviour of the different agents and callers potentially points towards certain preferences in the two varieties of English investigated in this study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Downloaded from http://www.ai.sri.com/~communic/amex/amex.html

  2. 2.

    All words, apart from proper nouns, are lowercased in DART to facilitate the processing, and punctuation is only indicated in the form of so-called empty XML elements omitted here.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

    Martin Weisser

Authors
  1. Martin Weisser
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

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

    Lucy Pickering

  2. Applied Linguistics and ESL, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Eric Friginal

  3. English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Shelley Staples

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Weisser, M. (2016). Profiling Agents and Callers: A Dual Comparison Across Speaker Roles and British versus American English. In: Pickering, L., Friginal, E., Staples, S. (eds) Talking at Work. Communicating in Professions and Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49616-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49616-4_5

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-49615-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49616-4

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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