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Lingua Inglese I 2018-19 (Proff. Marek Łukasik / Virginia Pulcini)
Baglivo Marika
Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e
Culture Moderne
Degree course in Foreign Languages for International Communication
Date 2/07/
How corporate communication “impacts” on customers: linguistic and multimodal
analysis of the term impact in the Sustainability Corpus
Abstract
This research paper aims to explore the function of the term impact in the business area, which is extracted from the Sustainability Corpus created on Sketch Engine, and its contribution to the construction of a company’s frame. In a first section, the shades of meaning of the word impact depending on different economic and business contexts will be discovered through a lexical and linguistic analysis of the item with the main tools (Word Sketch, Concordances, Collocations, N- Grams) provided by Sketch Engine. Secondly, the official website of the multinational company Coca-Cola will be reviewed as a multimodal artefact whose combination of different modes leads to the building of the society’s identity and to an effective business communication. Keywords : Sketch Engine; corpus linguistic analysis; multimodal discourse analysis; Sustainability
1. Introduction
The definition that the Cambridge dictionary gives of the term impact as a noun is “a powerful effect that something, especially something new, has on a situation or person”. This definition implies that the effect has to be “powerful” so that it is perceived and, in most cases, it is linked to a consequent transformation of the situation or the person. However, it is not specified whether it refers to a positive or a negative effect. Nevertheless, this research paper will show how, especially in business communication, the term impact is most widely used with a negative connotation and it usually conveys negative situations, as it will be demonstrated through the Word Sketch, the Concordances and the Collocations analyses in Sketch Engine. Two sections can be distinguished in this paper.
The first section will be focused on the linguistic examination of the English lexical item impact , gathering data resulting from the analytical work on Sketch Engine, detecting common and unusual usages in context and identifying the different shades of sense of the item, especially for what concerns business and economic field. According to Sinclair, the independence of the word as a unit of meaning is questioned such as in the case of “compounds”, which combine two words creating a new meaning, different from the specific meaning of each word taken as an individual unit. Compounds prove how it is necessary taking into account the linguistic context of the item for the meaning to emerge (Sinclair 1996). Since the word impact is withdrawn between common key words of the Sustainability Corpus, the second section of this research paper will explore the occurrence of the word impact in the official website of the Coca-Cola Company. It will be the subject of a multimodal discourse analysis, which will take into account the set of modes in the homepage and the Sustainability webpage: in this way, it will be explained how they contribute to form the portrait of the company and help it to reach the global market, empowering the enterprise’s credibility and value.
2. Methodology
With the aim of proposing a careful analysis of the lexical item impact , the first step was the creation of a small-scale corpus , which is “a collection of documents, and instances of words come from a variety of documents representing different types of text” (Kilgarriff, Kosem 2011: 32). For this research the Sustainability Corpus, which is a corpus of sustainability sections of corporate websites, was generated. Then, the second step was the selection of the word to analyse from the list of Key Words, a tool provided by Sketch Engine for terminology extraction, and also on the basis of its frequency in the focus corpus. Then, the item was explored through different tools. The analysis started from the investigation of the term in the Word Sketch section: this feature allows to get an overview on the word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour through some tables divided by grammatical relations, such as modifiers of the word; verbs with the KWIC as object, etc. Moving forward with the analysis, the word was reviewed in the Concordances section, specifically in the KWIC format: it shows a series of usages in context with the key word centred so that the shades of meaning can be identified simply considering the linguistic unities that precede and follow the item through a vertical reading. The following step was using the Collocations tool which detects combinations and sequences of words that occur together more often: it lists the most frequent collocates of a node, which is impact in this case. Finally, the N-Grams feature was exploited: it
Entering impact in the Word Sketch section (Table 1), it is possible to notice at a glance some evident aspects. First of all, the most common and used modifier of impact in business language and communication is environmental. It is not economic but environmental impact , which is intrinsically linked to the social aspect that appears in the sixth line of the table. People have become more and more sensitive to the environmental issue and it turned necessary for multinational companies to include in their policy sustainability projects and strategies that reduce environmental damage. Secondly, it is interesting to take note of the fact that negative is the second most common modifier of impact , which means that, even if it can express both positive or negative effects, it is more widely used with a negative connotation and it brings to mind negative consequences. This assumption is confirmed by the need of the companies to always reduce, minimize, assess and measure the impact of their corporate policy on the environment, as the list of the verbs with impact as object shows: it may be due to the fact that, for companies, it is more strategic reducing the negative impact than producing a positive one. The fourth list in the Word Sketch screenshot presents the most common items that appear in an “and/or” relation with impact. The first one is risk which, unlike the analysed term, has in its definition a negative connotation: this acknowledges the more ordinary negative use of impact , usually matched with other negative nouns. Nevertheless, the positive connotation of impact is not excluded at all, as underlined not only by the presence of positive as the fourth most used modifier of impact but also of result and progress in the table “impact and/or”: actually it could be said that the reduction of the negative impact automatically produces advantages and positive effects. However, in the light of this examination on Word Sketch, it seems to be more effective and strategic for companies’ business communication to talk about the minimization of negative impacts than the creation of positive ones. It is clear that impact conveys the notion of a “powerful”, a “marked” effect, as the modifier significant remembers, on something concrete such as environment and human rights. The feature Concordances in Sketch Engine allows to observe the behaviour of the item in some specific contexts. So it makes possible to work with the context of the item impact and to learn from it different ways in which the word is used in business communication. As the Word Sketch tool already outlined, enterprises are increasingly involved in sustainability activities aimed to a “green” production: this is why the focus on environmental impact is more and more important. The analysis of Concordances (Table 2 ) restates the extensive use of impact preceded by environmental or climate and followed by - on the environment. In some Concordances lines, adjectives like social and economic always refer to the environmental question.
Table 2. Concordances of the term impact Secondly, the screenshot of Concordances reaffirms that impact is an item linked to necessary operations conducted by a company in order to manage their activities’ effects of: since repeated events are significant in the corpus linguistics analysis (Stubbs 2004), it is important to highlight the fact that minimise is the verb that occur repeatedly on the left of impact. Other verbs like maximise, assess, optimise, reduce and avoid appear on the left of the KWIC: with the exception of the verb maximise and optimise which contain a positive connotation and assess which is neutral, the others ( minimise, reduce, avoid ) are negatively connoted. They are actually matched with negative adjectives or nouns: the screenshot shows adjectives like adverse, severe, negative on the left of the KWIC and the nouns hazards, incidents on its right. This demonstrates how companies prefer talking about impact in a negative way in order to underline their engagement and their efforts to eliminate any possibility of bad consequences and guarantee only a good effect for the society. Furthermore, adjectives like significant and far-reaching suggest once again the concept of fundamental change conveyed by impact.
in the Sustainability corpus. It is followed by negative , while positive is only in the sixth position of the table. However, the item that has the most cooccurences is on , on the right of impact , due to the fact that impact is always linked to something concrete, such as a situation, a context or a person, on which it acts. Then it could be established that reduce is the first verb associated to impact , as it was already found by the Word Sketch tool. In order to have a better overall view of the occurrence of these combinations of words, the N-Grams tool could be very useful, listing sequences of tokens on the basis of the frequency. The analysis conducted by the N-grams feature, selecting a number of tokens from 2 to 4 (Table 4), finally allows to read in an explicit way the increased use of environmental impact and negative impact , after impact on which hold the higher level of frequency in the selected corpus. Table 4. N-Grams containing the word impact
3.2 Multimodal discourse analysis
In order to integrate the linguistic analysis of the lexical item impact , this section will be focused on the way the multinational company Coca-Cola has organized its corporate communication through the official website (https://www.coca-colacompany.com/). In particular, a special attention will be given to the configuration of different linguistic and non-linguistic elements in the analysed
webpage for the purpose of understanding the interrelation between multimodal strategies adopted by the company. Actually, as Emanuela Tenca pointed out, the advent of websites made it possible to relocate printed and material brochures for corporate promotional activity to web- mediated communication through a process called remediation which empowered the former. Then, added to this, a resemiotisation leads to an increasingly widespread use of semiotic resources, called modes (Tenca 2018). Cooperating with a complex hypertext system, which enables to electronically access to other links containing other images or texts, the commercial power of the web was boosted. Figure 1. The official Coca-Cola website (homepage) Multinational companies aiming to reach a global market tend to create a stratified complex website: the Coca-Cola Company, with over 500 brands in more than 200 territories, is one of them. By entering into the Coca-Cola company official website (Figure 1), the first thing that will be noticed is the predominance of the matched colours red, white and black which have always distinguished the company. The homepage is characterized by short texts and key words that constitute the hypertext system, so that, as Garzone stated, the user will prevalently perform navigating actions
Caimotto and Molino remarked (Caimotto, Molino 2011: 3). Actually, the sliding photographs show men committed to recycling or happy workers on green expanses: in this way, the functional load of the image is improved. Very interesting for the multimodal discourse analysis is the insertion of a link to a map (Figure 2) which locates the sustainability projects of the Coca-Cola enterprise all over the world. Figure 2. Map of Coca-Cola global sustainability projects (Available in the Sustainability section) Some icons are placed on different points of the map and each icon has a different colour and an ideational component representing something which is explicated by the legend on the top. This proves the importance of the visual mode in digital communication with the purpose of rapidly detect and select the information needed and to obtain a user-friendly navigation on the website.
4. Discussion of the findings and conclusion
Reviewing collected data it could be assumed that the word impact is gaining prominence in business field as the interest and the attention of global companies for the sustainability question increase. As regards the linguistic and lexical analysis of impact through the Sketch Engine tools, it made possible to get a sense of how multinational companies deals with impacts of their policy on the customers and the society in general, to what kind of impacts they assign the priority and how much importance the power of their impact has. The first part of the analysis proved the growing use of the expression environmental impact and the most common use of impact with a negative connotation in order to match it with verbs as reduce, minimise, avoid which produce a finally positive effect by eliminating the negative impact. As far as the multimodal discourse analysis is concerned, the digital communication introduced unprecedented possibilities for corporate and business communication through the cooperation of remediation and resemiotisation processes. This enables multinational companies to exploit a stratified system which is prevalently a hypertextual system combined with textual and other semiotic modes. The study of the case Coca-Cola proved how the elements’ order in the webpage and the layout are fundamental to meaning-making and to guide the customer’s examination of informational and promotional contents. The considerable involvement of the company in the environmental cause is reiterated and highlighted through different combinations of modes: long descriptive texts, the hyperlink to a sustainability section, images and symbolic photos matched with short texts, the audiovisual of a promotional video and a predominantly visual mode.
Bibliography
Adami, E. (2015) “Multimodality”. Oxford Handbook of Language and Society , edited by O. Garcìa, N. Flores and M. Spotti (2016), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caimotto, M. C., A. Molino (2011) “Anglicisms in Italian as Alerts to Greenwashing: A Case Study”. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD), Vol. 5(1), pp. 1-16. http://cadaad.net/files/journal/CADAAD%202011_Caimotto%20and%20Molino.pdf Garzone, G., “Multimodal analysis”. The Handbook of business discourse, edited by Bargiela- Chiappini, F. (2009), Edinburgh University Press, Ch. 2, pp. 155- 165
