Look Who's Talking

Abstract

Management is a symbolic activity that depends to a great extent on a manager's control of language resources. However, relatively little is known about the linguistic and pragmatic features of managers' spoken discourse in a range of speech events common in organisations (e.g., meetings, negotiations, presentations, and so on). Drawing on a corpus of authentic business meetings videotaped at a large airline in Hong Kong, this article investigates a number of aspects of the managerial discourse that occurs in business meetings (chair-talk). Three specific aspects of “chair-talk” are considered: the proportion of chair-talk that occurs in business meetings, the patterns of speech acts that commonly occur in chair-talk, and the ways in which chairs convey command-oriented directive speech acts. These findings are then discussed within the context of such issues as hierarchical power structure in organisations, the function of different meeting types, the role of directness and indirectness in personal relationships, and linguistic tolerance in intercultural encounters.