“Do you think we have reached the bottom of the trough?”: A corpus-assisted pragmatic analysis of pronouns in earnings calls

Earnings calls have become the primary channel for oral financial reporting in today’s globalized corporate world (Tasker 1998). These events consist of executive presentations of financial performance followed by Q&A sessions with professional analysts who participate via teleconferencing, thus integrating both monologic speech and dialogic interaction. This study investigates the pragmatic dimension of personal pronouns in this ‘virtual’ corporate setting. Pronouns have been shown to be key in establishing interpersonal relations and participant roles in traditional forms of corporate communication (cf. Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris 1997, Thomas 1997). Yet there is a lack of research on their pragmatic role in increasingly important ICT-mediated genres. The study is based on an analysis of the transcripts of 25 earnings calls of multinationals operating in a wide range of industry sectors. Corpus software was implemented to descriptively analyze first and second person pronouns as discrete linguistic features. In addition, the transcripts were manually examined to identify their pragmatic functions that could shed light on interpersonal relations in this communicative environment. More specifically, a quantitative-qualitative approach was utilized to address following research questions: • How are pronouns used by company executives and financial analysts during earnings calls? • How is this usage impacted by the ‘virtual’ setting of the earnings call and the professional role/objectives of the participants? The results indicate that overall pronoun usage mirrors the professional roles associated with ‘information providers’ (company executives) and ‘information seekers’ (financial analysts). Pronoun componential analysis based on inclusive vs. exclusive meanings revealed highly-articulated pragmatic uses that appeared to be strongly linked to the particular interactional context in which members of a close-knit community of practice make strategic linguistic choices to achieve specific professional goals. The findings can help corporate professionals acquire an enhanced awareness of the pragmatics of pronouns, and thus improve the effectiveness of their oral financial reporting.