About this Event
Title: Towards a linguistic theory of trust: insights from discourse analysis and experimental pragmatics
Speaker: Matteo Fuoli, University of Birmingham
Trust has been studied extensively in psychology, sociology and business studies, but has so far received scant attention from linguists. Yet, in both our intimate and distant relationships (e.g. friends vs politicians) we pay close attention to what others say and how they say it, looking for clues about their trustworthiness. In this talk I will explore the important question of how trust can be built and restored using language, with a focus on discursive ‘trust work’ in organizational settings. I will present the findings of recent studies in which I use a combination of discourse analytical and experimental methods to identify and test the effects of some of the linguistic devices companies and their employees use to negotiate trust. The results of these studies offer insights into the linguistic mechanisms of trust and raise provocative questions about the relationship between language, ethics and power. From a methodological perspective, these studies show that experimental methods can be fruitfully combined with discourse analysis to provide a complete and falsifiable account of the function and persuasive effects of linguistic choices.
Matteo Fuoli’s bio
Matteo Fuoli is Associate Professor of corpus-based discourse analysis at the University of Birmingham (UK). His research draws on an interdisciplinary mix of corpus, experimental and data science methods with discourse analysis to study the linguistic mechanisms at the heart of important social phenomena and issues, such as trust, polarization and climate change. Matteo tweets @MatteoFuoli.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Aston University, Aston Street, Birmingham, United Kingdom
USD 0.00