Tag Archives: linguistics

The Business of Language and the Language of Business

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Entering the world of business is a significant challenge for an anthropologist.  There are questions about the moral ambiguity and exploitative nature of the capitalist system.  There are concerns about the relationship between industrialized nations and the indigenous populations that invariably produce the goods that are sold.  There is the internal debate over globalization and the development of new forms of colonialism.  And finally, how do we speak to our employers in such a way as to effectively communicate our findings?  The first issues are exceedingly difficult to resolve, requiring individuals to look within and determine what is and is not acceptable from his or her philosophical and theoretical understanding of the world.  The last is perhaps less difficult intellectually, but at times just as painful.  Learning a new language is never easy.

Today, my anthropological training is applied to attempting to understand the ways in which culture influences and reflects how people interact with, use, and conceptualize the brands, objects, and products.  The nature of the work is such that research time is often dreadfully limited and the results of fieldwork are frequently ambiguous.  Communicating this to groups that expect simple, concrete answers and recommendations is at times a seemingly insurmountable task.

My first presentation (part of the far distant past) to a combined group of business executives, industrial designers, and marketing experts did not go well.  I was branded as being too academic when I did the unthinkable and used polysyllabic words such as “epistemology” and “neocolonialism” (never mind that I had failed to reduce the finding to a series of bulletpoints on a PowerPoint deck).  To make matters worse, I made the mistake of talking about “building” the business as opposed to “growing the business organically,” an act of sociolinguistic impropriety so great as to draw angry glares and barely concealed threats of banishment.  While my initial reaction was to dismiss their reactions, further reflection brought the realization that I had failed to live up to what I had learned as a student – in essence my reaction was ethnocentric and perhaps arrogant, if we view the business environment as a culture in its own right with rules of behavior and communication – all of which I had largely overlooked or dismissed. 

For an anthropologist interested in practicing in the business world, it is as important that he or she learn the language, so to speak, of that culture as it is for an anthropologist entering the a small, tribal society.  It would be tempting to initially argue that the university settings in which we first learn the basics of our discipline are remiss in preparing students for the corporate life, but this would be shortsighted, inaccurate, and unfair.  Preparation ultimately rests on the practitioner’s shoulders – we receive the fruits of experience of our teachers, but ultimately we must learn the basics of the languages and customs of the people with whom we will live and work on our own.  Unfortunately, learning the communication styles and language of the business world must be done rapidly – the “natives” are largely unforgiving and impatient, casting the “academic” anthropologist out on the street if they do not perform within the approved social and linguistic norms quickly.  And so I have learned, or so I like to believe.

To my mind, the most significant change comes in the way we present our findings.  Increasingly, the preferred mode of communication in the business world is the bullet point.  Findings typically must be distilled to their most basic principles and recommendations asserted with the voice of command.  While painfully frustrating, it often serves to engage the audience enough to get them to begin asking more detailed questions.  This does not mean the abandonment of detailed reports.  Rather, the report serves to defend or expand recommendations.  No matter how dependent they may be on the bullet point, the in-depth report is still an expectation of the employer.  With time it becomes a respected element of the work.  My limited experience has indicted that we are a new voice to business and though respected, we are expected to adapt to the social and linguistic rules of this unforgiving lot.

So, as we talk to the issues that will develop into holistic synergies, we continue to harvest constructive relationships and build a new paradigm – or something along those lines.  

 

      

 

Adding Value to Social Media Monitoring: More Than A Word Search Game

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It is difficult to get an accurate reading on how commonly a word is used in a given society. In fact, the task of measuring word frequency fully objectively is inherently impossible. The results will always be affected by the size of the corpus and the choice of the texts entered in it. On a global scale, where words take on subtle new meanings as they are appropriated into the semiotic structure of the actor and thereby changed, the problem becomes even more obvious.  Frequency means nothing without cultural context.

This is not to say that frequency isn’t important. It is important and revealing. Frequencies are only broadly indicative of cultural salience and they can only be used as one among many sources of information about a society’s cultural preoccupations. But measurements only tell part of the story. And when they are decontextualized or proscribed meanings based on the person developing the algorithm that assigns sentiment. They give a potentially false understanding. To be correctly interpreted, figures have to be considered in the context of an in-depth analysis of meanings.

If four thousand people call a product “shitty,” it is fair to say that four thousand people reacted negatively to it. But that measurement can’t tell us about the culture of those people – are they engineers addressing it from a technological angle? Are they Venezuelan students reacting to a larger political issue? We assume that a word can be easily categorized along a linear trajectory – negative/positive, etc. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Words can be studied as focal points around which cultural domains are organized. By exploring these focal points in depth, we may be able to show the general organization principles which lend structure and coherence to a cultural domain as a whole, and which often have an explanatory power extending across multiple domains.

The underlying principle lacking in current social media monitoring processes is allolexy. The term allolexy refers to the fact that the same element of meaning may be expressed in a language in two or more different ways. Just as one word can be associated with multiple meanings, one meaning can often have two or more different lexical exponents. For example, in English, I and me are allolexes of the same primitive concept (In Latin, Ego).  Often allolexes of a semantic primitive are in complimentary distribution. So in English, a combination of the semantic primitives someone and all is realized as everyone or everybody. In these particular contexts –one and –body can be seen as allolexes of someone; and –thing can be seen as an allolex of something. This notion of allolexy plays a particularly important role in social media monitoring because it allows us to build inflectional categories. For example, the forms  am doing, did, and will do used without temporal adjuncts convey different meanings, but when combined with the temporal adjuncts now, before now, and after now, as in the sentences below, they are in complementary distribution and can be seen as allolexes of the same primitive DO:

  1. I am doing it now.
  2. I did it before now.
  3. I will do it after now.

When we apply an approach derived from an allolexical perspective, we can start to determine where sentences or words “match,” semantically, across languages, even though inflectional categories can differ considerably from language to language. In other words, if a word is taken out the process of discourse, it loses meaning and is therefore subject to interpretation that lacks a way of accounting for either semantic variance or semantic stability – it is nothing short of a guess.

In a sense it is true that words have no “fixed” meanings because meanings of words change. But if they were always fluid and without any “true” content, they could not change either. Words do have identifiable, “true” meanings, the precise outlines of which can be established on an empirical basis by studying their range of use and articulating the contexts that subtly repurpose them. The key point is that social media monitoring today does not account for semantic deviation and language as fundamentally tied to speech and discourse. For companies that take the time and effort to do that, the financial rewards are tremendous.

The Importance of Metaphor

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Each of us is a skillful master of metaphors, as both linguists and primatologist have pointed out.  From an early age, indeed from birth, we possess an innate ability to recognize phonological and semantic patterns.  We construct utterances, phrases, to describe one thing in terms of another. Metaphor is essentially hardwired into our little brains.  These metaphors tend to emerge first during pretend play or parent/child interactions, when children produce simple noun-noun substitutions. I recall my oldest daughter calling a paring knife an “apple shaver” as a small child because of the associations with food and my then practice of shaving (which I have largely put aside).  My younger daughter referred to the minivan we had at the time as the “driver house.”  The point is that metaphor is a large part of how we make sense of the world and SYMBOLS drive the better part of how we construct and interpret reality.

A key part of human learning processes is what is referred to as “cognitive embodiment.” We use our bodies to develop more complex or abstract  concepts. For example, when we fall and struggle to stand up as toddlers, we learn about the principle of “balance.” This in turn informs our understanding of “balance” in many other spheres of life – “balance” becomes a metaphor for other facets of existence beyond the physical struggle against gravity.

The tendency has been to trumpet the features and product benefits of the things manufacturers and retailers sell, but that model is rapidly dying.  Marketers are only now realizing how important an understanding of metaphoric experience processes in the consumer’s mind is (vis-à-vis a brand, a product, a need, etc), in order to then provide brand positioning and creative communication with genuine meaning that impacts consumer thought and behavior. To every advertiser, designer and marketer, metaphor is the fundamental thread that weaves through and across our conscious and subconscious minds.  Metaphor creates a new reality.

Personality Seepage

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My friend Bryan Crawford posted a marvelous article by Bethlehem Shoals on “Personality Seepage” yesterday that got me revisiting an issue I’d set aside, namely, the presentation of self in virtual life.  Beautifully written (unlike most of my muses), the article sums up the increasing difficulty we have in separating our various senses or displays of self thanks to the digital age.

Personality seepage is the consequence of the liminality that occurs (that nether-state between one construct of reality and another), when we put too much of ourselves online at once.  With the array of IM windows, boxes, and browsers all crammed together on our laptop, iPad or telephone screens, we see seepage. Personal and professional language become blurred and the lines we draw between one projection and another break down.

Of course, this leads me back to anthropologist Erving Goffman and the theoretical model in anthropology and sociolinguistics rooted in the idea of constructed identity – that we create, or adapt, based on context.  As we communicate with people, we share different parts of ourselves, adopting a slightly different personas, so to speak, to fit the context.  It is a co-creative act and one that has social and cultural rules that define the interaction. The written word, with no face behind it and no real direct interaction to guide our conversation through non-verbal/non-textual cues exacerbates the situation. Unlike most situations, we have no clear way to define our contexts and we juggle too many conversations at once.

More often than not, the blurring leads to expressions that can be taken as insulting or simply out of place.   We inadvertently display a side of our personalities we want to stress with one person but conceal with another.   So much for the praise we heap on the notion of authenticity in what we say and do.  Authenticity isn’t about being “real,” it’s about a different kind of projection, one that is more about establishing a friendly context. The authenticity of a person is, in truth, the last thing we want.

But why does any of this matter?  It matters because of our new love affair with social media monitoring and the ways we build products, services and messages to accommodate the virtual self.  We monitor half truths and make decisions based on spurious exchanges in the virtual universe.  In other words, Personality Seepage is the frequently the communicative norm in virtual space and that means the people to whom we market or for whom we build are not the people we think we know.  It’s not enough to simply watch and “listen” in the social media universe.  We have to understand what happens offline as well.

Linguistic Shortcomings of Social Media Monitoring – notes.

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It is difficult to get an accurate reading on how commonly a word is used in a given society. In fact, the task of measuring word frequency fully objectively is inherently impossible. The results will always be affected by the size of the corpus and the choice of the texts entered in it. On a global scale, where words take on subtle new meanings as they are appropriated into the semiotic structure of the actor and thereby changed, the problem becomes even more obvious.  Frequency means nothing without cultural context.

This is not to say that frequency isn’t important. It is important and revealing. Frequencies are only broadly indicative of cultural salience and they can only be used as one among many sources of information about a society’s cultural preoccupations. But measurements only tell part of the story. And when they are decontextualized or prescribed meanings based on the person developing the algorithm that assigns sentiment. They give a potentially false understanding. To be correctly interpreted, figures have to be considered in the context of an in-depth analysis of meanings.

If four thousand people call a product “shitty,” it is fair to say that four thousand people reacted negatively to it. But that measurement can’t tell us about the culture of those people – are they engineers addressing it from a technological angle? Are they Venezuelan students reacting to a larger political issue? We assume that a word can be easily categorized along a linear trajectory – negative/positive, etc. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Words can be studied as focal points around which cultural domains are organized. By exploring these focal points in depth, we may be able to show the general organization principles which lend structure and coherence to a cultural domain as a whole, and which often have an explanatory power extending across multiple domains.

In a sense it is true that words have no “fixed” meanings because meanings of words change. But if they were always fluid and without any “true” content, they could not change either. Words do have identifiable, “true” meanings, the precise outlines of which can be established on an empirical basis by studying their range of use and articulating the contexts that subtly repurpose them. The key point is that social media monitoring today does not account for semantic deviation and language as fundamentally tied to speech and discourse.

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