THE EMOTIONAL PROSODY OF U.S. FATAL AIR-ACCIDENT DOCKETS ONLINE: RISKING RISK COMMUNICATION?
- Authors: Guinda C.S.1
-
Affiliations:
- Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ETSI Aeronáutica y del Espacio
- Issue: Vol 22, No 1 (2018): The discourse of emotions
- Pages: 126-143
- Section: Articles
- URL: https://journals.rudn.ru/linguistics/article/view/17851
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-1-126-143
Cite item
Full Text
Abstract
Risk communication is grounded in both rationality and emotion (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Bo-holm & Corvellec 2014). Recent investigations have proved that emotions do affect risk and danger percep-tions by functioning as ‘mediators’ (Xie et al. 2011) and become important in decision-making. My study explores how emotion is induced by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short) to influence the mentalities and behaviours of its broad mixed audience and thus increase risk prevention. With that research purpose in mind, I examine an electronic corpus of over 500 online samples of fatal aviation dockets issued yearly online by the NTSB between the time span 2010-2015 and contained in its website databases. The emotional engagement deployed to mediate the perceptions of risk and danger by the general public constitutes a unique genre among all other world transportation agencies, since through informative vividness it pursues to activate the processes of memory, inference (i.e. judgement) and decision-making. I take Stubbs’ (2001) concept of ‘discursive prosody’ as point of departure and resort to a blended theoretical framework that combines Narratology, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Proximisation (Cap 2013) and Positioning (Harré & van Langenhove 1999) Theories. I will show that the NTSB’s emotional prosody is more rhetorical than lexical and that the narrative strategies of focalisation and speech representation play a salient role. To conclude I will reflect on some of the possible consequences of over-exploiting emotional engagement in risk communication.
About the authors
Carmen Sancho Guinda
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ETSI Aeronáutica y del Espacio
Email: carmen.sguinda@upm.es
CARMEN SANCHO GUINDA is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, where she teaches English for Academic and Professional Communication at the school of Aerospace Engineering and in-service seminars for engineering teachers willing to undertake English-medium instruction. Her research focus is the interdisciplinary study of academic and professional discourses and genres and innovation in the learning of academic competencies. Plaza del Cardenal Cisneros 3 28040-Madrid, Spain
References
- Andrews, M., Squire, C. & Tamboukou, M. (eds.) (2008). Doing narrative research. London: Sage.
- Anthony, L. (2007). AntConc 3.2.1w. Retrieved from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html.
- Bal, M. (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Bearman, P., Faris, R. & Moody, J. (1999). Blocking the future: New solutions for old problems in historical social science. Social Science History 23 (4), 501-533.
- Bednarek, M. (2008a). Emotion talk across corpora. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Bednarek, M. (2008b). Semantic preference and semantic prosody re-examined. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 4 (2), 119-139.
- Berkenkotter, C., Bhatia V.K. & Gotti, M. (2012). Introduction. In Berkenkotter, C., V.K. Bhatia & M. Gotti (eds.) Insights into academic genres. Bern: Peter Lang, 9-28.
- Besley, J.C. & McComas, K.A. (2014). Fairness, public engagement and risk communication. In Árvai, J. & L. Rivers (eds.) Effective risk communication. London: Routledge, 108-123.
- Bhatia, V.K. (2014). Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view. London: Continuum.
- Bloor, M. & Bloor, T. (2007). The practice of Critical Discourse Analysis. An introduction. London: Hodder Arnold.
- Boholm, Å. & Corvellec, H. (2014). A relational theory of risk: Lessons for risk communication. In Árvai, J. & L. Rivers (eds.) Effective risk communication. London: Routledge, 8-22.
- Cap, P. (2013). Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Chouliaraki, L. (2008). Mediation, text and action. In Bhatia, V.K., J. Flowerdew & R.H. Jones (eds.) Advances in discourse studies. London: Routledge, 211-227.
- Czarniawska, B. (2004). Narratives in social science research. London: Sage.
- Elliot, J. (2005). Using narrative in social research. Qualitative and quantitative approaches. London: Sage.
- Fairclough, N. (1993). Critical Discourse Analysis and the marketization of public discourse: The universities. Discourse and Society 4 (2), 133-168.
- Fairclough, N. (2006). Language and globalisation. London: Routledge.
- Fischhoff, B. & Kadvany, J. (2011). Risk. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Harré, R. & van Langenhove, L. (1999). Positioning Theory: Moral contexts of intentional action. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Hawley, K. (2012). Trust. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) (2006). Safety management manual (SMM). Doc. 9859 (1st ed.). Montreal: ICAO.
- Kohler Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. London: Sage.
- Labov, W. & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In Helm, J. (ed.) Essays on the verbal and the visual arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 12-44.
- Machin, D. & Mayr, A. (2012). How to do Critical Discourse Analysis. A multimodal introduction. London: Sage.
- Martin, J.R. & White, P.R.R. (2005). The Language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. London/New York: Palgrave/Macmillan.
- Maynard, A. (2011). Risk = OMG x WTF! 2020 Science. Retrieved from http://2020science.org/ 2011/10/18/risk-omg-x-wtf/.
- Neeley, L. (2014). Risk communication in social media. In Árvai, J. & L. Rivers (eds.) Effective risk communication. London: Routledge, 143-164.
- NTSB website http://www.ntsb.gov/.
- NTSB Accident synopses by month. Retrieved from http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/month.aspx.
- Plutchik, R. (1980). Emotion - A psychoevolutionary synthesis. London: Longman.
- Sancho Guinda, C. (2015). Digital vividness: Reporting aviation disasters online. In Bondi, M., S. Cacchiani & D. Mazzi (eds.). Discourse in and through the media: Recontextualizing and reconceptualizing expert discourse. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 187-212.
- Shaver, P.R., Murdaya, U. & Fraley, R.C. (2001). Structure of the Indonesian emotion lexicon. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 4, 201-224.
- Sol Hart, P. (2014). Boomerang effects in risk communication. In Árvai, J. & L. Rivers (eds.) Effective risk communication. London: Routledge, 304-318.
- Stubbs, M. (2001). Texts, corpora, and problems of interpretation: A response to Widdowson. Applied Linguistics 22, 149-172.
- Swales, J.M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Tardy, C.M. (2016). Beyond convention: Genre innovation in academic writing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
- Tuler, S.P. & Kasperson, R.E. (2014). Social distrust and its implications for risk communication. In Árvai, J. & L.Rivers (eds.) Effective risk communication. London: Routledge, 91-107.
- Watt Smith, T. (2015). The book of human emotions. London: Profile Books.
- Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Xiao, R. & McEnery, T. (2006). Collocation, semantic prosody and near synonymy: A crosslinguistic perspective. Applied Linguistics 27 (1), 103-129. doi: 10.1093/applin/ami045.
- Xie, X., Wang, M., Zhang, R., Li, J.&Yu, Q. (2011). The role of emotions in risk communication. Risk Analysis, 31 (3), 450-465.
- Zhang, Y. & K.L. O’Halloran (2014). From popularization to marketization: The hypermodal nucleus in institutional science news. In Djonov, E. & S. Zhao (eds.) Critical multimodal studies of popular discourse. New York, NY: Routledge, 160-177.
- Zwickle, A. & Wilson, R.S. (2014). Construing risk. In Árvai, J. & L. Rivers (eds.) Effective risk communication. London: Routledge, 143-164.