Contrarily to what one might think, finance isn't just about numbers but also relies on communicative exchanges between parts, in both oral and written form. Within the field of financial communication, periodical voluntary disclosures known as Earning Conference Calls (ECCs) are particularly noteworthy [1]. Their Q&A sessions, the real core of the activity, could to some extent be associated to journalistic interviews [2] performed by analysts towards the managerial board of a company; though sharing a certain number of features with those, they also display originality and domain-specific characteristics. Being a situation where all participants are virtually already in possession of all the facts the call will be about, it is apparently useless; however, significance lies in the ways the two sides perform contextually constrained dialectical exchanges embellishing mere data, among which we focus on recurrent argumentative patterns [3], later showing their extra-communicative relevance by scaling up the number of occurrences under scrutiny.
In the context of such disclosures, we can trace a chain of information conversion from oral to written form and vice-versa, ultimately resulting in written recommendations to investors [4] with practical consequences in the financial market. Still, one of these passages is particularly delicate: the transcription of ECCs, performed by several independent services, the product of which is made available across different platforms. Not denying the results those services achieve in contributing to the spread of financial information among people who did not attend the call, it must be noted that they primarily focus on the content of ECCs, thus adopting a standard of transcription that neglects some linguistic aspects of central importance for studies not (entirely) devoted to financial aspects. With respect to our specific field of application, moreover, the adopted criteria of sentence segmentation and punctuation insertion often add opaqueness in the recognition of argumentative units of analysis. Having had to personally face and overcome challenges related to the written rendition of such complex oral exchanges, we provide a description of how we dealt with them – successfully leading to a first round of qualitative research results – but also ultimately share a practical toolkit of common issues and quick fixes for general purpose transcriptions that researchers might be willing to convert into a scientific-grade corpus for research.
[1] B. Crawford Camiciottoli, "Earnings calls: Exploring an emerging financial reporting genre," Discourse & Communication, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 343–359, 2010.
[2] S. Clayman and J. Heritage, The news interview: journalists and public figures on the air, vol. 15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
[3] R. Palmieri, A. Rocci, and N. Kudrautsava, "Argumentation in earnings conference calls. Corporate standpoints and analysts' challenges," Studies in Communication Sciences, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 120–132, 2015.
[4] R. Palmieri and J. Miecznikowski, "Predictions in economic-financial news: Author's stance and argumentative loci," Journal of Argumentation in Context, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 48–73, 2016.
