An informal language of reasoning. Ways of talking about inference and explanations in communication between managers and financial analysts.

In our paper we present the shared professional language used to talk about reasoning and explanation by top managers of listed companies and financial analysts  in quarterly Earning Conference Calls (ECC). . One of the key functions of ECC is to contextualise and "frame" financial results. Several studies of this dialogic professional genre suggest that advancing and challenging argumentative justifications plays a central role in this endeavour.   Since these are conversations where not only managers introduce their arguments in order to persuade analysts and investors of their accountability, but also analystsintroduce their own reasoning and explanations around results and earlier disclosed information through complex dialogical moves (cf. Rocci and Raimondo, 2017). We will address the question of the shared language used by managers and analysts using both formal methods argumentation theory and empirical observational methods from corpus linguistics. A significant body of argumentation theoretical research is dedicated to how interaction field (Rigotti and Rocci, 2006) and types of dialogue (Walton, 1992) shape and constrain the way in which participants fashion their argumentation. Corpus linguistic approaches provide descriptive tools for investigating recurrent lexis and phraseology in argument and about argument. Finally, formal tools allow us to construct formally precise representations of reasoning, explanation and persuasion in dialogue. Bringing these three perspectives (context, corpus and formalization)

demands an investigation of structured corpus, which currently becomes possible due to the development of annotation tools for annotation of linguistic units, genre specific discourse moves  (INCEpTION[1]) as well as of the anchoring of reasoning to dialogue acts (OVA+[2]). Both, normative and descriptive methods provide a practical guidance on how reasoning and explanations are working in the field as also how it can be improved. Exploiting annotated corpora we will examine on the one hand the key words, which participants of the ECCs are using to indicate reasoning and explanative contextualisation of released data. On the other side, we will show how bits of the text can be connected with a relation of inference in order to show how particular standpoints are argued and data is explained this particular interaction. Finally, correlations between linguistic indicators and reasoning structures will be established.

References: 

Rigotti, E. and Rocci, A., 2006. Towards a definition of communication context. Studies in communication sciences, 6(2), pp.155-180.

Rocci, A. and Raimondo, C., 2017. Dialogical Argumentation in Financial Conference Calls: the Request of Confirmation of Inference (ROCOI). In Argumentation and Inference: Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Argumentation, Fribourg 2017 (Vol. 2, pp. 699-715).

Walton, D., 1992. Commitment, types of dialogue and fallacies. Informal Logic, 14(1993), pp.93-103.