The interpersonal pragmatics of financial discourse: A contrastive analysis of European vs. Asian earnings calls

Earnings calls are financial reporting events organized by companies via teleconferencing as a format that allows management and financial analysts to interact on an interpersonal level. In this study, I analyse the relational dimension of earnings calls of European and Asian companies, representing cultures that are widely recognized as having different communicative approaches. I used corpus software to extract and analyse pragmalinguistic features that encode relational aspects of interaction. The findings revealed rather strong differences in interpersonal communication styles that did not always align with presumed cultural orientations. In this context, the use of relational features appears to be impacted not only by cultural values, but also by the distinct professional goals of participants and the technology-mediated setting.