A discoirse analysis of English Sales Presentations An integrated approach 9 pecialization English linguistic

A discoirse analysis of English Sales Presentations: An integrated approach Nguyê ̃ n Thi ̣ Ha ̀ My University of Languages and International Studies M.A Thesis: English linguistic, Code: 60 22 15 Supervisor: Prof. Nguyê ̃ n Hoa ̀ (PhD) Year of graduation: 2011 Abstract: Studies investigating the sales letters and some other kinds of business communication have shown the effective ways to write a persuasive sales letter. However, very few studies are found investigating the sales presentation. This paper is an attempt to deal with sales presentations– one kind of business correspondence. The paper illuminates register and coherence of discourse of sales presentation, which are two variables of integrated approach to discourse analysis. The result of the study identifies register and coherence factors of discourse of sales presentation. From the findings, the implication for the most effective way to make a successful sales presentation in terms of register and coherence of discourse is drawn out. Keywords: Tiếng Anh; Bài thuyết trình; Phân tích diễn ngôn; Bán hàng Conetent I. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale of the study In theory: Up to now, only few books and researches specialized in presentations, and most of them are guidance in making presentation in general, for example: Presentation Skills for Students (Emden, J. & Becker, L., 2004). This thesis desires to investigate this new field and to be as a reliable source for a salesperson before making his sales presentation. In practice: The rapid development of economy has created various challenges to Vietnamese companies; they are forced to act more effectively in the market. One of their ways to compete with other companies is to make successfully presentations to introduce new products. Therefore, the investigation to famous sales presentations will be a good means for enterprises in attracting more customers and in getting more profits. 1.2 Aims of the study Due to the constraints in time and knowledge in Business English, this thesis will not able to cover all aspects of sales presentations, this study aims at: - Investigate register of the discourse of English sales presentations including field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse. - Examine factors creating coherence of the discourse of English sales presentations: relevance and discourse structure. These aims are to answer the research questions: - What is the register, including field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse, of English sales presentation? - How coherence of discourse of English sales presentations is created via relevance and discourse structure? 1.3 Scope of the study In business, there are various ways for a salesman to seek customers‟ needs including sales letters, advertisements, or sales presentations, etc. Within the limitation of an M.A thesis, this research can only deal with 1 aspect of this broad area, that is sales presentations made by Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple. This study is confined to the register of sales presentations with three parameters: field, mode and tenor of the discourse. Moreover, this thesis will focus on coherence of the discourse of sales presentations with 2 relevance factors: relevance and discourse structure. 1.4 Methods of the study This study adopts an integrated approach to discourse analysis, which looks into the concerned discourse in terms of registers and coherence. To do this, descriptive method is used to describe data and characteristics about the population or phenomenon being studied. The description is used for frequencies, averages and other statistical calculation of variables of register and coherence‟s relevant factors of discourse of sales presentations. I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK This study looks at discourse of English sales presentation in terms of register and coherence. 1.1 Register 2.1.1 The notion of register Register is among the two varieties which determine variation in language use. The other variety is dialects which is not the matter of this paper. According to Halliday et. al (1964:87) “the category of register is postulated to account for what people do with their language. When we observe language activity in the various contexts in which it takes place. We find differences in the type of language selected as appropriate to different types of situation. By this way, register is defines in terms of differences in grammar, vocabulary, etc. of language activity such as a sports commentary or a church service. 2.1.2 Parameters of register Register consists of field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse. Field or the reference to „what is going on‟ is the kind of language use, which reflects “the purposive role” or the social function of the text (Hatim & Masan, 1990: 48). Tenor of discourse concerns the relationship between the addresser and the addressee, which “can be analyzed in terms of basic distinction such as polite-colloquial-intimate, on a scale of categories which range from formal to informal” (Hatim & Mason, 1990: 50). There are two kinds of tenor, personal tenor covers the degrees of formality with the social roles of participants together with their status relationship and personalities such as the social identity: age, sex, power relations. Whereas functional tenor concerns with the determining the social function or role of utterance, identifying the purpose for which the language is being used. Mode of discourse, from the macro point of view, is “the medium of the language activity”, or the function of the text in the event by means of channel (Hatim & Mason (1990). The extent of mode variation is illustrated by Gregory & Carroll (1978: 47) by means of a diagram as follow: The micro mode of discourse refers to the use of grammar involving the use of modality, active and passive voices, kinds of sentences, sentence order, and the use of vocabulary including technical words, adjectives and adverbs. • Use of grammar - Modality: Modal auxiliaries are used to build up complex verb phrases and cannot occur alone unless a lexical verb is recoverable from the context. The modal auxiliaries express a wide range of meanings, having to do with concepts such as ability, permission, necessity, and obligation. There are nine central modal auxiliaries: can could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, must; some marginal auxiliary verbs: need (to), ought to, dare (to), used to, which behave like modals in taking auxiliary negation and yes-no question inversion; some semi-modals which are fixed idiomatic phrases, expressions: (had) better, have to, (have) got to, be supposed to, be going to. Modals and semi-model can be grouped in to three major categories according to their main meanings:  Permission/possibility/ability: can, could, may, might  Obligation/ necessity: must, should, (had) better, have (got) to, need to, ought to, be supposed to  Volition/prediction: will, would, shall, be going to. - Active and passive voices: English verbs have two voices: active voice and passive voice. Voice of a verb expresses the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). In active voice sentences, the agent or the doer of the action is the subject; the receiver takes the action of the verb. Active sentences follow the Agent –Verb – Receiver. The major function of passive voice is to demote the agent of the verb (often the person doing the action of the verb, while giving topic status to the affected patient (the entity being acted on). - Kinds of sentences: There are three basic types of sentence structure: simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences. o Simple sentences: A simple sentence is formed by a subject and a verb. By this way, the verbs in simple sentences are often intransitive verbs. An important requirement of simple sentence is that it must express the complete thought. o Compound sentence: is formed when two simple sentences are joined together with a conjunction. The most common conjunctions are and, but and or, which respectively shows addition, contrast and choice. o Complex sentence: is the most complicated among the three types of sentence structure. Complex sentence contains clauses with subordinate relation, i.e. one clause is a constituent or a part of the other. - Sentence order: The sentence order, which is determined by which part of sentence coming first, is related to thought patterns and affects the making of text. One sentence can start with the subject which show the direct thought of the speaker/writer. For example: Tom is going to have a long business trip to Asia. One sentence can also begin with a part of speech other than the subject. These sentence patterns may be used to delay revealing what the sentence is about and sometimes to create tension or suspense; some other times, these patterns can be used to make the ideas between sentences more clearly. For example: A few weeks ago, we sold out 250,000,000 iPod. • Use of vocabulary - Technical words: Technical words term define typical words or phrases on specific fields. These terms build the technicality – a particular feature of a type of documents. For example, some law terms are: Adjudication (giving or pronouncing a judgment or decree), court (a place where justice is administered.), etc. - Adjectives: The most common use of adjectives is to modify nouns, thus adding to the informational density of expository registers such as news and academic prose (Biber, 1999: 504) Semantically, adjectives are divided into two broad groups: descriptors and classifiers. Descriptors are prototypical adjectives denoting such features as color, time, size and weight, chronology and age, emotion, and a wide range of other characteristics. They are typically gradable, i.e. they allow comparison, whether inflectional or not, and degree modification: shorter, very strong, extremely serious. In contrast, classifiers are used to delimit or restrict a noun‟s referent, by placing it in a category in relation to other referents. They are normally non-gradable and non-predicating (i.e. they do not occur as predicatives in clauses. Classifiers can be groups into subclasses including relational, evaluative, and a miscellaneous topical class. - Adverbs: In a clause, adverbs can either be integrated in to an element of a clause (modifiers) or function themselves as an element of the clause (adverbials). Most commonly, adverbs that are integrated into another element of the clause modify an adjective or another adverb. Semantically, adverbs are categorized into different groups: adverbs of place, time, manner, degree, additive/restrictive, stance, linking and some other meanings. 1.2 Coherence “Coherence refers to the type of semantic or rhetorical relationships that underline texts” (Nguyen Hoa, 2000: 23). According to Nunan (1993), coherence is “the feeling that sequences of sentences or utterances seems to hang together and make sense”. In the past, coherence is really a combination of many variables, three of which are cohesion, relevance, and discourse structure. This paper concerns the two variables that is relevance and discourse structure. 1.2.1 Relevance The technical use of the term “relevance” is derived from the conversational maxims proposed by Grice (1975). As Grice suggests, there is the co-operation between participants in the conversation, in which the participants need to follow the four maxims, i.e. maxim of quantity (or informativeness), maxim of quality (truthfulness), maxim of manner (clearness) and maxim of relation. Although discusses and exemplifies the other maxims, Grice only gives a simple instruction to maxim of relation „Be relevant‟. Brown & Yule suggest interpreting the maxim „Be relevance‟ into a more practical useful form as “make your contribution relevant in terms of the existing topic framework” (1983:84). Topic framework as suggested by Nguyen Hoa (2000:82) “should comprise all the activated features of context because they are the aspects of contexts directly reflected in the text, and need to be called upon to interpret it”. While communicating, the speaker or writer tends to operate within the topic framework to produce language to help reader or listener have as sense that the sentences are connected topically. This convention of conversational discourse could be captured more concisely in the expression speaking topically, in which there is no fixed direction for the conversation to go, or speaking on a topic in which the participants concentrate their talk on one particular entity, individual or issue (Brown & Yule, 1983: 84). A discourse participant is said to be „speaking topically‟ when he makes his contribution fit closely to the most recent elements incorporated in the topic framework. 1.2.2 Discourse structure The last mentioned factor creating coherence is the discourse structure or the organization of the discourse. This paper applies the Mann and Thompson‟s Rhetorical Structure Theory. This theory describes the relations between text parts in functional terms, identifying both the transition point of a relation and the extent of the items related. According to them, there is an exist of relations between Nuclear (N) and Satellite (S) of the text, and the reason for the writer/speaker to choose those nuclear and satellite is called Effect. Mann & Thompson also provided the relation types: Circumstance, Solutionhood, Elaboration, Background, Enablement, Motivation, Evidence, Justify, Volitional Cause, Non- volitional Cause, Volitional result, Purpose, Antithesis, Concession, Condition, Otherwise, Interpretation, Evaluation, Restatement, Summary, Sequence and Contrast. II. METHODOLOGY 2.1 Research methods This thesis applies integrated approach to discourse analysis introduced by Nguyễn Hòa (2003) with the focus on coherence and register of the discourse. This is a functional approach regarding discourse as a process of interactive communication among members of the society (Nguyễn Hòa, 2003:144). As Halliday (1994: xvi) argues “it is sometime assumed that this (discourse analysis) can be carried out grammar – or even that it is somehow an alternative to grammar. But this is an illusion. A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text”. 3.2 Subjects of the study The subjects of the study are sales presentations from Apple Company to introduce their famous products: iPod, iPhone and iPad. 3.3 Data collection methods 3.3.1 Data Sales presentation, in this case, is the video recordings; that is spoken discourse. So we need to have a reproduction of that discourse that can be examined repeatedly. “That reproduction must be a recording but not a recollection or report by researchers or observers of what was said” (Wood & Kroger, 2000:55) 3.3.2 Discourse recordings The samples of this study are achieved from Internet at http://www.apple.com/apple- events/ . As this research concerns only on the verbal activities, it is only necessary to get the audio recordings of the presentations, no need for video-tapes. The recording of spoken discourse must be of high “fidelity” (Wood & Kroger, 2000:56), that is, it must correspond as closely as possible to the discourse. The recording of spoken discourse should be natural as well (Wood & Kroger, 2000-57). The natural discourse refers to the circumstance under which the discourse is produced. 3.3.3 Samples selection and samples size In discourse analysis “bigger is not necessarily better” (Wood & Kroger, 2000:81), so this research focuses on the three most famous products of Apple: iPod, iPhone and iPad, which can represent the Steve Jobs‟ style in sales presentation. 3.4 Analysis procedure 3.4.1 Transcription Transcription refers to the transformation of spoken discourse into a written form that is fully amenable to analysis and available for inclusion in the report of the research. The standard or thography is the transcription method used in this research. 3.4.2 Analysis process First, all sales presentations were numbered sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Second, each sentence is analyzed carefully to find out: - The use of grammar - The use of vocabulary Next, grammar and vocabulary were classified into different groups according to the aims of the study. Fourth, each paragraph was analyzed to draw out topic of each one. After that, descriptive and analytic methods are utilized to describe and analyze the database so as to find out the grammar, vocabulary, field and tenor of discourse, relevance and discourse structure of sales presentations. III. THE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH SALES PRESENTATIONS 3.1 Register 3.1.1 Field of discourse of English sales presentations These sales presentations are made with the main aims to announce new products of a company. To reach this aim, the presenter has experienced different fields. During the presentations, Steve Jobs provides reasons for the being of new products; remarkable new features of these products; the applications built-in the new products; price, shipment condition and shipment time of products; the updates of other products and applications of other companies built for the new products; greetings and goodbye. 3.1.2 Tenor of discourse of English sales presentations Sales presentations belong to a subcategory of business communication, so obviously the language used in sales presentations is the language of business communication. The presentations are made to announce new products to a wide range of listener, the end users of the products, the representatives, the retailers or even the competitors of the company. The attendance of the conference may come from different countries, different classes with different cultures. Therefore, in terms of personal tenor, the presenter employs informal, friendly and simple language. In terms of functional tenor, sales presentations are made with the purpose to announce new products, to introduce remarkable new features and interesting applications, to provide helpful using instructions, and to announce the price range of the new products. By this way, the presenter reassure the audiences that the new products are easy to use, worth to buy and professional to hold in hands and they are affordable to be purchased by a wide range of users. 3.1.3 Mode of discourse of English sales presentations * Macro mode of discourse of English sales presentations From the macro point of view, mode is defined as the function of the text in the event by means of channel. Sales presentations are the speech in conference in which they are spoken out non-spontaneously. As the presenter has prepared carefully what to speak in the presentations, it can be said that sales presentations are the speaking of what is written to be spoken. * Micro mode of discourse of English sales presentations Use of grammar - Modality: the modal “can” marking possibility is the most effective modality to show the power or the usage of new products. - Active and passive voices: Active voice is the majority voice in sales presentations. - Kinds of sentences: Simple sentences together with the use of imperatives and ellipsis are the most popular kinds of sentences in English sales presentations. - Sentence order: other parts of speech but not subject is normally the first sentence element in English sales presentations. Use of vocabulary - Adjectives: evaluative and emotive adjectives are the most effective devices to emphasis the remarkable features of new products. - Adverbs: adverbs of time and adverbs of degree are the other importance device in creating the impressive image of new products. 3.2 Coherence 3.2.1 Relevance The analysis of data points out the following topics mentioned in sales presentations: Updates of the company; reasons for the being of new products; New features of new products; Applications of other company running on the products; Cost/price/shipment of the new products; Restating new features of new products; Business philosophy of the company; It can be seen that except for “updates of the company”, all the above topics related to the new products introduced in the sales presentations. Although the topic “updates of the company” does not directly talk about new products, it helps to enhance power of the company, by this way, it also helps new products to be more easily accepted. Therefore, all parts of the sales presentation are under the same topic framework and are linked closely together. 3.2.2 Discourse structure Structurally, and English sales presentation to announce a new product consists of three main parts: the beginning, the body and the ending. The structure of English sales presentations to announce new products of mobile devices can be characterized in table 1. In terms of relation defined by Mann and Thompson, in sales presentation there is the exit of some main types: Circumstance, Elaboration, Evaluation, Restatement and Summary. Table 1: Discourse structure of English Sales Presentations IV. CONCLUSION To sum up, this study is an attempt to investigate sales presentations to announce new products. English sales presentations are analyses in terms of register and coherence. From the analysis, the register‟s parameters and coherence factors are identified and explained. Hopefully, the study can help business people, to some extents, to be more aware of the significant features of this kind of discourse for making an effective sales presentation, so that they can sell more products and make more profits for company. In addition, we hope that this study can be of some help to the teachers and students in teaching and learning presentation skill. While the study provides an overall analysis of the discourse of English sales presentations, it is not free from some limitations, therefore it needs further researches. Further researches for this study can be focused on: • Cohesive devices of English sales presentations • The non-verbal language of English sales presentation. REFERENCES In English Biber, D. 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A discoirse analysis of English Sales Presentations: An integrated approach Nguyê ̃ n Thi ̣ Ha ̀ My University of Languages and International Studies M .A Thesis: English linguistic, . and analytic methods are utilized to describe and analyze the database so as to find out the grammar, vocabulary, field and tenor of discourse, relevance and discourse structure of sales presentations.