The Interpretation of Business Communication: The Application of Functional Grammar and the Transaction Process Model

The unambiguous interpretation of the propositional and illocutionary act is of extreme importance in understanding linguistic coordination of business activities. In the interpretation of actual realizations of business conversations it can not always be determined unambiguously what kind of communication act the speaker is making. In this paper we focus on the interpretation of utterances in business communication. We propose two techniques to trace the structure of business conversations: Functional Grammar and the Transaction Process Model. The analysis is illustrated with a recorded conversation taken from a larger case study in a Dutch hotel.