The Pragmatics of Financial Communication. Part 2: From Public Sphere to Investors

Abstract

Research in financial communication has long been dominated by scholars in accounting and finance, who largely focused on the extratextual aspects of financial disclosures, such as the choice (not) to reveal information or the impact of new regulatory standards. In contrast, the past decade and a half has witnessed a significant shift of attention toward the linguistic and textual elements of financial communication. Finance scholars have started to develop text analysis approaches to investigate, in particular, market sentiment and its impact on stock prices. At the same time, accounting scholars have engaged in the so-called narrative turn by investigating the rhetorical aspects of voluntary disclosure. Recent developments in the field, however, dig deeper and are beginning to shed light on the crucial functions of language use in financial communication. There is a growing interest throughout the disciplines to analyze the interplay of micro and macro structure in financial communication, which has been clearly reflected in academic initiatives and rapidly evolving subject areas in recent years. Bringing together these initiatives on a higher level, the AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics) research network in financial communication, set up in early 2018, enables scholars from all over the world to strengthen and elaborate on their research and its dissemination. The two parts of the special issue “The Pragmatics of Financial Communication” aim to reflect these recent developments and to foster current and future initiatives in the field.

Commentary—Much ado About Something Else. Donald Trump, the US Stock Market, and the Public Interest Ethics of Social Media Communication

“…As Tetlock (2007) shows, the emotional content of news matters for markets, that react to pessimism with bearish price drops to later revert to fundamentals, whereas unusually high or low pessimism predicts high market trading volume. Language is key in the construction of emotion concepts (Lindquist & Gendron, 2013), and but investors are sensitive to language mood (Whitehouse et al, 2018) as a powerful tool to spread fundamentals-related information that can be appreciated only through mastery of expressive nuances (Tetlock et al, 2008).…”