Panel: Anticipating margins as a core competence : pragmatics and discourses in the financial sector

Panel introductionAnticipating margins in order not to be marginalized is a core competence in the financial sector. Forecasting and pre-empting economic, legal and political changes while staying on the targeted track is vital to survive. This applies to both short-term and long-term changes. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), for example, was based in Hong Kong from 1865 until 1992 when it moved its headquarter to London, shortly before Hong Kong was returned to China. This move had to be communicated to the stakeholders pragmatically and determinedly. Our panel intends to enhance the understanding of such pragma-linguistic aspects of communication in finance as response to geopolitical changes. In line with the overall theme of the IPrA 2019 Conference, “The Pragmatics of the Margins”, the panel focuses on the key role of margins and strategies of growth vs. marginalization in finance. We analyze and discuss how these macro-structural aspects are reflected in linguistic micro-structures of discourses and text types as well as genres such as CEO letters, earnings calls, financial analysts’ recommendations, corporate announcements, and annual reports. By doing so, this panel addresses theoretical, methodological and practical challenges of investigating the intertextual and interdiscursive dynamics and linguistic strategies at the interface of verbal, visual, and numerical languages and their macro-structural context. Research frameworks combine innovative research questions with inter- and transdisciplinary approaches (Palmieri, Perrin, Whitehouse, 2018) that enable researchers to capture and understand the field’s complexity and dynamics. Methods and methodologies emanate from or are combined from e.g. text analysis, genre analysis, multimodal genre analysis, critical genre analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus analysis and writing research. We intend to contribute to an enhanced understanding of the pivotal role of margins and marginalization in the financial sector. Key research questions include which communication strategies the stakeholders use, why they make their decisions as they do, and how the resulting practices are received in public discourse. By creating the opportunity for close interdisciplinary dialogue between complementary disciplines, the panel aims at developing a common agenda of joint research on communication in finance as a key to an economically shaped world