Linguistic Creativity and Professional Discourse Strategies: An Intercultural Perspective

305 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.The discourse strategies of teams attempting the same task are compared and contrasted in this study. While a linguistic analysis of business student team meetings cannot provide a business assessment of a team's solution, teams can be comparatively assessed by how they reach their objectives in terms of the internal logic of the team discourse. Not all teams are equally successful in reaching their own objective. The meetings of two different teams show dramatic differences in the organization of the task and in the discourse routines which are used to manage discussion. A debating style of cyclical challenges locks one team into opposing sides, while a constructive style characterizes another team whose members elaborate and ratify each other's open-ended proposals.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD