LOCATING NEGOTIATION ACTIVITY WITHIN DOCUMENT DESIGN PRESENTATIONS

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the linguistic enactment of presentations by small teams of professional people involved in producing business documentation. It is a distinguishing characteristic of the presentation activities that the talk is organized around five recurring topic types. These topic types do not occur in an unstructured way either. There is a pattern to the way they unfold that can be seen as constitutive of doing a presentation as part of the document design process. Visual presentation functions as a default topic. Once any problems have been dealt with it is this topic that would occur and it is the presenter who would initiate it and be allowed a lengthy turn for this purpose, but for no other purpose. Thus, there is a distinct turn-taking mechanism for enacting this kind of data that, because it is linked to the occurrence of certain topic types, is another defining feature of this kind of presentation. In presentation, talk negotiation occurs at well-defined points in the discourse. Issues for negotiation are raised through clarification and negative evaluation topics. Only the client initiates negative evaluation and this can be seen as one indicator of his role as negotiation-instigator within these proceedings.