Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 35, Issue 3, 2013

A main goal of employee magazines is to increase employee commitment (Kikkert, 1988; Smith, 1997; Van Ruler, 1992). How those magazines pursue this goal and whether or not they actually increase employee commitment, has hardly been studied. We developed a model with three textual elements of commitment: the source, the type of information, and the goal of the magazine article. Twenty Dutch employee magazines were analyzed (496 articles). On the basis of the categorization model, we were able to distinguish between high and low committed magazines. To test the model, a survey was carried out in two organizations with a high committed magazine and two organizations with a low committed employee magazine. Thus, we were able to establish the relation between the levels of commitment in magazine and employees. Employees who read a high committed magazine were significant more committed to their organization than employees who read a low committed magazine. Our model appears to be suitable to categorize textual elements of commitment and to distinguish high and low committed employee magazines.

There is ample empirical evidence for the fact that narratives can influence an audience’s attitudes. In this study, we address the question as to whether the persuasive impact of stories can be explained by the emotions evoked as a result of the audience identifying with the protagonist. In an experiment, the extent to which participants identified with a character was manipulated through portraying the character as more or less sympathetic. The resulting difference in identification with this character did not only result in experiencing more intense emotions but also in a more favorable attitude. Mediation analyses revealed that the impact on the attitude was mediated by the extent to which emotions were evoked, which in turn was mediated by the extent to which participants identified with the character. The extent to which participants perceived the story as realistic proved a mediating variable as well in explaining the impact on the attitude. The results of this study shed more light on an important mechanism of narrative persuasion.

This article presents the results of three experiments in which the influence of the pause eh in bad news voicemails is studied on the hearer evaluation. Based on the politeness theory of Brown & Levinson (1987) we expect that eh will facilitate the hearer’s acceptance of the bad news. The addition of eh turns out to have a positive effect on the attributed relational qualities of the speaker of the voice mail. On the other hand, his attributed communicative professionalism is rated lower. One of the two potential explanations for these results is that eh causes some delay in the presentation of the bad news itself, thereby triggering the hearer’s suspicion that really very bad news is forthcoming. Against this expectation the eventual bad news is not that bad. The experimental evidence does not support this hypothesis. Therefore the alternative hypothesis, eh signals the speaker’s difficulty to communicate the message, which in turn makes him more empathic, becomes highly probable.

This article concerns the use of Dutch forms of address, especially the second-person pronouns je and u, in banner advertising on the websites of four newspapers in the Netherlands and Flanders. It focuses on two specific aspects: variation in the frequency of forms of address and pragmatic principles underlying their usage. The paper shows that economic sector is a significant factor in the use or avoidance of address pronouns. When an address pronoun is used, sector is again a significant factor in the choice between u and je and the type of newspaper (quality or popular) is of marginal significance. In neither case does the factor region (Netherlands vs. Flanders) play a role. Clyne et al. (2009) have proposed six pragmatic principles for the choice between familiar and distance pronouns, but in Dutch banner advertisements only three of them play a significant role.