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 ma Read More

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 o Read More

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 Read More

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 prono Read More