ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛЬНАЯ ПРАГМАТИКА ПРИ АНАЛИЗЕ КОМПЬЮТЕРНО-ОПОСРЕДОВАННОГО ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЯ В СЕРВИСНЫХ ЦЕНТРАХ

The study discusses the importance of understanding institutional pragmatics of the computer-mediated customer-operator interaction in service encounters as the major factor for teaching an intelligent system since we can postulate that service encounters of the 21^st century will involve artificial agents intertwined with human intelligence of either customers or staff. It aims at giving an overview of the research that has been done so far in the field of computer-mediated interaction and institutional pragmatics as well as provides some findings of the research based on the analysis of customer-operator chat data.

When we speak of the study of interaction, we bear in mind the analysis of synchronous conversation but we might also consider text-based computer communication in which participants are temporary jointly engaged in some kind of social action being co-present though spatially distant.  Examples include telephone conversations, video conferences, chart and instant messaging sessions especially on working place such as service encounters.  

The study of interaction traces its roots in many approaches. L.Wittgenstein [12] found the focus on how people actually employ words and sentences in certain situations more important than language rules.  D. Hymes [6] laid emphasis on communicative competence, the ability not just to speak a language but to interact in that language in particular situations. The key idea of  frames as the way people strategically organize, communicate or even conceal what they are doing when they interact [4] alongside with speech act theory [10] and works on implicature [5] became the foundations for the development of the field of pragmatics.

Pragmatics as a linguistic discipline deals with the analysis and recognition of meaning in texts under contextual influences far larger than their semantic counterpart. Two different traditions in pragmatics are seen in two different fields of research: pragmalinguistics referring to pragmatics as a separate level of linguistics and sociopragmatics treating pragmatics as a function of language that incorporates a larger situational context.  Two different approaches nevertheless operate some general terms such as reference, dexis, definiteness and indefiniteness, implicature, presupposition, speech acts.  Issues like reference, dexis, definiteness and indefiniteness are more grammatical in nature whereas  implicature, presupposition, speech acts tend to involve more lexico-grammatical or semantic aspects and are more much difficult to handle as they follow less clearly defined or researched patterns.  This problem is urgent to be solved as recent years have seen the flourishing in the development of intelligent systems that are supposed to replace one of the partners in some mediated interaction.

The traditional definition of mediation is the information passing though some kind of artifact that is inserted between communicative partners.  In applied linguistics the idea of what media is includes psychological, semiotic, and social entities like schemas and genres.  M. Bakhtin [1] and L. Vygotskey [2] are the most influential scientists in the field. For the first all our interaction is mediated through other people as to form any utterance we borrow from previously formed utterances. For the second every action is mediated by various tools (both technical and psychological) that provide a link between individual mental processes and social and cultural ones.  Early work in applied linguistics dealt with the influence of any kind of face-to-face clues absence on the ways messages can be delivered and understood [11]. Later the focus has moved to the characteristics of the computer-mediated communication both from the point of view of technology and semiotics [7]. But mediated interaction cannot solely rely on either technological or semiotic means, so the study of mediated discourse analysis [9] as the research of interactions in a wide variety of contexts with the emphasis on pragmatics, institutional pragmatics in particular, seems to be a very important.

Institutional pragmatics though not considered a unified subfield of pragmatics, refers to research on how linguistic utterances obtain their meanings in the context of institutions as language use in the workplace is under certain institutional constraints, which affect how meaning is interpreted and produced. These constrains or the institutional context make up what are called frames [4] for participants of the interaction to interpret what type of activity is it, what is going on, and what roles are being played. But the process develops both ways: the institution provides the context for language use so that participants orient to the features of the institution in the verbal (and nonverbal) conducts, but the utterances produced also renew and create the institution as by orienting to institutional goals participants define what institution it is.

Research on institutional pragmatics [3] points at three main features of the institutional interaction in contrast with ordinary conversations:

1. partners in institution interaction orient to some institutionally defined goals, tasks, identities (in the corpus of the call-center dialogues participants do not insert exchanges that deviate from the core goals of the interaction);
2. partners in institution interaction orient to some specific and implicit constraints on what contribution is permissible and what contribution is not (in the corpus of the call-center dialogues when a caller tried to play a compliment, the staff refused to participate in the interaction and tried to orient to  the official business issues);
3. partners in institution interaction orient to some inferential framework that are specific to every institution ((in the corpus of the call-center dialogues the staff withhold the expressions of surprise or sympathy).

    

   Research on institutional pragmatics has covered a wide range of topics but in our research the main focus has been on the analysis of lexical choice and speech acts. 

   Lexical choice is a key resource can index and renew the institutional context. In the example of the recorded conversation between a customer and a call-center operator (to present the authenticity it is in Russian) the customer uses some special vocabulary  «потерял сим-карту», «заблокировать» (Line 1), the operator uses «номер» (Line 2), «электронного счета» (Line 6), «балансе» (Line 7), «тарифа» (Line 12) that indexes the context as a telephone company chat and evokes the roles of the interaction  as a customer and an operator.

   (1) Здравствуйте! Я вчера потерял сим-карту, можно ли заблокировать её?

   (2) Добрый день! Ярких и солнечных дней вместе с ****! Руслан, речь идет о номере, который Вы (3) указали в теме чата? Подскажите, пожалуйста, фамилию, имя и отчество владельца номера.

   (4) Дело в том, что я * лет назад купил телефон, вместе с этой сим-картой

   (5) Подскажите, пожалуйста, следующую информацию: *. Дата последнего пополнения     (6)электронного счета (с точностью до * дней) и сумма последнего платежа (с точностью до *$ (7)или ** руб.). *. Сумма на балансе в данный момент.

   (8) Мы будем рады Вам помочь, когда у Вас будет время на общение!

   (9) Примерно, **.**.**** Сумма ***рублей. Баланс примерно рублей **-** рублей

   (10) Просто сейчас с этой сим-карты, поступают звонки

   (11)Минуту, проверяю.

   (12) Информация неверна. Название тарифа, последний набранный номер?

   (13) Мы будем рады Вам помочь, когда у Вас будет время на общение! Этот диалог я закрываю, но

           (14) мы работаем для Вас ** часа * дней в неделю и всегда будем рады Вам помочь! Рекомендуем

          (15) Вам наш сайт www.****, а также Личный Кабинет ***. Это просто, быстро и очень удобно!

          (16) Всего Вам доброго!

It should be noted, that lexical choice in institutional talk involves not only the choice of some special vocabulary,  but the choice among different ordinary formulations «просто сейчас» (Line 10), «минуту, проверю» (Line 11). Other type of formulation that participants may use to orient to institutional setting involve the choice of references to time, place and events, e.g.. «Дата последнего пополнения» (Line 5) or formulaic expressions («Ярких и солнечных дней вместе с ****!» (Line 2), « будем рады Вам помочь!»  (Line 13). Thus word meanings are arrived at in the context of the institution and the identities of the people involved.

Another widely discussed topic within the scope of institutional pragmatics is speech acts as interaction in a specific institutional setting may contain speech acts that are unique to that setting or are realized slightly differently than in ordinary conversations. In ordinary conversations, due to issues of face and solidarity, requests often have prerequests and hesitation markers that allow for the requestee to imply a negative response before the actual request is produced [8]. In the data under discussion we noted that requests in service encounters of the computer-mediated dialogues between a customer and an operator customers tend to produce their request immediately after the greeting and without any pre-sequences or hesitation («Здравствуйте! Я вчера потерял сим-карту, можно ли заблокировать её?» (Line 1)) . In situations involving negative response this leaves the business employee little or no opportunity to indicate prior to the customer’s request that it will not be granted.  Since the customer’s request and the business fulfillment of this request is the main purpose of the interaction, business employees tend to engage in extensive responses when a request cannot be fulfilled, this responses can involve suggestions for self-service: «Мы будем рады Вам помочь, когда у Вас будет время на общение! Этот диалог я закрываю, но мы работаем для Вас ** часа * дней в неделю и всегда будем рады Вам помочь! Рекомендуем Вам наш сайт www.****, а также Личный Кабинет ***. Это просто, быстро и очень удобно! Всего Вам доброго!» (Lines 13-16). 

In the last few decades institutional pragmatics has contributed much to the understanding of how meaning is created and interpreted in the context of the workplace. The findings of the data analysis of the computer-mediated customer-operator interaction in service encounters can provide useful implications for interventions and improvement of communication within institutions.