Language and voice
Language: one of our specialities
Brand voice and discourse
We have developed a desk-based discourse analysis tool called Syllabell to diagnose your brand or organisation's voice using your existing written material like websites, letters, annual reports and newsletters.
To make sense of the 'voice' of a brand or an organisation, we realised that we needed to go beyond primary research and draw on our academic heritage in linguistics. Syllabell diagnoses how your organisation or brand. communicates through language - its 'linguistic palette'. It is also a quick way to define your competitive context through analysis of the language used on competitors' websites or social media.
Ethnosemantics
Ethnosemantics is a branch of linguistic anthropology which studies the ways in which people classify the social, cultural, and environmental phenomena of their world. To put it another way, meaning is not ‘in’ the words themselves, the meaning of the words comes from each person’s social and cultural experiences. Take pleasure and pain for example. These may seem discrete concepts - we all know what pleasure is and what pain is. However, people vary in how they use these terms, because experientially there is a pleasure and pain spectrum. The important point is that individuals demarcate that spectrum in different ways, based on their own experiences, and social and cultural norms.
- Ethnosemantic interviews treat the person being interviewed as the expert of their world.
- Ethnosemantics is a useful approach for any labeling research
Visit our Resources page for free books and webinars on these topics.
http://www.sbresearch.com.au/index.php/bellbird/120-a-discourse-analysis-of-hope-you-are-well
Tags: Semiotics, Discourse Analysis, Ethnography, Hybrid methods, Language, Ethnosemantics