The play of tropes in the discourse of knowledge workers: Examining technical support services

This research in progress uses tropes and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine technical support exchanges recorded over a one-year period. Tropes, such as metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, function to close lexical gaps in a speaker’s vocabulary thereby extending a speaker’s expressive potential. Technical support exchanges are critically dependent on successful communication between knowledge worker and client. Knowledge workers are domain experts, possessing a good command of the semantics within their domain. Clients, on the other hand, have far less of a command of this domain which they must traverse in order to communicate their problem. This paper proposes that tropes offer both clients and knowledge workers the ability to expand their semantic range and establish common meaning. CDA will be used as a sociolinguistic frame for examining different types of utterances and the way they are tied together to create meaning, but also critically examine social context.