Illocutionary Forces in BPO Discourse: Identifying Speech Acts of Call Center Agents in Technical Service Interactions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19558706Keywords:
Speech Acts, Searle’s Taxonomy, Call Center Agents, Applied Linguistics, BPOAbstract
This research focused on the types of speech acts produced by the call center agents during their phone conversations with customers․ This study belongs to the type of descriptive-qualitative research․ The data were taken from the utterances from 10 male and 10 female call center agents in the call center industry in the Philippines․ To analyze the data based on Searle's (1969) speech acts theory‚ the study classified the illocutionary acts into the following four major categories: directives (requesting‚ asking‚ suggesting‚ and advising)‚ assertives (stating‚ informing‚ explaining‚ affirming‚ and responding)‚ commissives (offering and agreeing)‚ and expressives (thanking‚ apologizing‚ greeting‚ welcoming‚ and commending)․ These findings stress the instrumental use of language in accomplishing technical tasks while also maintaining professional relationships in the outsourcing environment's high-pressure context․
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