Abstract
Risk communication is grounded in both rationality and emotion (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Bo-holm & Corvellec 2014). Recent investigations have proved that emotions do affect risk and danger percep-tions by functioning as ‘mediators’ (Xie et al. 2011) and become important in decision-making. My study explores how emotion is induced by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short) to influence the mentalities and behaviours of its broad mixed audience and thus increase risk prevention. With that research purpose in mind, I examine an electronic corpus of over 500 online samples of fatal aviation dockets issued yearly online by the NTSB between the time span 2010-2015 and contained in its website databases. The emotional engagement deployed to mediate the perceptions of risk and danger by the general public constitutes a unique genre among all other world transportation agencies, since through informative vividness it pursues to activate the processes of memory, inference (i.e. judgement) and decision-making. I take Stubbs’ (2001) concept of ‘discursive prosody’ as point of departure and resort to a blended theoretical framework that combines Narratology, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Proximisation (Cap 2013) and Positioning (Harre & van Langenhove 1999) Theories. I will show that the NTSB’s emotional prosody is more rhetorical than lexical and that the narrative strategies of focalisation and speech representation play a salient role. To conclude I will reflect on some of the possible consequences of over-exploiting emotional engagement in risk communication.
Highlights
Risk communication is grounded in both rationality and emotion (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Boholm & Corvellec 2014)
The prevention of hazard is driven by emotion as much as by rationality (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Boholm & Corvellec 2014) and recent research (Xie et al 2011) has demonstrated that emotions function as ‘mediators’ influencing the perception of danger and the making of related decisions, emotional language is not expected in risk communication ( RC), let alone if the text in question is a synopsis issued by a corporation or a governmental organism
Many of the dockets or synopses of aviation accidents disseminated online every year by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short) exhibit a distinctive ‘emotional tone’ that notably diverges from the sanitised technical style of other world transportation agencies
Summary
Risk communication is grounded in both rationality and emotion (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Boholm & Corvellec 2014). The prevention of hazard is driven by emotion as much as by rationality (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Boholm & Corvellec 2014) and recent research (Xie et al 2011) has demonstrated that emotions function as ‘mediators’ influencing the perception of danger and the making of related decisions, emotional language is not expected in risk communication ( RC), let alone if the text in question is a synopsis issued by a corporation or a governmental organism Counter to these expectations, many of the dockets or synopses of aviation accidents disseminated online every year by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short) exhibit a distinctive ‘emotional tone’ that notably diverges from the sanitised technical style of other world transportation agencies. This researcher reminds us that curiosity gave rise to the scien-
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