Multi-modal, virtual professional space: ‘unboundedness’ and ‘grounding’ in corporate web-casting events.

This chapter looks at CMBC, computer-mediated business communication genres, and in particular fast-changing web-conferencing modes, within a diachronic perspective. The corpus used is a multi-modal, self-compiled, specialized set of company genres and sub-genres. Web-casting is placed alongside other, conventional, business reporting genres, and is also analysed as an evolving conferencing mode, incorporating tele-presencing channels. Focusing on “space” as an interactional phenomenon, linguistic and pragmatic resources, directed towards the creation and use of this particular virtual business communication space are investigated: the essential “boundlessness” of the channel is set against “grounding”, the creation of relevance in the moment. Primarily cognitive linguistic frameworks are applied to a close analysis of the use of time, tense and aspect, visual and spatial imagery, and the indexicality functions of proximal deixis. The results show an identical match between the characteristics of this temporal-spatial nexus, its channels and modes, with the pragma-linguistic corollaries of the discourse conveyed by it.