| dc.description.abstract | The dissertation investigates group decision-making from a linguistic perspective,
which means that the linguistic interaction in group decision-making is put
in focus, but also that linguistic methods are used to perform the investigation.
The main research questions are i) what are group decisions, ii) how are group
decisions made, linguistically, and iii) how does group decision-making relate to
other social activities?
The dissertation has five main parts. The first is a survey of previous research on
group decision-making, including work done in social-psychology, communication
research, linguistics and argumentation analysis. The second part of the dissertation
is an analysis of the concept of decision, where dictionaries, thesauri
and corpora are used as empirical input. The third part is a study of argumentation
in group decision-making, where one well-established theory of argumentation
analysis, pragma-dialectics, is discussed critically, and merged with a modern
theory of language. The fourth main part of the dissertation concerns interactional
patterns – a corpus of decision-making conversations is scrutinized, and
patterns are extracted and discussed. The fifth and last of the main parts is a
study of word frequencies in the group decision-making corpus, where methodological
problems are discussed, and a number of measures based on word frequencies
are presented.
The results of the dissertation include the survey of previous research on group
decision-making, a concept analysis of decision, as well as a new model for argumentation
analysis. Some more specific results are that there is considerable variation
among the groups as regards the way decisions are made, although group
decisions always are oriented around proposing-accepting. In addition it was
found that the language in group decision-making is often quite advanced and
that arguing is an integral part of group decision-making. | |
