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Indexing traditional and modern professional values

T/V-pronouns in Flemish New Work Order job interviews

ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with KU Leuven.

Published online: 27 May 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24044.ded
Abstract
Traditional professional values are complemented by more modern ones in the “New Work Order”-context, roughly marking a shift from hierarchy to (seeming) egalitarianism and from formality to informality. We investigate the pragmatic uses of T/V-pronouns in job interviews in relation to this transformation. More particularly, we zoom in on the Flemish case, which is especially rich, given that next to V-forms, there is a double-barreled T-system with standard versus colloquial T-forms. Exploring twenty-one authentic job interviews using exploratory statistical techniques, we found that V-forms, emblematic of traditional values, are nearly absent in our data. In turn, the variation attested in the use of T-forms by recruiters highlights local meaning-making, prompting questions about the alignment of these forms with evolving indexical values and workplace norms.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The evolving New Work Order Context and its relation to job interviews
    • 1.2Pronouns of address as emblematic markers of the potentially evolving New Work Order-context in Flemish JIs
  • 2.Research questions
  • 3.Data and bird’s eye view on the analytical approach
    • 3.1Dataset: Twenty-one Flemish job interviews
    • 3.2A multi-tiered investigation into recruiters’ T2/V pronouns in relation to the professional identity of recruiters
    • 3.3Coding T/V-pronouns in Flemish job interviews
  • 4.T2/V-Pronoun usage in Flemish job interviews
    • 4.1The distribution of T2/V-pronouns in our dataset (RQ1)
    • 4.2Patterns of T²-pronouns within and across recruiters’ job interviews (RQ2)
      • 4.2.1Method for tracking recruiters’ T2s
      • 4.2.2Recruiters’ patterns: Overall
      • 4.2.3Zooming in on dynamically shifting recruiters’ patterns
        • 4.2.3.1Recruiter-3
        • 4.2.3.2Recruiter-7
        • 4.2.3.3Recruiter-2
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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