RATING TOBACCO INDUSTRY DOCUMENTS FOR CORPORATE DECEPTION AND PUBLIC FRAUD: A CORPUS LINGUISTIC ASSESSMENT OF INTENT by CATHERINE GENE BROWN (Under Direction the of Dr. Don Rubin) ABSTRACT Publicly available tobacco industry documents represent a window into an industry that perpetrated corporate deception and fraud that resulted in degraded public health and cost millions of lives. The current study addresses the topic of corporate deception and fraud from a linguistic standpoint, employing corpus methods, text analysis, (critical) discourse analysis and automated computational linguistic methods to assess a selection of six automated linguistic indicators of deceptive corporate strategy. These six linguistic indicators of deceptive corporate strategy were mined from an extensive body of deception and language research. These indicators represent common themes and observations in the literature and include the following: adversarial language, allness and superlative language, deprofiled agency due to overuse of passive constructions, group mentality, cognitive verbs, and strategically ambiguous language. Computer programs were written and used to assess single documents for the instance of each linguistic indicator of deceptive corporate strategy. Using the Tobacco Documents Corpus, a specialized full-text corpus representative of the entire body of tobacco industry documents, each indicator was assessed separately by source (company of origin), audience affiliation (internal or external to the tobacco industry), decade and audience type (individual or mass recipients). Additionally, internal audience documents were automatically ranked for deceptive corporate strategy using a vector model method. Tobacco control literature has demonstrated that external audience documents are deceptive and fraudulent as a whole. Accordingly, the linguistic benchmark for deception was estimated by taking an average external audience document. Internal audience documents were ranked against this benchmark using the vector analysis classification method. To evaluate the efficacy of the indicators and the multivariate method for ranking documents, documents from the highest, middle and lowest rankings were assessed by- hand using (critical) discourse analytic methods. Analysis validated the automatic ranking algorithm in part. However, statistical tests did not support hypotheses projecting higher instance of the six indicators in external audience documents and certain sources. Rather, deceptive corporate strategy can be better captured by examining potential indicators in concert. The automatic ranking algorithm results demonstrate an avenue for quickly organizing document in a large collection for subsequent discourse analysis. INDEX WORDS: Corpus linguistics, deception research, business ethics, document ranking, discourse analysis, tobacco industry documents, corporate fraud, document categorization RATING TOBACCO INDUSTRY DOCUMENTS FOR CORPORATE DECEPTION AND PUBLIC FRAUD: A CORPUS LINGUISTIC ASSESSMENT OF INTENT by CATHERINE GENE BROWN B.A., Agnes Scott College, 2000 Ph. D, University of Georgia, 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2006 © 2006 Catherine Gene Brown All Rights Reserved RATING TOBACCO INDUSTRY DOCUMENTS FOR CORPORATE DECEPTION AND PUBLIC FRAUD: A CORPUS LINGUISTIC ASSESSMENT OF INTENT by CATHERINE GENE BROWN Major Professor: Donald Rubin Committee: Michael Covington Bill Kreztschmar Betsy Rymes Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2006 DEDICATION This is dedicated to my friends and family. To my brother, Nick Brown, who kept me sane during years of hard work. To my mother, Colleen Morich, and her mother (Grandmother) and father (Grandaddy) who were always committed to public education and honesty. To my dad, Paul Vaughn Brown, who would do just about anything to help out anyone (me included). I would like to dedicate this dissertation to many important Kathryn/ines in my life: Kat Ballard, Kate Daley-Bailey, Kate Zimmerman and Dr. Kate Andersen. I hope a working coffee break with one of them is just around the corner. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this work (again) to my grandmother, Eugenia Caldwell Johnson. She had never left the southern U.S. when she boarded a train for Chicago to attend graduate school at Garrett (now a part of Northwestern University). She made her own way as a woman, as a southerner and as a scholar. I can only hope to be as blessed. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee and professors. Dr. Don Rubin has been an encouraging advisor, a thorough editor and someone who could keep me on track. My committee, Dr. Betsy Rymes, Dr. Michael Covington and Dr. Bill Kreztschmar always demanded my best work and effort. In addition, devoted instructors and teachers have been a source of sustenance and inspiration throughout my education. Of those many important people in my life, some should be acknowledged by name: Mrs. Abbott, Mrs. Schlumpf, Dr. Mi-Ran Kim, Dr. Marlyse Baptista. I would also like to thank Dr. Rubin for introducing me to Dr. Robbin Derry. She has been an inspiration and in some ways, a guide. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES......................................................................................................................... ix LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 Motivations for the Study..........................................................................................1 Language, Deception and Corporate Malfeasance....................................................3 The Electronic Repository of Tobacco Industry Documents ....................................6 Deception in Business: The Changing Face of Business Ethics ...............................7 Research Goals ..........................................................................................................8 Plan of the Dissertation ...........................................................................................15 2 REVIEW OF LITERATURE ......................................................................................13 Corpus Linguistics...................................................................................................13 Computerized corpora .............................................................................................14 Specialized corpora .................................................................................................15 Developmental and Learner Corpora ......................................................................16 Studies Using Corpus Linguistics ...........................................................................17 The Idiom Principle and Corpus Linguistics...........................................................18 ESL Applications of Corpus Linguistics.................................................................18 vi vii Collocation in Corpus Studies.................................................................................19 Corpus Multidimensional Factor Analysis Studies.................................................21 Applications of Corpus Linguistics and Computational Methods to Business Language ...........................................................................................................23 The Tobacco Industry – A Historical Perspective...................................................27 A History of Strategically Deceptive Communication: The Tobacco Industry ......27 The Current State of the Tobacco Industry and Tobacco Control ..........................31 The Tobacco Documents Corpus: the Tobacco Industry at a Glance .....................33 Features of the TDC: Some Document Class Differences ......................................34 H1: TDC Internal Versus External Audience Documents ......................................38 H2: Tobacco Institute and Center for Tobacco Research (CTR) Documents.........39 Language-Based Correlated of Deceptive Communication....................................39 Assumption of Truth ...............................................................................................39 Deception Attributes and Typology ........................................................................41 Typology of Deception............................................................................................43 Identifying Deception in Language.........................................................................48 Approaches to Researching Deception and Language............................................49 Are Features of Deceptive Language Results of Strategic Communication or Cognitive Constraints? ......................................................................................61 Observations about Deceptive Communication......................................................63 Linguistic Indicators of Deception and Unethical Business Discourse ..................66 3 METHODS ..................................................................................................................75