By Way of Example

Transparency can be seen as providing access to more and better information, in ways that inevitably involve both informativity and accessibility, comprehension and comprehensiveness. It is difficult, however, to identify linguistic features that may be critical in the process, apart from generic appeals to avoiding ambiguity and vagueness. The present paper focuses on elements of accessibility and looks in particular at the use of exemplification. Keeping in mind work on strategies of recontextualization in popularising, exemplifications can be seen as a way of adjusting information to the readers’ knowledge and information needs by offering specific examples of general phenomena, clarifying general questions and adapting them to the audience. But how do exemplifications stand from the point of view of informativity and vagueness? The study is based on a corpus of Annual and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports in the rail sector. The corpus collects reports in English from different cultural backgrounds – including Native Englishes across continents and Non-native Englishes, whether English as a Lingua Franca or translation. The analysis of exemplification was conducted by identifying the various types of Vague Category Identifiers (VCIs) within the different forms of Exemplifying Markers, focusing particularly on the two main components of exemplifications: the General Element and the Exemplifying Element. This combined methodology allowed for a detailed examination of the dynamics between vagueness and exemplification, suggesting that exemplifications may increase accessibility but their informativity may vary and so can their contribution to transparency.