Abstract
Press releases represent a hybrid business genre, which combines an informational and a promotional communicative purpose. The objective of the study is to assess the extent to which this duality is reflected in the language used, and more particularly in the expression of stance, by comparing corporate press releases with another business genre that is essentially informational, namely business news reporting. The focus is on lexical bundles, as they have been found to be a major conveyor of attitudinal and epistemic stance. Relying on the pattern-matching approach to language, 3-word lexical bundles are extracted from a 1-million-word corpus of press releases (BeRel) and set against those found in a similar-sized corpus of business news (BeNews). An examination of the key bundles (keyword analysis) in each corpus reveals that the bundles that are distinctive to press releases differ significantly from those found in BeNews, particularly in the expression of modal, evaluative and personal stance.
About the authors
Sylvie De Cock is Professor of English language, linguistics and business communication at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). She conducts her research at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (founded by Sylviane Granger). Her interests include corpus linguistics, phraseology, English for specific purposes (business communication), learner corpus research (spoken and written learner corpora) and pedagogical lexicography.
Sylviane Granger is Professor Emerita of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). In 1990 she launched the first large-scale learner corpus project, the International Corpus of Learner English, and since then has played a key role in defining the different facets of the field of learner corpus research. Her current research interests focus on the analysis of phraseology in native and learner language and its integration into reference and instructional materials.
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