A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF KEYWORDS IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE CORPORATE PRESS RELEASES FROM EUROPEAN COMPANIES: INSIGHTS INTO DISCURSIVE PRACTICES Cover Image

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF KEYWORDS IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE CORPORATE PRESS RELEASES FROM EUROPEAN COMPANIES: INSIGHTS INTO DISCURSIVE PRACTICES
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF KEYWORDS IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE CORPORATE PRESS RELEASES FROM EUROPEAN COMPANIES: INSIGHTS INTO DISCURSIVE PRACTICES

Author(s): Hanna Teresa Skorczynska Sznajder
Subject(s): Economy, Media studies, Lexis, Semantics, Culture and social structure , Rhetoric
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: corpus linguistics; discursive practices; genre theory; intercultural rhetoric; keywords; corporate press releases;

Summary/Abstract: This study provides insights into discursive practices through a comparative study of keywords in English-language press releases from British, Spanish and Polish energy companies. Even though corporate press releases have been extensively researched, there is a lack of cross-cultural and corpus-based studies in this field. In the present research three corpora of approximately 120,000 words each, containing English-language press releases from British, Spanish and Polish energy companies, were used. The keywords were identified with the Wmatrix tool (Rayson 2009) and the reference corpus consisted of business periodical articles. The analysis of corpus keywords usually provides insights that would be difficult to gain by means of manual analyses of texts or qualitative approaches. The results obtained in this study show notable differences between the corpora with regard to the keywords identified. The use of more general meaning keywords by British companies or more technical keywords by Polish companies suggest that lexical choices might be indicative of different discursive practices used to reach stakeholders and the general public.

  • Issue Year: 9/2016
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 49-64
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: English