A Comparative Study of Keywords in English-Language Corporate Press Releases From European Companies

Insights Into Discursive Practices

Bibliographic Data

ID23020569
AuthorsHanna Teresa Skorczynska Sznajder (corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume9
Issue1
Pages49
Publication date2016-06-30
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDiscourse and Interaction (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1802-9930 • E-ISSN: 1805-952X
PublisherMasaryk University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5817/di2016-1-49
OpenAlexW2468819690
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited17

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 fi eld. 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 identifi ed 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 diffi cult to gain by means of manual analyses of texts or qualitative approaches. The results obtained in this study show notable diff erences between the corpora with regard to the keywords identifi ed. 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 diff erent discursive practices used to reach stakeholders and the general public.

Business English · Corpus linguistics · Energy (signal processing) · English language · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Psychology

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