Title: Self-reference in the leads of institutional press releases
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2013, vol. 39, iss. 1, pp. [41]-58
Extent
[41]-58
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2013-1-3
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/129151
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
The paper investigates the phenomenon of self-reference as an instance of preformulation in the genre of institutional press release, situating it into a more general framework of representation of social actors in the lexico-grammatical and semantic structure. The study is based on a corpus of governmental press releases from two institutions with a similar socio-political function, and it focuses on the opening sentences of the releases which take the function of leads. While the analysis of the data confirms sharp qualitative differences in the nature of self-referencing, especially with regard to their relative position on the informative – promotional axis whose two ends are prototypically represented by news reporting and advertising, the findings also indicate that the structural and lexical differences hardly affect the deeper cognitive semantic patterns relating to the construal of agency.
References
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[2] Bell, Alan (1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
[3] Bhatia, Vijay K. (1993) Analyzing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings. Essex: Longman Group.
[4] Catenaccio, Paola, Colleen Cotter, Mark De Smedt, Giuliana Garzone, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Lutgard Lams, Daniel Perrin, John E. Richardson, Tom Van Hout, Ellen Van Praet (2011) "Towards a linguistics of news production". Journal of Pragmatics 43 (7), 1843–1852. | DOI 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.09.022
[5] Chilton, Paul (2004) Analysing Political Discourse. London: Routledge.
[6] Chovanec, Jan (2009) "Simulation of spoken interaction in written online media texts". Brno Studies in English 35 (2), 109–128.
[7] Fairclough, Norman (2003) Analysing Discourse. London and New York: Routledge.
[8] Fowler, Roger (1991) Language in the News. Discourse and Ideology in the Press. New York: Routledge.
[9] Grice, H. Paul (1975) "Logic and conversation". In: Cole, Peter and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.) Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 1–36.
[10] Halliday, Michael A. K. (1985) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
[11] Huddlestone, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[12] Jacobs, Geert (1999a) Preformulating the News. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
[13] Jacobs, Geert (1999b) "Self-reference in press releases". Journal of Pragmatics 31, 219–242 | DOI 10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00077-0
[14] Lassen, Inger (2004) "Ideological resources in biotechnology press releases: Patterns of Theme/Rheme and Given/New". In: Young, Lynne and Claire Harrison (eds.) Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. London and New York: Continuum, 264–279.
[15] Maat, H. Pander (2007) "How promotional language in press releases is dealt with by journalists: genre mixing or genre conflict?". The Journal of Business Communication 44 (1), 59–95. | DOI 10.1177/0021943606295780
[16] McLaren, Yvonne and Calin Gurau (2005) "Characterising the Genre of the Corporate Press Release". LSP & Professional Communication 5 (1), 10–29.
[17] Mulderrig, Jane (2003) "Consuming education: a critical discourse analysis of social actors in New Labour's education policy". Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 1 (1). The Institute for Education Policy Studies (IEPS), 96–123.
[18] Põiklik, Pille (2012) "Recontextualisation of the Second Amendment and Supreme Court Decisions in The New York Times'. Brno Studies in English 38 (1), 24–37.
[19] Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Sidney, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
[20] Ungerer, Friedrich (2004) "Ads as news stories, news stories as ads: The interaction of advertisements and editorial texts in newspapers". Text 24(3), 307–328.
[21] van Dijk, Teun A. (1985) "Structures of news in the press". In: van Dijk, T. A. (ed.) Discourse and Communication: New Approaches to the Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication. Berlin: de Gruyter, 69–93.
[22] van Leeuwen, Theo (1996) "The representation of social actors'. In: Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa and Malcolm Coulthard (eds.) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 32–70.
[23] van Leeuwen, Theo (2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[24] Walters, William and Jens Henrik Haahr (2005) Governing Europe. Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration. London: Routledge.