Characterising the Genre of the Corporate Press Release.

Abstract

This article discusses the findings of a study which aimed to investigate the conventions of corporate press releases in English. The data consisted of a corpus of approximately 50 press releases issued by biotechnology companies in the UK. The analysis, which adopted a qualitative approach based primarily on work in genre analysis, text linguistics and pragmatics, focused on two main areas: the structure or format of company press releases, and characteristic linguistic and pragmatic features. Clear trends emerged, which will be discussed and exemplified, and an attempt will be made to link textual conventions to contextual features of the genre, such as the purpose of press releases and characteristics of the text users (producers and receivers).