Self-reference in the leads of institutional press releases

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
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
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.
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