Uncovering the typical phraseology of press releases and business news reports using a lexical bundle approach
(2021) EUROPHRAS 2021 — Location: UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (6.September.2021)
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Granger, Sylviane 
- Abstract
- Lexical bundle research has contributed to demonstrating the ubiquity and importance of phraseological expressions in a range of registers and genres (Biber 2009). This paper reports on research that set out to explore the phraseology of two business English genres using the lexical bundle approach. The genres under study are corporate press releases and business news reports, two text types which have so far been largely neglected in lexical bundle research. In our study, 3-word lexical bundles were extracted from a 1-million-word corpus of press releases (BeRel) and set against those found in a similar-sized corpus of business news (BeNews). The specific aim of the paper is twofold: (1) to examine the extent to which the distinct set of bundles used in each genre actually reflect their specific communicative purposes (Biber and Barbieri 2007); (2) to demonstrate that the lexical bundle approach can be used as a very powerful discovery procedure, which brings to light phraseological units at the interface between discourse, syntax and lexis that would not easily be accessible via other means. An examination of the key bundles (keyword analysis, Bondi 2010) in each corpus reveals that the bundles that are typically used in BeRel differ significantly from those found in BeNews. It clearly emerges that the distinct lexical bundle types in each corpus can be seen to reflect the respective communicative purposes of the two genres under study: mainly informational in the case of news reporting and informational as well as promotional and persuasive in that of press releases (Bremner 2014, Catenaccio 2008). Our findings show that this is particularly striking when it comes to stance bundles. Despite the fact that press releases are to some extent preformulated to resemble news reports (Jacobs 2006), there are marked differences in the way the actual information is presented. The impersonal framing in news reports (e.g. there bundles and anticipatory it bundles) stands in stark contrast to the more personal framing in news releases (e.g. we and I bundles). In addition, the more personal self-centered approach of press releases combined with the routine foregrounding of firm intentions/promises (e.g. will bundles) and the focus on positive elements (e.g. bundles with positively laden adjectives) tie in well with their promotional role (among their stakeholders, potential investors and the general public). The persuasive function of press releases (to persuade journalists to cover the news) is for example reflected in the bundles found in quotes from high-ranking figures which are invariably included in the releases (e.g. we are excited). The main benefit of the lexical bundle approach is its strong heuristic power. The disadvantage of the approach, however, is that it only extracts fully fixed sequences of contiguous words. We will show that this weakness can be overcome by using the extracted sequences as prompts to explore the range of variants they display, using the concordancing and automatic collocate extraction functions offered by linguistic analysis software tools. References Biber, D. (2009). A corpus-driven approach to formulaic language in English: Multi-word patterns in speech and writing. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(3), 275–311. Biber, D. & Barbieri, F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purposes, 26, 263-286. Bondi, M. (2010). Perspectives on keywords and keyness. An introduction. In M. Bondi & M. Scott (Eds.), Keyness in texts (pp. 1-18). Benjamins. Bremner, S. (2014). Genres and processes in the PR industry: Behind the scenes with an intern writer. International Journal of Business Communication 51(3), 259-278. Catenaccio, P. (2008). Press releases as a hybrid genre: Addressing the informational/promotional conundrum. Pragmatics, 18(1), 9-31. Jacobs, G. (2006). The dos and don’ts of writing press releases (and how learners act upon them). In P. Gillaerts & P. Shaw (Eds.), The map and the landscape: Norms and practices in genre (pp. 199-218). Peter Lang.
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De Cock, S., & Granger, S. (2021). Uncovering the typical phraseology of press releases and business news reports using a lexical bundle approach. EUROPHRAS 2021, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/216533