Self-reference in the leads of institutional press releases

Vol.39,No.1(2013)

Danica Maleková

https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2013-1-3

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/129151

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Abstract
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.

Keywords:
self-reference; social actors; institutional press release; construal of agency

Pages:
41–58
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