Is the press release a genre? a study of form and content

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    52 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Although using different labels, genre theorists from different traditions have generally given privilege to the communicative purpose, in this article referred to as rhetorical objective, as genre determinant (see e.g. Swales 1990; Bhatia, 1993; see also Hasan, 1989; Halliday and Martin, 1993; Eggins, 1994). Genre analysts who have studied press releases in particular (e.g. Frandsen et al., 1997; Jcobs, 1999) tend to share this view, but nevertheless categorize communicative events conveyed through the press release as belonging to one genre despite variation in rhetorical objectives. This article argues that although the press release may be seen as a genre on the basis of textual form, it does not qualify for the genre label if analysed in terms of content and rhetorical objective. To substantiate my claim, I shall discuss a small corpus of press releases, all focusing on a specific biotechnological issue. In my analyses I shall discuss staging in terms of content as wll as logico-semantic relations between stages, patterns of stage combinations and their linguistic realizations with the aim of identifying variation in rhetorical objective.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalDiscourse Studies
    Volume8
    Issue number4
    Pages (from-to)503-530
    Number of pages27
    ISSN1461-4456
    Publication statusPublished - 2006

    Keywords

    • biotechnology discourse
    • communicative purposes
    • context
    • intertextuality
    • news releases
    • press releases

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