A comparative study of keywords in english-language corporate press releases from European companies: Insights into discursive practices

Abstract

This study provides insights into discursive practices through a comparative study of keywords in English-language press releases from British, Spanish and Polish energy companies. Even though corporate press releases have been extensively researched, there is a lack of cross-cultural and corpus-based studies in this fi eld. In the present research three corpora of approximately 120,000 words each, containing English-language press releases from British, Spanish and Polish energy companies, were used. The keywords were identifi ed with the Wmatrix tool (Rayson 2009) and the reference corpus consisted of business periodical articles. The analysis of corpus keywords usually provides insights that would be diffi cult to gain by means of manual analyses of texts or qualitative approaches. The results obtained in this study show notable diff erences between the corpora with regard to the keywords identifi ed. The use of more general meaning keywords by British companies or more technical keywords by Polish companies suggest that lexical choices might be indicative of diff erent discursive practices used to reach stakeholders and the general public.