An Analysis Of Corporate Press Releases From The Perspective Of Generic Intertextuality

As an important communication vehicle in the area of public relations,corporate press releases contribute to establishing favorable corporate images and maintaining good relations between corporations and stakeholders.Through corporate press releases,companies usually report on the corporate news while attempting to develop positive reputations,which can be reflected by the generic intertextuality in those releases,where genres of both news reports and advertisements are embedded.This paper is aimed at analyzing corporate press releases(hereafter referred to as CPRs)from the perspective of generic intertextuality to expose their nature of pseudo-news.The author collects 50 pieces of CPRs from the official websites of 42 Fortune 500 companies as research data for the current study.As Xin Bin(2000)proposes that generic intertextuality is composed by mixtures of genres,registers and styles,this paper examines the generic intertextuality of CPRs in light of mixtures of genres,registers and styles respectively.Firstly,this paper analyzes all the moves in the data to identify the move structure of CPRs and then compares it with those of news reports and advertisements respectively.It turns out that there is a high level of similarity between the move structure of CPRs and that of news reports and also between those of CPRs and advertisements.That is to say,both news reports and advertisements are embedded in CPRs.As a result,the generic intertextuality of CPRs is exposed.Secondly,the paper analyzes the generic intertextuality from mixtures of genres,registers and styles respectively.As to the mixture of genres,the paper examines genres such as description,narration,exposition,argumentation and instruction embedded in CPRs.This mixture contributes to forming an orderly and comprehensive organization of corporate news to realize underlying communicative purposes.For the mixture of registers,the paper further divides it into mixtures of fields,tenors and modes.Mixture of fields is frequently found in CPRs,mainly resulted from writers' consideration of the important readership of journalists.Writers often incorporate various fields in CPRs to facilitate journalists' work with relevant background information in an attempt to obtain publicity.Mixture of tenors is also found in CPRs.In order to balance the complex relationship between audiences and communicative purposes,writers change their roles from news reporters to advertisers to corporate representatives,in conformity with the move structure of CPRs.Mixture of modes also appears,which incorporates different modes,such as pictures,video clips and website links or icons into CPRs,revealing writers' expectation for further reactions from readers.As to the mixture of styles,the paper examines the informal style embedded in CPRs which are supposed to be formal.The informal style not only facilitates audience's understanding of CPRs but also contributes to narrowing the distance between corporations and the audience.Finally,possible causes are explored and it turns out that social transformations such as commercialization and technologization all have impact on CPRs,which lead to the emergence of generic intertextuality.It is expected that this paper could shed some light on a better understanding of generic intertextuality and help practitioners of public relations to develop skills of using it in writing CPRs.Hopefully,the paper can also help news readers to enhance their critical reading ability on news reports of commercial business.