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Part of
Current Issues in Phraseology
Edited by Sebastian Hoffmann, Bettina Fischer-Starcke and Andrea Sand
[Benjamins Current Topics 74] 2015
► pp. 57–82

On “true” portraits of Letters to Shareholders – and the importance of phraseological analysis

The purpose of the present paper is primarily methodological. It provides evidence that a research question investigated in a corpus can produce different results according to the software adopted, queries the comparability of the results, and shows that the whole picture is more than one piece of software can reveal. The field of research is a corpus of Letters to Shareholders referring to 2008, the year the current financial crisis began, compared to identically constructed corpora from the same companies, referring to 2006 and 2010. The paper argues that the macro analysis of key words and key semantic domains needs to be complemented by close phraseological analyses, since it is in the phraseology of the texts that the nuances of a message are to be found.

Keywords: DICTION, key semantic domains, Letters to Shareholders, phraseology, verbal tone
Published online: 10 July 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.74.04mur
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Giglioni, Cinzia
2020. Annual Company Reports’ narratives migrate to the Web: A diachronic perspective. Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies :29(2) ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Qingrong, Bilal & Bushra Komal
2022. A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Chief Executive Officer Statements in Annual Reports and Corporate Social Responsibility Reports. Frontiers in Psychology 13 DOI logo
Manzella, Pietro
2020. “Dear Emma…”. Genre Overlapping and Register Variation in the English and Italian Version of Sergio Marchionne’s Letter to Confindustria. Comparative Legilinguistics 44:1 ► pp. 45 ff. DOI logo

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