Representation of Social Actors in the Genre of the Institutional Press Release: a Study of Headlines.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship of self-reference to other-reference in the discourse of institutional press releases focusing on headlines. For the purposes of the study, two key political actors were selected – the European Commission and the British government, namely their environmental departments. Corpora of more than 70 press releases from each organization have been compiled to compare the degree of self-centredness as demonstrated by foregrounding and backgrounding linguistic techniques, with particular focus on how syntactic-semantic structures are allocated to social actors. The analysis shows that while there is a significant level of similarity as far as allocation of agency and prominent linguistic structures related to self-reference is concerned, there are stark differences in terms of the space and prominence of linguistic structures allocated to the other social actors, personality and directness of reference, and the intensity of self-promotion by frequent repetition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]