A corpus-based approach to corporate communication research

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a decisive reputation tool for companies and as such, a key concept in corporate communication as a phenomenon of intercultural and global significance. This has warranted a comprehensive examination of the language of CSR reports reflecting the principles of the corporate culture. Studies exploring the narratives of CSR reporting currently lack insights into the distribution of meaningful priorities evidenced in language use. This study sets out to explore the linguistic environment of the most frequently occurring language tokens to identify recurrent language patterns used to ensure efficient CSR reporting, and to further establish priority directions in CSR narrative composition evidenced in language use. A corpus-based approach and contextual analysis were adopted to examine CSR reports issued by Microsoft over the last seven years and recognised as an example of best practices in the corporate field. The corpus was compiled using the Prime Machine corpus concordancer tool and comprised 99,176 tokens. Following the study results, the study makes a number of inferences regarding the use of pronouns, “Microsoft + a verb denoting positive action”, “more + than,” “more + adjective”, “Corporate” as part of compound terminological units, as well as a set of key tokens encountered within a descriptive linguistic environment with positive connotation. This, in turn, proved helpful in identifying the hierarchy of priorities distribution revealed in the course of material analysis. The results contribute to a systemic appreciation of corporate language policies facilitating efficient stakeholder communication and can be used in further research investigating related matters of scientific interest.

作者简介

Elena Malyuga

Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia

编辑信件的主要联系方式.
Email: malyuga-en@rudn.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6935-0661

Professor of Linguistics, Head of Foreign Languages Department at the Faculty of Economics, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Doctor Habil. of Linguistics, Academician of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Editor-in-Chief of the research journals Issues of Applied Linguistics and Training, Language and Culture. Her research interests include theory and practice of intercultural professional and business communication, pragmatics, corpus studies and discourse analysis. She is author and co-author of over 300 publications.

Moscow, Russia

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