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Press releases represent a hybrid business genre, which combines an informational and a promotional communicative purpose. The objective of the study is to assess the extent to which this duality is reflected in the language used, and more particularly in the expression of stance, by comparing corporate press releases with another business genre that is essentially informational, namely business news reporting. The focus is on lexical bundles, as they have been found to be a major conveyor of attitudinal and epistemic stance. Relying on the pattern-matching approach to language, 3-word lexical bundles are extracted from a 1-million-word corpus of press releases (BeRel) and set against those found in a similar-sized corpus of business news (BeNews). An examination of the key bundles (keyword analysis) in each corpus reveals that the bundles that are distinctive to press releases differ significantly from those found in BeNews, particularly in the expression of modal, evaluative and personal stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how marketing and science rhetoric have become entrenched in online science news stories. The schematic structures of a corpus of 270 news stories from three types of website (university websites, the websites of Futurity.org and MSNBC.com) have been analyzed and compared. An eight-move structure identified from the corpus suggests that the genre of news stories is a hybridization of promotional discourse for marketization and science discourse for explanation. Hybridization is first evident in university press releases, which are then spread by the mass media without significant changes. From the perspective of intertextual chains, the emerging discourse practices can be attributed to the power shifting of news production from journalists to science institutions and further from journalistic to scientific norms. In turn, the discourse practices accelerate the shift of power, which could ultimately lead to the loss of independent and critical science journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]