公司新闻发布稿中的体裁互文性分析

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 

Ever since the beginning of the 20th century when the first corporate press release was made by Ivy Lee, concerning an accident that the company Pennsylvania Railroad had been involved in, press release has been playing an important role in the profession of public relations. Fraser even crowns it as  “the granddaddy of public relations writing vehicle” (Fraser, 2014: 92). In the business world, the success of a company is usually built on a good public reputation, which is mainly realized by way of public relations. Corporate press releases turn out to be a most widely used tool for that purpose. If the public, or more specifically, the stakeholders are kept well infor med of what happens in a company, especially of those good thi ngs, it would be much easier for the m to relate  to this com pany  and thus  conceive  a po sitive  image  of  it in a  gradual way. However, with the aim to construct a favorable image, companies usually adopt a tone more or less prom otional, typical feature of advertisem ents, to report on their news, which  is in  conflict  with the com mon  rule th at  news rep orts  shall  be  factual  and objective. As a result, corporate press releases com e to a place som ewhere between news  reports and advertisem ents,  mixed  with  generic features of both genres. Therefore, generic intertextuality is bound to appear in corporate press releases.  

1.1 Definition of Corporate Press Releases
A press release is a form of written communication from an organization to the media about anything that is consid ered to be newsworthy. It can announce a range of new s items,  including scheduled events, persona l  promotions,  awards, new  products and services,  sales  accomplishments,  etc.1  Specifically,  in  this  paper,  corporate press releases,  hereafter  referred  to as CPRs, are thos e  only reporting  on positive  events published by corporations on their official websites. 
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1.2 Rationale of the Study 
On  the one hand, intertextuality has long be en  a key factor in discourse analysis. Kamberellis  and Scott (2004) propose that  one of the basic tasks for discourse analysis is to construct a specific n etwork of intertextual relations. There have been many  researches in d iscourse  analysis  carried out from the perspective of intertextuality. However, most of those researches concentrate on explicit intertextu al relations,  such as allusions,  references,  clichés, proverbs,  quotations, etc. (e.g. Ma , 2013;  Liu, 2014; Zhao and Che ng,  2015). Those relations can be recognized immediately.  In contra st,  implicit  intertextual  relations of discourses, such as the various  styles em bedded  in a text, are not  clearly  demarcated,  and thus they have obtained  less attention from  previous  studies  (Bhatia, 2 008;  Xin, 2005). Those implicit intertextual relations are the main concern of generic intertextuality. On the other hand, CPRs, as a fundam ental channel for a com pany to spread its corporate news to the public, are primarily aimed at obtaining positive publicity in the media to build a desired com pany image and a good reputation, which can be best realized  through prom otion  (Kotlre, 1984). In  essence, CP Rs  are promotional like other corporate public discourses such as company profiles and chairman’s statements. However, as socially acknowledged, news has to be reported in a factual and objective tone.  All this suggests that  there must be a tension  between  the ostensible and underlying  communicative purposes of CPRs.  That  is why CPRs are al