Making sense of web-based European Court of Justice institutional press releases: Context, structure and replicable genres

Abstract

In a world in which major technological advances have considerably boosted the use of the web as a communication tool, the analysis of digital press releases to disseminate information on the case-related activity of judicial courts and project their social and institutional identity far and wide is useful to understand an evolving continuum of professional discursive practices (re-)shaped within institutional and media (public relations) communication strategies. Drawing from the criteria of genre categorizations (Swales, 2004; Bhatia, 2004; Askehave & Swales, 2001) along with computer-mediated analysis of texts (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992; Askehave & Nielsen, 2005; Caballero, 2008; Villanueva et al., 2008; Garzone, 2012) and metapragmatic strategies of press releases (Jacobs, 1999) in a randomised corpus of web-based European Court of Justice institutional press releases, I first place the sampled texts into their context of use, and then look at the generic structure used to realise the moves with communicative purposes, in both qualitative and quantitative analyses of data. Context and structure underlying the communicative genre are then mapped onto the role and function of intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 1992, 2003; Bhatia 2004, 2017) alongside recontextualization (Linell, 1998; Sarangi & Brookers-Howell, 2006). The findings show that the genre typifies the rhetorical activities and purposes of release writers as they come across to the media and the wider audiences in the ongoing context of institutionalised communication, and the ways the genre effectively replicates other forms of discourses and genres at different levels of organisational structure.