Corpus Analysis of Discourse Markers in Corporate Reports Involving Climate Change

Abstract

This article involves a corpus-assisted quantitative analysis of discourse markers (further in the article - DMs) identified in the climate change sections of corporate annual reports by British Petroleum and the Royal Dutch Shell corporations. Corporate discourse involving climate change has been amply elucidated from the linguistic macro-perspective (Koteyko, 2012; Livesey, 2002), whilst the discursive micro-perspective still receives little attention. The present corpus-assisted study seeks to elucidate corporate discourse on climate change from the micro-perspective by identifying DMs in climate change sections of annual reports by British Petroleum and the Royal Dutch Shell corporations. Additionally, the novel aspect of the present study involves a juxtaposition of the to-be-identified DMs in annual reporting by these two corporations. The corpus of the study involves climate change sections of the annual reports by British Petroleum and the Royal Dutch Shell Group within the time frame from 2010 until 2015. The corpus has been analysed in WordSmith (Scott, 2012). Results of the data analysis indicate that the most frequent DMs used in climate change discourse by British Petroleum involve and (M = 4,2%), as (0,9%), also (M = 0,4%), likely (0,3%), and but (M = 0,15%), while DMs identified in the Royal Dutch Shell Group’s climate change discourse comprise and (M = 2%), but (M = 0,15%), also (M = 0,6%), such (M = 0,2%), however (M = 0,2%), accordingly (M = 0,1%), furthermore (M = 0,16%), further ( M = 0,1%), and therefore (M = 0,1%). These findings are further presented and discussed in detail in the article.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.