Types of intertextuality in Chairman’s statements

Abstract

Intertextuality is a pervasive feature of all discourse, but norms and conventions vary widely across domains. Academic conventions can cause difficulties for those who have been exposed to, or move on to, domains with other practices. Academic conventions are well documented; here we examine those of business writing. We created a corpus of chairman’s statements from annual corporate reports and searched them for signalled and unsignalled intertextual relationships. We hypothesise that statements from the same company will be linked by both repeated phraseology and acknowledged intertextuality.