Genre Analysis of Press Releases of Pakistan Air Force
Keywords:
BCU Approach, move analysis, press release, Swales’ (1990) Genre TheoryAbstract
Press releases are the pieces of writing issued by companies or institutions to communicate information to the news media community and the general public. There has been limited work done on the press release genre (Catenaccio, 2008) in the Pakistani context. The current study aimed to explore different moves in the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) press releases and to identify the moves’ functions in the text of the PAF press releases. The data for this purpose was collected from the official website of the Pakistan Air Force dated from 2009 to 2019. Then, through a systematic random sampling technique, every 4th press release was selected. After the sampling, a total of 150 press releases were selected as a sample. For the move analysis, Swales’ (1990) Genre Theory was used as a theoretical framework, and the BCU Approach by Biber, Cornor and Upton (2007) was used as an analytical framework. The findings of the study revealed that there were four moves followed by the sub-moves in the press releases. These moves formed the coherent and interlinked structure of the press release and served the communicative functions in the move structure. The current study will be helpful for Academic Discourse Community to learn the way in which the press release genre is structured and convey its communicative purposes.
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