Promotional language for bank accounts: a corpus driven analysis through web sites comparable corpora.

INTRODUCTION The aim of this work is to apply the methodology of corpus linguistics to the analysis of the specific genre of promotional language for bank accounts, in order to identify the possible differences between Italian and English bank web-sites in terms of language, culture and promotional linguistic strategies. The language used by banks in promoting their services is a very peculiar genre as it is supposed to combine specific features of both banking and promotional language. Banking communication strategies have been investigated in several different ways and from different perspectives, however most of the works conducted approach this subject from specific economic and marketing points of view. What I will going to analyse, instead, is only the use of language in order to detect possible differences between the Italian and the English languages and cultures. An important work in this field has been carried out by Katan in 2006, comparing Italian and English brochures of private pension institutions. References to his work will be made further in this essay. In order to achieve the aim mentioned above, I assembled two parallel corpora selecting texts from the web sites of some Italian and English major banks. The analysis was conducted following a corpus-driven approach which will be better explained in the following chapters. Before describing my own analysis, the first part of this essay will introduce the concept and the history of corpus linguistics providing a brief explanation of what corpora are, why they are used, and what are the main methods to use them. Then, I will illustrate what are the tools and methods I used, describing the software TextSTAT used for the design and the analysis of the corpora and the corpus-driven approach. Furthermore, after introducing the general features of the chosen genre, I will describe step by 1