Evolution of institutional genres in time: the case of the White House press briefings

Literature on genre analysis mainly focuses on the description of language use in the different professional and institutional domains (Bhatia 2004). Despite the different directions of the studies on genre (Bhatia 1993; Martin and Christie 1997; Swales 1990), a common orientation may be seen in their tendency to describe homogeneous concepts, such as communicative situation, register and function.Nevertheless, genre-specific features are subject to changes due to the ongoing processes of internationalisation and globalisation (Candlin and Gotti 2004; Cortese and Duszak 2005; Crystal 1997). In particular, political and institutional communication genres have been experiencing in-depth transformation in the last few decades, mainly due to evolutions in the media market, fuelled by technological developments and by the economic globalisation (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999).Within the framework of a wider research project titled “Tension and change in English domain-specific genres” funded by the Italian Ministry of Research, the present paper aims to outline, through a corpus-based analysis of lexico-grammatical and syntactic features (Baker 2006), in what ways White House press briefings as a genre have evolved in the last 16 years under the pressure of technological developments and of media market transformation.White House press briefings are meetings between the White House press secretary and the press, held on an almost daily basis. They may be regarded as the main official channel of communication for the White House and therefore play a crucial role in the communication strategies on the world’s most powerful institution (Kumar 2007).Embracing a diachronic perspective, our analysis aims at identifying the main features of the evolution of the briefings as a genre, during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. A corpus (DiaWHoB) including all the briefings from January 1993 to January 2009, available on the American Presidency Project website, has been collected in order to carry out the analysis.The corpus consists of about 4,000 briefings and is made up of more than 18 million words. The scope and size of a specialised corpus of this kind make it a powerful tool to investigate the evolution of the White House press briefing. In order to manage the data more efficiently, the corpus has been annotated by using XML mark-up, which incorporates information about individual speakers and their roles, date, briefing details and text structure.The present research paper outlines the corpus structure and discusses the ways in which the corpus architecture helps in investigating the evolution of the genre, and also presents some preliminary results. In particular, it focuses on some examples of evolution in phraseology within the genre of briefings in order to support the hypothesis that a diachronic corpus-based investigation facilitates comparisons among different speakers thanks to the XML mark-up while providing interesting insight into the evolution of a genre.