“Boosting the company's identity. Point of view and promotional discourse style in a corpus of business to consumer (B2C) webpages”.

The Internet with its decentralized internationally operating network and multimedia functions has captured the attention of companies and advertisers, thus becoming the 4th largest medium (Janoschka 2004) for building and boosting company identity. Company websites offer diverse marketing functions. Every single webpage has a visual organization which allows the inclusion of several texts with diverse communicative purposes. Around the main body of a single page there can be lists of links under the form of isolated noun structures (Haas and Grams 2000), snippets of text, such as navigational buttons, menus, ads, and search boxes visually dislocated (Santini 2005). Additionally, webpage textuality can be affected by hyperlinking interactivity allowing website browsers to pick up searched information and skip to another page or section thus determining a non-linear reading path (Lemke 2005). However, it is not only the option of changing reading paths but the combination of multi-semiotic resources and processes into a single communicative act that make webpages more complex than traditional paper or electronic documents. Webpages can include an overlapping of informational, promotional and commercial discourse used to boost a company’s image, credibility and profits, since knowing how to successfully present a company and its products online is a crucial part of the Web design (Samson 2009). A company’s image is strictly linked to the point of view from which it is presented and the style used to do so in webpage promotional discourse with the aim of “hooking on” its browsers/consumers. The style of webpage promotional discourse is assumed to be light. Is the assumption valid for any Business to Consumer (henceforth B2C) company website? Or are there variations be found among companies promoting different types of products?This paper therefore investigates how point of view and promotional discourse are adopted in a corpus of “product” webpages in business to consumer websites (henceforth P2CWPs) in which products are described, promoted and sold. Specifically, the study analyses the lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features which characterise the style of promotional discourse in the three sub-corpora of P2CWPs. These are analysed in a corpus stylistics approach integrated by qualitative analysis and the findings are illustrated with examples from the three sub-corpora.