ABSTRACT
As mentioned in the Introduction, this book attempts to relate corpus linguistics to other fields of linguistics. It is meant as a contribution to the pragmatic study of press briefings as one type of institutional talk. This is basically defined as talk between professionals and lay people, but the definition can be stretched, as here, to include talk between two groups of professionals with an audience of lay persons (the TV and Internet audience). The main object of study in this field is ‘the ways in which institutional contexts are manifested in, and in turn shape, the particular actions of […] participants’ (Drew and Heritage 1992: 24).
