Documentazione Aziendale o Pubblicità di Marketing? Un'Analisi Basata Sul Corpus del Linguaggio Valutativo Nei Rapporti di CSR delle Principali Società Petrolifere e del Gas Quotate Nel Regno Unito

New challenges such as climate change see companies often under indictment due to their polluting emissions. This has led them to report on their sustainability and social practices. CSR reports are becoming increasingly common among corporate documents. In comparison to annual reports, sustainability disclosure is not compulsory, and, does not necessarily have to follow strict editing rules and deadlines. This makes these documents rather optimistic and encouraging instead of simply reporting about companies’ sustainability practices. The present study examines the use of evaluative language (specifically, words of optimism and commitment) in CSR reports. The purpose is to establish whether these documents take on an overly optimistic and promotional tone instead of fairly reporting on the companies’ activities. Adopting a combined approach which integrates corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, 15 CSR reports of the major oil and gas companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (FTSE100) will be analysed. The study is structured as follows. The first chapter provides a literature review in order to set a theoretical foundation aimed at contextualizing the present research in the overall background. The second chapter is entirely dedicated to methodology. In this section, data selection and corpus compilation will be discussed, and explanations about data analysis and commentary will be provided. Finally, in the third chapter, the results of the research will be discussed.