CSR Reports in English and Italian: Focus on generic structure and importance markers

The chapter looks at the main tool of CSR communication: the CSR report. Cross-linguistic analysis is centred on the banking sector and the language backgrounds explored are those of Italian and English as an International Language (EIL). Keeping in mind the complexity of lingua-cultural issues involved in any comparison between a national and an international language, the study addresses two research questions. It focuses first on an attempt to look at the CSR report, with a view to defining its global macro-generic structure. It then focuses on the role of importance markers in the reports, with a view to exploring convergences and divergences in the language-specific corpora. After the presentation of the corpus of CSR reports in English and Italian and of the procedures involved in the analysis, the cross-linguistic analysis is divided into two main sections: the first outlines the general structure of CSR reports as a macro-genre characterized by a high degree of recursivity, while the second focuses on importance markers and on the role they play in guiding the reader to identifying the main CSR principles adhered to by the company in such an extended textual form. The aim is also to explore the importance of lexico-semantic patterns and pragmatic functions in a cross-linguistic perspective. Conclusions are drawn as to the nature of the genre and the usefulness of cross-linguistic comparison for the purposes of genre analysis.