Chairman’s messages in Russian-language banking discourse: corporate framing strategies

The article is devoted to the study of Russian-language chairman’s messages to shareholders, customers, and business associates through a prism of Critical Discourse Analysis and Computational Linguistics. The work aims to identify mental constructs and typical discursive practices employed in this fragment of business communication. The scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that, based on the material of chairman’s messages in Russian-language banking discourse, the key mental constructs and typical discursive practices corresponding to them are identified and systematized for the first time, as well as their information-influencing potential is quantified based on the methods of computational linguistics. As a result, conceptual and discursive foundations of chairman’s messages have been identified, while lexical, morphological, and syntactic components of texts under consideration have been determined. It is shown that the main mental construct in the texts under consideration is “sustainability”, which works in unison with the bank’s strategy, profit, and competitiveness. The research also reveals a range of standard discursive practices that rely on the basic parameters of banking communication – sustainability, corporate responsibility, and corporate identity. The practices of organizational hypocrisy and selective presentation of business results favorable to the bank’s management are registered.