REMEDIATING CORPORATE COMMUNICATION THROUGH THE WEB: THE CASE OF ABOUT US SECTIONS IN COMPANIES' GLOBAL WEBSITES

International corporate communication has been impacted by the introduction of the Web, and organisations have an array of semiotic resources at their disposal to promote themselves worldwide. This paper aims at investigating the communicative choices supporting corporate image in the About Us/Company sections included in the global websites of 30 European companies active in the renewable energy sector. Hence, an analytical framework combining a genre and a corpus perspective has been devised with a view to focusing on form-function correlations as expressed by hyperlinks, visuals, and recurring lexico-grammatical patterns. Genre Analysis is instrumental in locating possible instances of text typologies belonging to corporate communication such as mission statements, company brochures, and CSR reports, while Corpus Linguistics offers ways of looking at linguistic choices. These frameworks have been integrated with Multimodal Discourse Analysis so as to examine hypertextual and multimodal features as well. The results show that About Us/Company sections are now loci for the projection of a favourable corporate image, and that companies are well aware of the importance of delivering their message by balancing textual, hypertextual, and multimodal strategies. Some pedagogical implications for the ESP classroom are also discussed in the paper.