On "True" portraits of Letters to Shareholders - and the importance of phraseological analysis

e purpose of the present paper is primarily methodological. It provides evi- dence that a research question investigated in a corpus can produce di erent results according to the so ware adopted, it queries the comparability of the results, and shows that the whole picture is always more than one piece of so - ware can reveal. e eld of research is a corpus of Letters to Shareholders refer- ring to 2008, the year the current nancial crisis began, compared to identically constructed corpora from the same companies, referring to 2006 and 2010. e paper argues that the macro analysis of key words and key semantic domains needs to be complemented by close phraseological analyses, since it is in the phraseology of the texts that the nuances of a message are to be found.