Die Aktienempfehlung als Handlungsanweisung für den Anleger: Eine pragmatische Perspektive auf Börsenmagazine

The paper deals with stock recommendations in several German investment magazines. To begin with, the stock recommendation is outlined as a journalistic text genre, then it is seen within the framework of speech act theory as a particular type of directive act. Core of the study is the pragmalinguistic analysis of 300 texts from the years during the time between 2015 and 2018. The textual and argumentative structure shows a continuum from merely informative to clearly directive, i.e. from an indirect to a direct speech act. Surprisingly, only a minority of the texts conveys an explicit instruction for the investor. In that regard several lex-ical and syntactic means seem relevant for emphasizing or weakening the recommendation: on the lexical level for example reference to the risks of investment or limitation to a specific type of investor, on the syntactic level the use of certain modal verbs, tenses, or connectives.