Financial innovation in the Canadian Press: actors and reporting verbs

This corpus helped to investigate the business sections of seven Canadian newspapers over a period spanning from 2001 to 2008 in English and in French. The newspapers are: The National Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Gazette, La Presse, Le Devoir and Le Droit. The focus was on the sources whose speech was selected and reported by journalists in direct or indirect style when covering new subprime-driven financial derivative instruments, namely collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDS). With the use of the monolingual concordancer WordSmith 6.0, we looked at the following keywords: collateralized, backed, CDO, CDS and their French equivalents. The results were treated in 2 Excel files. In particular, we identified the different voices/actors who used the financial innovation terms. These voices could be the journalists or different institutional actors such as central banks or Canadian banks. When reported speech was used, we also identified reporting verbs.