institutional discourse; promotional discourse; university website; genre analysis; interpersonal function; persuasion

The paper focuses on a specific instance of institutional discourse, namely on the Internet university presentations targeted at prospective applicants and students. Applying methodology based on Halliday's functional systemic linguistics and drawing upon research results in genre analysis (Swales, Bhatia, Martin), the analysis provides an insight into the generic properties of university presentations, reveal the extent to which these texts are shaped by their persuasive communicative intentions, and determine the specificities of the manifestation of the interpersonal metafunction in this type of institutional discourse. The corpus includes website presentations of British, American and Czech universities, both texts published exclusively on the web pages and texts of brochures and prospectuses available on the web and in a print form.