Genre Analysis Of Chairman’ Statements In Chinese And Foreign Companies’ Annual Report: A Comparative Study

With more and more companies going listed for new project finance and existingoperation expansion, Corporate Annual Report (CAR), as a legally required document,has become increasingly important for its dual prominent roles: to discloseinformation about the company in the previous accounting period, to forecast theoperations in the coming year and to build a positive image for the company. As thefront part of financial report, chairman’s statement is the most popular andwidely-read part in CAR. Many researches have been conducted on corporate annualreports, however, there are fewer researches carried out in the field of linguistics.Therefore, this thesis aims to take a new attempt to investigate the chairman’sstatements in annual report as a branch of promotional genre in framework of genreanalysis.The present research chooses60chairman’s statements in CAR from the globalfortune500companies’ websites (30of Chinese companies and30of foreigncompanies) as research subject to analyze the features based on its communicativepurposes and applies an integrating framework of Swales’ Move-step Model andHasan’s Generic Structure Potential (GSP) to examine the move structure patterns andgeneric structure potential of the genre of chairman’s statements; moreover, explainsthe differences of the Chinese and English samples through a comparative study.This research tries to serve as a guideline for Chinese company’s managementand the learners of business practical writing, in giving inspirations for genre-basedteaching methodology and in arousing people’s awareness of cultural differences inconstructing discourses under different cultural backgrounds.