A Contrastive Study Of Interactional Metadiscourses In Letters To Shareholders From Chinese And American IT Companies

Letters to the shareholders,usually found at the commencement of a listed company’s annual report,are the subject of this paper which seeks to analyze them from a perspective of metadiscourses.These letters possess the highest readability and embody rich humanistic feelings,both key characteristics of promotional discourse.Metadiscourses can achieve persuasion and ’ethos’,one of the three classic rhetoric devices,plays a dominant role in persuasive effects.According to Hyland’s category(2004),metadiscourses consist of two sub-categories:interactive and interactional ones.The latter ones,interactional metadiscourse resources,account for a great majority in the letters to the shareholders and thus,being the focus of this study.Previous researches reveal that an array of studies on metadiscourses,mainly in academic discourses,and in terms of letters to the shareholders,works are conducted on the fiscal situations and moves,following by ethos being categorized into classic rhetoric.To put it in a nutshell,for the above topics,individual studies are in no shortage,yet the combined one is relatively scarce.In an attempt to figure out the way interactional metadiscourses achieve persuasion,this study adopts Hyland’s metadiscourse interpersonal model,and employs Aristotle’s Classical Rhetoric’s Ethos(Credible Appeal),contrastively making an analysis of interactional metadiscourses from Chinese and American IT companies.The study incorporates three research questions progressively:1)What is the distribution of the interactional metadiscourse resources in the letter to shareholders from both Chinese and American IT companies?2)How do those interactional metadiscourse resources achieve persuasion in terms of ’ethos’ appeal,and what are similarities and differences in the way they realized persuasion in the letter to shareholders from both Chinese and American IT companies?3)What attributes can account for the distinction?Quantitative and qualitative research methods have been adopted in this study.The study is based on a relatively small self-built corpus,with the letters sourced from the official website of four IT companies situated in China and three companies located in the United States.This study retrieves the concordance of interactional metadiscourses through the employment of the two corpus tools:AntConc 3.4.4w and WordSmith 4.0.With the assistance of SPSS,statistical significance has been established by analyzing Chi-square value and recording the log likelilhood ratio.Finally,specific examples are further illustrated to distinguish the way interactional metadiscourses achieve ethos as well as their contributing reasons.Major findings are listed below:(1)Overall,the frequency of metadiscourses in the COA(Corpus of America)is comparatively larger than that in the COC(Corpus of China),and the interactional metadiscourses in both corpora are the majority;specifically,self-mentions are strikingly employed in the two corpora,and meanwhile boosters and hedges are utilized in a balanced way in the COA.Conversely,boosters are slightly more deployed than hedges in the COC.Chi-square analysis confirms that statistical significance exists in them.(2)Both Chinese and American writers achieve credible appeal through the identity and authority,constructing the determined,devoted,reliable,credible and responsible corporate image;Chinese letter writers resort identity to construct ethos by virtue of self-mentions,to be exact,the first person plural pronouns ’we’ and ’our’.By contrast,American counterparts are prone to seek charismatic authority for shaping an amiable and trustworthy impression by way of the first person singular pronouns ’I’;(3)As for the attributions,national culture,Hofstede and Hall’s cultural model partially serve as the interpretation of the differences in the two countries,since China is typical of collective culture,reader-responsible in the writing and America the individual one,writer-responsible amidst the writing;For corporate culture,a set of rules and norms are supposed to be abided by within business community,and American IT enterprises appear more proficient in mastering those expectations;Writer’s and the translation’s influence.This study makes its attempt to provide some references for Chinese writers as to how to use metadiscourse to enhance persuasiveness in the face of international readers,and to raise the genre awareness of letters to shareholders so that we can communicate more effectively with international readers.Meanwhile,ESP teaching can draw some hints from the genre awareness and the effects of metadiscourses.