Stance Expression And Corporate Identity Construction

As economic globalization is developing at a more in-depth level,Chinese companies listed on the NYSE will be able to bring in domestic and foreign cooperative partners and explore the market space.As a hybrid genre,the corporate annual report is not only a formal document required by the law,but also the main communicative tool between companies and investors,which serves the persuasive function to a certain extent.Stance refers to the lexico-grammatical device that expresses the attitudes,feelings,judgments,and commitment to information authenticity of language users,which involves how speakers construct their identities and negotiate interpersonal relationships,playing an indispensable role incorporate annual reports.Therefore,the thesis aims to investigate the use of stance expressions in annual reports of Chinese and American listed companies,and their differences and on the construction and promotion of corporate identities,so as to clarify the stance strategies that Chinese and American listed companies employed to construct corporate identities.The thesis addressed the following two research questions:(1)Are there differences on stance expressions used in annual reports of Chinese and American listed companies? If any,what are the differences on stance expressions?(2)How do Chinese and American listed companies use stance expressions to construct and promote trustworthy corporate identities?The thesis selected the annual reports of ten Chinese companies and twenty-two American companies listed on the NYSE,and built the two parallel corpora.The study adopts a mixed method that includes quantitative and qualitative method to answer the two research questions respectively.One is statistical quantitative analysis,that is,to retrieve the frequencies of epistemic stance,attitudinal stance,modality,and the subordinate types respectively,then the Log-likelihood test is conducted to test whether the use of stance expressions in Chinese and American corporate annual reports has significant differences.The other one is qualitative analysis,which is based on the statistical results of the former step and combined with the definitions of stance markers and their specific contexts,to analyze the differences and similarities between Chinese and American listed companies on the use of stance expressions.So as to interpret the construction and promotion of trustworthy corporate identities of Chinese and American listed companies.The results indicate that there are significant differences between Chinese and American listed companies on the use of stance expressions,among them,it is modality that indicates the highest frequency,followed by attitudinal stance and epistemic stance.The overall frequency of stance use in Chinese corporate annual reports is significantly less than American counterparts,the same is true of three stance types.As for epistemic stance,stance construction types that show the significant differences are all expressions about likelihood.As for attitudinal stance,there are four construction types that show the significant differences.When it comes to modality,the use of permission/possibility/ability modals in American corporate annual reports shows a higher frequency,while Chinese listed companies employ more necessity/obligation modals and volition/prediction modals.As for the construction and promotion of trustworthy corporate identities,it can be learned from the differences on the use of stance expressions between Chinese and American listed companies that American listed companies are prone to build the identity of close and equal guiders,cautious and friendly negotiators,and individual-centered.While Chinese listed companies are inclined to construct themselves as reliable and law-abiding leaders,authoritative and rational professors,and state-centered.With regard to the similarities on the use of stance expressions between Chinese and American listed companies,it shows that the annual report,as a mandatory document required by law,is not suitable for the use of emotional stance expressions,but tends to be euphemistic,cautious and objective.Theoretically,the study focuses on the use of stance expressions in the annual reports of Chinese and American technology companies listed on the NYSE,which enriches the existing research on stance expressions and expands the research perspective on corporate annual report.In practice,this study stands the point from the persuasive function of annual report,which shows the important role of stance expressions in the construction of corporate identities and provides a reference for the listed companies to construct and promote trustworthy corporate identities in their annual reports.In terms of teaching,the corpora of corporate annual reports built in this study will provide real language materials for business English teaching,which has certain guiding significance for business English writing and provides new language insights for learners to interpret corporate annual reports.