The Nature And Development Of Financial Accounting

Everything has its specific principles of development, financial accounting is no exception. Mainstream researches of contemporary financial accounting focus more on very specifically and quantitatively empirical tests from certain aspects of financial accounting or financial information, which is evidently helpful for exploring the relative financial problems. However, we regret to find that the mainstream empirical researches fail to grasp the nature and development principles of financial accounting in generally. Therefore, this dissertation is trying to investigate financial accounting in its general meaning from the most basic attributes of financial accounting as"the universal business language", so as to provide a brand new perspective and systematic demonstration to explore the financial accounting's nature and development principles.The viewpoint that"accounting is a universal business language"has been generally accepted by accounting academia and practitioners. With the development of economy, some new accounting fields have gradually taken shape. Thus, the"accounting"here should specifically refer to financial accounting. Therefore, we can consider financial accounting as a language. It is based upon an apparently well-established and irrefutable fact: that people in business circle, whether investors, creditors, or executives, invariably use the same accounting vocabulary as"asset","liability", and comply with the accounting standards to calculate"income"and"cost", to decide on investment, debit or credit, and to set or perform the entrusted accountability. The discovery of the fact, is not the accountants'contribution, but should be seen as the pervasive knowledge and regularity summary of the accountants in their broad participation in the collocation activities of the human resources. This dissertation considers that, until now the domestic and foreign volumes on the exploration and discussion of the accounting language's character, function, and development principles are still insufficient. K.W.Hoskin and R.H.Macve (1999) have explained the important effects of accounting from the aspects of reappraising the genesis of managerialism, and obtained important innovative achievements in accounting literature. Inspired by their research, the author thinks that the analyses of financial accounting may lead to original achievements if they are conducted from the perspective of relative language communication's characteristics.The development of linguistics has about 2000 years'history. While financial accounting based on the traditional accounting, i.e. bookkeeping, took shape in last century. The cross-disciplinary study of linguistics and financial accounting has already been launched, but it's far from prevalence. Although it is constantly mentioned that"accounting is an international business language", hence"accounting is a language of corporate governance"; despite the appearance of arguments about such concepts as"uncertainty","true and fair", and their different semantic characters in different countries; people have not yet made profound studies on the nature, spreading and the future of this language, and on the relative phenomena that have widely affected people's life. Since language is a mass communication tool, financial accounting, being a universe business language, has a self-evident function of transmitting economic information. To concentrate on a communicative approach to financial accounting, this dissertation intends to resort to linguistic principles, and make an innovative elaboration on the nature and development of financial accounting.This dissertation consists of six chapters. The Introduction presents the limitations of the previous studies on the analysis of the accounting language and the discussions on the nature of accounting language, then clarifies such basic issues as the background of topic selection, methodology, etc. To overcome these limitations, in Chapter Two, the author starts with the basic theories and principles of linguistics, analyzes the basic characters and functions of accounting language, and demonstrates what kinds of characters accounting should have as a language. Then, in Chapter Three, the author makes structural analysis on the components of the accounting language, and Chapter Four extends the analysis to the presentational characters, nature, and evolutive principles of the accounting language in different countries'practice. After all these preparations in theory and practice, in Chapter Five the author evolves the accounting language's logic and anticipates its development from the theoretic angle, discusses the values of accounting language as a tool and objective. Chapter Six is the conclusion and future prospect.The main contributions of this dissertation are twofold:1. On the research methodology, the author creatively combines the accountancy with linguistics to make the cross-disciplinary and comparative research, and tries to create a new marginal theory. The objective is to broaden the range and degree ofinterdisciplinary study among accountancy and other subjects, and construct a vigorous and dynamic theory , which is more fundamental, open, and full of interaction among different subjects.2. In research contents, the author deduces the linguistic nature of accounting and its characters as a business language again, and puts forward the accounting language's quality requirements by referring to linguistic communicating principles; discovers and analyzes two linguistic phenomena: the distortion of accounting information and the global standard convergence; presents an overall view of the contemporary global accounting language pattern, and makes a logistic deduction of the accounting language's development tendency based on the principles of accounting language evolution, and makes a preliminary analysis of the values of accounting language as a tool and objective.