| In recent years,the number of Chinese firms listed on the U.S.stock market is booming,showing that an increasing number of Chinese firms are accelerating their pace in going global.As a mandatory disclosure document,corporate financial report is an important tool for information communication between firms and investors,and thus plays an important role in the process of information disclosure.Traditional accounting and financial research mainly focuse on the disclosure of financial data,but in recent years,more and more attention has been paid to text information,as a result,financial text research has become an emerging research focus.This study will investigate the quality of corporate annual report texts from perspectives of readability,persuasiveness and sentiment,based on linguistic theories,such as Systemic Functional Grammar,and then compare the discourse quality of corporate annual report discourse from Chinese and the US firms.In addition,this study will quantitatively explore the correlation between discourse quality of corporate annual reports and stock market response,and qualitatively analyse their association based on financial theories,such as Efficient Market Hypothesis,and linguistic theories.Following are the research questions of this study:1)Are there any significant differences between the quality of corporate annual report discourse from Chinese and the U.S.firms?2)Is the quality of corporate financial report discourse significantly correlated with stock market response?3)How to improve the communication ability and information disclosure quality of the US-listed Chinese firms.This study constructs a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the discourse quality of corporate annual reports on stock market response.This framework includes three discourse indicators–readability,persuasiveness and sentiment,and one financial indicator–commulative abnormal return–for measureing stock market response.The corpus of the present research consists of texts of Management's Discussion and Analysis(MD&A)in corporate 10-K reports and 20-F reports from 2012-2016 of 52 Chinese companies and 135 U.S.companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange(NYSE).It is comprised of 892 texts totaling 17,934,276 words.This dissertation involves four studies.The first study comprehensively measures the readability of sampled texts from five perspectives–Fog index,lexical sophistication,syntactic complexity and coherence,with the help of five advanced corpus tools.The second study investigates the underlying dimensional functions of the co-occurring patterns of 59 lexical-grammatical features based on the Multi-dimensional Analysis framework to measure and analyze the persuasiveness of lexical-grammatical features in corporate financial report discourse,with the help of MAT corpus tools and Rhetorical Structure Theory.The third study uses the advanced artificial intelligence technique to classify the sentences in sampled texts into three groups–positive sentences,negative sentences and neutral sentences,and then measures the sentiment of the sampled texts.The differences of the above linguistic features between Chinese and the US financial reports are compared by statistical methods,such as MANOVA and t-test.The fourth study uses the Event Analysis method and regression to explore the impact of the readability,persuasiveness and sentiment of corporate annual report discourse on corporate stock market response.Findings of these studies are as follow:1)In terms of readability,the Fog index of corporate financial report discourse of Chinese firms is significantly lower than that of the U.S.firm firms(MD=-0.283,t=-3.790,p<0.05),and the Lexical Familiarity and the Coherence are significantly higher than that of the U.S.firms(MD=0.62,F=24.17,p<0.05;F(11,747)=21.400,p<0.05,Wilks'Lambda=0.760),showing that corporate report discourse of Chinese firms is more readable than that of the U.S.firms from the above aspects.However,the Lexical Concreteness,Lexical Imaginability and Lexical Meaningfulness of the corporate financial report discourse of Chinese firms are lower than that of the U.S.firms.Lower Lexical Concreteness,Imaginability and Meaningfulness can hinder the transfer of information.2)In terms of the persuasiveness of lexical-grammatical features,compare to the corporate annual report discourse of U.S.firms,the corporate annual report discourse of Chinese firms gets lower scores in dimensions of“Expression of Direct Persuasion”,“Integrative Expression of Stance v.s.Fragmented Expression”and“Expression of Reliability”(MD=-0.284,F=74.762,p<0.05;MD=-0.602,F=150.07,p<0.05;MD=-0.844,F=168.596,p<0.05),but higher scores in dimensions of“Subjective vs.Objective Positioning”and“Expression of Impersonal Stance”(MD=0.802,F=127.935,p<0.05;MD=0.536,F=56.898,p<0.05),revealing that Chinese and U.S.firms use different discourse devices to achieve the purpose of persuasion.3)In terms of the persuasiveness of content,the corporate annual report discourse of Chinese firms gets higher scores in sentiment than that of the U.S.firms(MD=0.247,t=5.053,p<0.05),showing that the sentiment of Chinese firms'annual report discourse is more positive.4)The readability(?=0.008),persuasiveness(?=0.010)and sentiment(?=0.029)of corporate financial report discourse are all significantly and positively correlated with the corporate cumulative abnormal return(R~2=0.138,F=8.709,p<0.05),indicating that the effective exertion of the information communication function and persuasion function of corporate financial report discourse can positively affect the stock market response,in other words,the higher the quality of corporate financial report discourse,the better the capital market responds.The innovation and contribution of this research is mainly reflected in the following aspects:1)In terms of theoretical contribution,firstly,a comprehensive theoretical framework for the discourse study of corporate annual report is constructed by combining the theories of linguistics,economics,communication,computer science and other disciplines.Secondly,it presents the concept of"discourse quality of corporate annual report"and constructs the theoretical model for assessing the discourse quality of corporate annual report;thirdly,it proposes and tests the theoretical hypothesis that the discourse quality of corporate financial report affect the stock market response,which expands the theoretical perspective of capital market research that previously only focused on the influence effect of financial data,and thus achieves an interdisciplinary study.2)In terms of methodology,it provides methodological guidance for research on the relationship between corporate discourse and economic performance.Firstly,this research uses different kinds of advanced corpus tools to comprehensively measure the discourse features in corporate annual reports,and conducts in-depth qualitative analysis of these discourse features using discourse analysis approach.Secondly,with the help of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology,and based on Appraisal Theory,this research automatically measures the sentiment of corporate annual report discourse.Finally,this research uses the Event Analysis method and regression to investigate the relationship between the quality of corporate annual report discourse and stock market response.3)In terms of practice,firstly,it is of practical significance to improve the communication ability and information disclosure quality of Chinese firms that are listed on the U.S.stock market.Secondly,it has implications to business English teaching.In future studies,more types of corporate report documents will be included into the corpus,more discourse features of corporate annual report will be investigated,and the factors that may affect the quality of corporate financial report discourse will be explored,in order to improve the information management ability and information disclosure quality of the U.S.-listed Chinese firms and provide advices for the going global strategy. |
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