Genre Analysis Of The English And Chinese Letters To Shareholders In Corporation Annual Reports

After China's entry into the WTO, more and more Chinese companies are targeting at the international market, and the communication among the Chinese companies and the world is sweeping. As the important media file, the letters to shareholders in annual reports play a very critical role in introducing and propagandizing the companies to the customers. There is an increasing need for the improved English writing in the letters to shareholders. So this research sets out to study the letters to shareholders composed by Chinese companies in their native language—Chinese and those written by western organizations in their native language—English, from the perspective of genre study.Hence, based on the theoretical framework of genre analysis following Swales, Bhatia and Hasan, a corpus of sixty letters to shareholders (thirty in Chinese and thirty in English) are randomly collected from the top 500 companies of the world and the top 500 companies of China in the internet and examined. The present study has analyzed and compared the structural moves used in Chinese and English letters to shareholders, and explained the similarities and differences from social and cross-cultural perspectives with an aim to shed light on the production of quality English letters to shareholders in China.First of all, the present study has discussed about the communicative purposes of letters to shareholders. Then, following Swales and Bhatia's move model, the author has found that there are twelve structural moves together in both Chinese and English letters. According to the occurrence frequency, five moves are considered obligatory and seven are optional in Chinese corpus, while six obligatory and six optional in English corpus. After that, based on Hasan's Generic Structural Potential (GSP), the GSPs of English and Chinese letters are figured out and explained from the perspective of communicative purposes. And then a cross-cultural comparison is made to find out the similarities and differences in move choices and move focuses between English and Chinese letters. The findings show that both the English and the Chinese letters exhibit universal tendencies and specific variations in occurrence frequency and realization of moves. To be specific, both English and Chinese letters to shareholders share five obligatory moves: commenting on the firm's performance in the preceding year, reviewing the operational performance of the firm, reporting on details about corporate development, outlining the firm's outlook, and expressing gratitude. There is one move, the move of reporting the financial results which is obligatory in English but optional in Chinese corpus. English writers prefer using the move of foregrounding highlight above the structural element Salutation, opening the letter with the move of commenting on the firm's performance and ending the letters with the move of expressing gratitude; while Chinese writers tend to open the letters with the move of greetings, the move of expressing gratitude or the move of describing the business environment. And the move of greetings and the move of describing the business environment only appear in Chinese corpus. The similar choices of moves rest with the similar purposes the letters to shareholders should fulfill, that is informative and persuasive. Those variations mainly result from the different social and cultural contexts.By doing genre analysis of English and Chinese letters to shareholders, this thesis intends to illustrate how communicative purposes are fulfilled by different choices of moves and different focuses in the moves in different social and cultural contexts and why the letters are written in the way they are. With a satisfactory description and explanation, the thesis could help people know well how the letter is organized and why it is organized as it is so as to help produce much more satisfactory letters. This study could not only help the Chinese companies in producing the satisfactory letters to shareholders. It also has implications on business writing and other professional genres cross-culturally.