A Corpus-Based Study On Conjunctions In Annual Reports

The corporate annual report, as an important information carrier submitted to the stockholders by the management, has been attracting attentions of many experts and scholars and many researches have been done in this field. The usages of conjunctions affect the readers’understanding of annual reports, so this paper tries to find out the features of frequencies and distributions of conjunctions used in annual reports. The Corporate Annual Report Corpus (hereinafter referred to as CARC) is constructed. The paper, taking the classification of conjunctions by Halliday and Hasan and corpus linguistic theory as the theoretical framework, compares the conjunctions in CARC and Brown Corpus by means of quantitative and qualitative research methods to explores the features of usage. The paper mainly analyses conjunctions in the following aspects: the overall frequencies, the frequently used conjunctions, the patterns and positions of some individual conjunctions and tries to achieve the underlying causes of the differences.After calculation by Antconc and SPSS, the data show that from the overall perspective and compared with Brown Corpus, the proportion of conjunctions used in annual reports is relatively small. Among them, the frequency of additive conjunctions ranks the first place and is followed by the causal conjunctions while adversative conjunctions and temporal conjunctions are comparatively less used. In terms of high frequency conjunctions, the high frequency conjunctions account for more than two-thirds of the total conjunctions used in annual reports. As for the individual conjunctions, and, however, as a result (of) and previously are the four most frequently used conjunctions in each category and they can be put either at the beginning or in the middle of the sentences. The Chi-square tested results reflect that there are significant differences on the frequencies of most conjunctions used in CARC and in Brown Corpus. Finally, this paper also makes an initial research on the archaic words and the implicit conjunction used in annual reports.