A Contrastive Study On The Stylistic Features Of Letter To Shareholeders Of Chinese Banks And Foreign Banks

The corporate annual report disclosures the annual financial situationof the corporate, which is the major resource of the corporate financialinformation and the important tool of establishing the good corporateimage. The letter to shareholders, located as the first part of the annualreport, is the most important part of the annual report. These lettersprovide an overview of the company’s performance in the past fiscal yearand discuss plans for the upcoming year. As financial market isbeing globalized and China has joined the WTO, the importance of thecorporate annual report has gradually been noticed by the corporations.The companies have to submit the corporate annual report according tothe related regulations.The bank industry always is the pioneer of globalization among theChinese industry. With strong economic strength, unique operationalideas and advanced management model, the bank magnates have somesuccessful experiences and strategies of international promotion, fromwhich the other developing banks and the other companies which havethe intention to explore potential markets worldwide can learn. On theconsideration of the irreplaceable role the corporate annual reportespecially the letter to shareholders plays in establishing a good image,the Chinese banks and other corporations have the necessity to study different stylistic features of the letters to shareholders of Chinese banksand foreign banks. While learning the difference, the banks andcorporations know how to write letters to shareholder of English version.It is useful and significant for Chinese banks and the other companieshaving the ambition to expand the international market.Adapting the general methodology of combining the quantitative andqualitative approach together, the thesis aims at analyze the differentstylistic features of the letters to shareholders of Chinese banks andforeign banks. It applies the professional statistical software and likeANTCONC and Go Tagger to make a thorough contrast of40letters toshareholders of Chinese banks and foreign banks. The differences ofletters to shareholders of Chinese banks and foreign banks are carefullyobserved from graphological, lexical and syntactical level. The result ofobservation shows that the differences at graphological level are biggercompared with the differences at lexical and syntactical level. As forgraphological level, the format and paragraph of Chinese banks differfrom those of foreign banks. The use of punctuations of foreign banks ismore abundant. As for lexical level, vocabulary richness, word length,word of top frequency, fuzzy term in letters to shareholder of Chinesebanks and foreign banks are of few differences. The employment ofpersonal pronoun differs from each other. As for syntactical level, thedifferences of sentence length to some extent can be ignored. And both Chinese banks and foreign banks prefer to use passive voice.