An Appraisal Analysis Of The Letter To Shareholders From Tesla

Director or CEO of a corporation tends to regularly deliver a letter to shareholders,which mainly makes a summary of the performance or hardships the corporation facingin previous section. Besides, he or she will announce the plans and expectations toshareholders in following stage. In fact, the letter is not only a review of the previoussituation but also a presentation of the corporate image, developmental potentials,strategies and the abilities of coping with problems. A good letter is expected to enhancethe shareholders’ confidence and inspire the potential investors’ motivation to invest inthe corporation.Based on the Appraisal Theory by James R. Martin, this thesis carries on a detailedanalysis on the letter to shareholders from Tesla Motors, Inc. of the first quarter in2014,which is delivered by the CEO Elon Musk. The thesis attempts to find out how Muskuses linguistic resources to deliver the information and how to build harmoniousrelationship with the shareholders.In the research, it can be obtained that Musk frequently adopts positive wordsconcerning Affect and Judgment to express his happiness and security. In reviewing theachievements and presenting promising future, Affect is more often used to set anoptimistic tone so that to grab readers; Judgment is adopted to maintain existingshareholders and motivate potential investors. The responsibilities speakers should takefor their speech or articles can be adjusted by Engagement. Heterogloss acknowledgesthat there will be alternative positions, which can be divided into Expansion andContraction; Expansion allows for dialogically alternative positions, while Contractioncloses down the space for dialogic alternatives. In Musk’s letter, Dialogic Contraction ismore often used than Dialogic Expansion. Dialogic contraction helps to present firmrevolutions and strong abilities of the corporation when encountering and dealing withhardships. Graduation is used to grade the meaning of Attitude and Engagement, whichis composed of Force and Focus. Force can be further divided into Intensification andQuantification; Intensification is the assessment of intensity covering quality andprocess, while Quantification is the assessment of number applied to entity. Focus is thegrading of prototypicality and the preciseness. Furthermore, Quantification inGraduation is the most widely employed. In describing the accomplishments andfinancial status, Quantification is utilized to make the information more concrete and convincing.The study in the thesis is expected to offer a little help in encoding or decodingsimilar letters in business frontier from the analysis on the distribution and applicationof linguistic resources.