Metadiscourse In Letters To Shareholders From Chinese And American IT Companies

Letters to shareholders,written by the CEO/president/chairperson as a personal letter to the current and prospective shareholders,belong to the promotional genre and can serve as a marketing tool,whose ultimate goal is to persuade.Metadiscourse comprises resources that help to achieve persuasion through tapping on three rhetorical appeals.Set out to explore how metadiscourse is employed in letters to shareholders from Chinese and American IT companies,the study aims to provide some insights for the Chinese practitioners,enhance their rhetorical awareness of this genre,and enable them to learn from their American counterpart to communicate with the international audience more effectively.This study investigates the metadiscourse resources in the self-built corpora,which comprises 29 letters to shareholders in English from Chinese and American listed IT companies respectively.On the micro-level,a corpus-based quantitative study is conducted,which examines the frequency of each type of metadiscourse across the corpora,based on the metadiscourse model and searching list provided by Hyland(2005).On the meso-level,a qualitative study is done to investigate how metadiscourse contributes to persuasion through the three rhetorical means proposed by Aristotle.The quantitative findings confirm the existence of both similarities and differences.On one hand,in both corpora interactional metadiscourse far outnumbers interactive metadiscourse,and the most frequently-used subcaterogies are almost the same.On the other hand,drastic differences are discovered in the frequency of metadiscourse subcategories and of certain individual items across the corpora,demonstrating their different preferences and patterns.The qualitative findings exemplify how different types of metadiscoursal resources help realize different rhetorical appeals,which,combined with the quantitative results,reveal different reliance on the three means of persuasion in the two corpora.For example,Chinese writers tend to tap significantly less on pathos than the American counterparts.What lead to the observed differences may be the interplay of national culture,corporateculture,and personal culture,which co-work together to determine the metadiscourse resources chosen for use in letters to shareholders.The study enriches the understanding of how metadiscourse is used and distributed in letters to shareholders from Chinese and American companies and provides practical insights for Chinese authors in how to make more effective use of metadiscourse to adjust to the international audience so that the letters can carry more persuasive force.