A Corpus-based Study Of The Features Of Adjectives In Letters To Shareholders

A letter to shareholders is a statement delivered by the chairperson of a business corporation.It usually appears in the beginning of an annual report and is the most widely read part in an annual report.The occurrence frequency of adjectives is remarkably high in letters to shareholders and the use of the adjectives may affect readers' understanding of letters to shareholders.Nowadays numerous studies have been conducted on letters to shareholders.Nevertheless,it is a pity that few studies have been conducted with respect to the adjectives in letters to shareholders.Consequently,this thesis attempts to analyze the adjectives in letters to shareholders which are extracted from 2014 annual reports of Global 500 companies with a corpus-based method.The present study aims to explore the features of adjectives in letters to shareholders in terms of their occurrence frequency,semantic prosody and functions under the guidance of a tentative analytical framework.The tentative analytical framework is an adaptation of Sinclair's(2004)Lexical Model and the Attitude System within Martin and White's(2005)Appraisal System.The findings for the study are as follows:(1)The occurrence frequency of the adjectives in letters to shareholders is strikingly higher than the occurrence frequency of adjectives in Brown Corpus.(2)Neutral semantic prosody dominates in the semantic prosody of adjectives in letters to shareholders.Moreover,the number of adjectives with positive semantic prosody is in the second place and it is remarkably higher than the number of adjectives with negative semantic prosody.(3)When it comes to functions of adjectives in letters to shareholders,the basic functions of the adjectives with positive semantic prosody are expressing affect of chairpersons,making judgements on the characteristics of the boards,employees or management team members and appreciating the merits of the companies.And the basic functions of adjectives with negative semantic prosody are stating objective facts andappreciating the complexity of external environment.Furthermore,those adjectives are attitudinal and they are useful for establishing interpersonal rapport between the chairpersons and shareholders.As for the research significance,theoretically it can provide a tentative analytical framework for explaining features of adjectives in letters to shareholders.Practically the findings may give some guidelines to chairpersons in newly listed companies on how to draft a communicative letter to shareholders by strategic adoption of certain adjectives.