A Study Of Hedges In Chairmen's Statements Of Annual Reports Of Companies Listed In The Usa Based On Cooperative Principle

With the development of China's economy and globalization,more and more Chinese companies choose to go public in the United States.The New York Stock Exchange,abbreviated as NYSE,is the world's largest stock exchange and has huge daily trading value.There have been by far 62 Chinese companies listed in NYSE and the number is expected to increase.For those listed companies,disclosing their annual reports is a must.Chairman's statement,the first part of an annual report,plays a significant role in conveying information to annual report readers.Hedges are words and expressions employed to convey fuzzy and vague meanings.They are often used to achieve specific communicative purposes because hedges can guide the reader to react as the writer intends.They exist in all kinds of texts,and chairman's statement is of no exception.With the aim of providing implications for Chinese companies that have already been listed or are going to go public in NYSE about how to make good use of hedges in chairmen's statements,this thesis will make a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of hedges applied in the chairmen's statements of annual reports of companies listed in NYSE based on cooperative principle.The author first builds a corpus of chairmen's statements of annual reports of companies listed in NYSE(abbreviated as CCS).This corpus is made up of 53 pieces of chairmen's statements of companies which are not only listed in NYSE,but also on the list of Fortune 2016 Global 500.The hedges in the corpus are classified into four categories,namely adaptors,rounders,plausibility shields and attribution shields,based on Prince et al.'s classification of hedges.Then,the frequency,distribution and linguistic forms of four kinds of hedges are summarized in order to find out the chairmen's preferences for four kinds of hedges in CCS.Next,the author analyzes the four types of hedges in CCS on the basis of cooperative principle put forward by Grice so as to figure out how the hedges observe or violate the four maxims of cooperative principle.Finally,the author concludes the communicative purposes realized by the hedges in CCS in the light of cooperative principle.The result of the quantitative analysis shows that adaptors are the most frequently used hedges in CCS,followed by rounders,plausibility shields and attribution shields in sequence.As for linguistic forms of hedges in CCS,adaptors and rounders only have lexical forms while plausibility shields have both lexical and syntactical forms.Attribution shields only have syntactical forms.Specifically speaking,the adaptors in CCS can be classified into three aspects,namely,the adverbial/preposition phrases,adjectives and adverbs.The rounders in CCS can be classified into three aspects,namely,the preposition phrases,prepositions and adverbs.There are two forms of plausibility shields in CCS,namely the syntactical devices and lexical devices.The result of the qualitative analysis shows that adaptors,rounders,plausibility shields and attribution shields all violate quantity maxim and manner maxim while observe quality maxim and relation maxim.The hedges' violation or observance of four maxims of cooperative principle realize three communicative purposes,namely,maintaining companies' credibility,making the chairmen less responsible for their statements and strengthening the persuasiveness of the chairmen's statements.This thesis extends the scope of hedges studies to chairmen's statements of annual reports.The analysis results indicate that the chairmen can use more adaptors in the chairmen's statements to realize communicative purposes.This thesis can also make the annual report readers aware of the fact that the chairmen may attempt to influence their investment or other decisions through the use of hedges in chairmen's statements.