A Multi-dimensional Analysis Of Register Features Of Letters To Shareholders From Chinese And American Enterprises

Letter to shareholders is one of the important ways for enterprises to communicate with shareholders.As the non-auditing part of annual report,it enjoys a high degree of freedom in its crafting,and becomes an effective tool for communication with investors,construction of sound corporate image and investment attraction.Therefore,its crafting is directly related to the construction of corporate leader's image and the corporate image as well.Using the Multidimensional Analysis,this study investigates systematically the register similarities and differences of letters to shareholders from Chinese and American enterprises.The main research questions are as follows: 1)What are the similarities and differences in the light of register dimensions of letters to shareholders from Chinese and American enterprises? 2)What are the specific linguistic features underlying the observed dimensional similarities and differences? 3)What factors result in the observed patterns,if any? In order to address the above research questions,294 letters to shareholders from Chinese and American enterprises were collected and analyzed with the aid of the corpus tool MAT(Multi-dimensional Analysis Tagger).The results show that 1)Chinese and American letters to shareholders share some common features,both of them belonging to the learned exposition text type,with a similar trend on each register dimension: information-intensive in content,non-narrative in style,explicit in reference,inexplicit in the expression of persuasion,and low online informational elaboration;however,letters to shareholders of Chinese enterprises are more narrative yet less interactive,overtly persuasive,integrated and context-dependent than American counterparts.2)The universality of high information density is illustrated by the more frequently used nouns,attributive adjectives as well as the long words and sentences in letters to shareholders.And the low frequencies of time and place adverbials prove that letters to shareholders are less situation-dependent in references than general texts.On the other hand,the register variation on interractiveness and overt persuasiveness of letters to shareholders from Chinese and American enterprises is illustrated by the different frequency in the use of personal pronouns,emphatics,phrasal coordination and nominalization.Meanwhile,the register variation on narrative,context-dependence and online elaboration of the discourse is manifested in the different choice for the approaches of information integration including clauses,participles as well as tense and aspect.3)The generic features of letters to shareholders lead to the observed register similarities while the differences in national cultures of China and the United States,corporate culture of Chinese and American enterprises as well as the language proficiency of Chinese and American writers contribute to the observed register differences.This study provides more objective and pertinent suggestions for Chinese enterprises in the crafting and translation of letters to shareholders as well as some pedagogical implications for business English class.