A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Letter To Shareholders In Chinese And American Corporate Annual Reports

Corporate Annual Report is issued by listed companies to its shareholders every year to convey the financial and operating conditions of the company,which is an important means for external communication of the company.Letter to shareholders lies at the beginning of the Corporate Annual Report,which not only summarizes the company’s operating status in the previous fiscal year,but also predicts the company’s future development.It is an important part of a company’s annual report,which attracts great attention from the scholars in business discourse studies.These studies have provided lots of different insights into the interpretation of corporate annual reports,but there are still many directions that can be further studied.One of the directions is to conduct systematic linguistic comparative studies of Chinese and English corporate annual reports.In order to better understand the genre and language characteristics of Chinese and English annual reports of Chinese and American companies,this research,based on Bhatia’s genre analysis theory and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,conducts a qualitative and quantitative contrastive analysis of Letter to Shareholders in the annual reports of Chinese and American companies from the perspectives of genre analysis(macro-level)and lexicon grammatical analysis(micro-level).First,based on the genre analysis theory of Bhatia,this paper summarizes the move structure of Chinese and English Letter to Shareholders,and then conducts a comparative analysis to find the similarities and differences.Next,the author explores the linguistic characteristics of Letter to Shareholders from the aspects of transitivity process system and person system in the Systemic Functional Grammar.The author has established two corpora of 10 Chinese and 10 English letters to shareholders,using manual annotations and Microsoft Word and Excel statistical analysis methods to calculate the occurrence frequency and distribution of the six processes in transitivity system and personal pronouns as well as proper names in person system in the two corpora.The research results show that Letter to Shareholders in Chinese and English annual reports share similar genre structure as annual reports of Chinese and American companies belong to promotional business genre and they have the same communicative purposes.This article concludes that both the two types of letters have a genre structure of six moves,but there are some differences in the specific contents of each move.As to vocabulary and grammatical features,a comparative study is mainly conducted from two aspects: transitivity process system and person system.The results show that from the perspective of transitivity process system,except behavioral process,the other five processes appear in two types of text.In both corpora,the frequency of material processes is the highest,followed by relational processes.Mental process,verbal process,and existential process occur less frequently in the two types of corpora,especially in the Chinese corpora.In terms of person system,personal pronouns and proper nouns appear in both types of corpora,and the occurrence frequency of first person pronouns is the highest in both types of corpora.In the Chinese corpus,only first person pronoun appears while in the English texts,all three types of personal pronouns appear.In addition,in the Chinese corpus,many other usages of addressing the company have been found,and such situations have not appeared in the English corpus.The author hopes that this research will provide some help for Chinese and American companies in writing and translating Letter to shareholders in Chinese and English annual reports.At the same time,it is hoped that business English learners can improve their grasp of genre structure and linguistic understanding of such business discourse by reading this article,and promote further research on business genres.