Metadiscourse In Management Discussion And Analysis From Chinese And American Commercial Banks

Management Discussion and Analysis(MD&A)is a section of narrative financial disclosure in corporate annual reports,in which the financial performance and operating conditions of a company are presented and analyzed by its management team.It is arguably the most important section in an annual report since it contains the most relevant information for investors,thus has become a highly dynamic topic in accounting research.Prior studies predominantly focus on the quality of informational content contained in MD&A;however,how the content is made cohesive and coherent was often overlooked.This problem can be approached by metadiscourse,a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in all writings,which explicitly organizes the text as well as shows the writer's stance towards the content and readers.Adopting Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourse and Habermas' theory of communicative action,this study sets out to investigate the patterns and functions of metadiscourse in MD&A based on two comparable corpora,comprising in total 80 MD&A reports from 8 Chinese and 8 American commercial banks on 2019 Global 500.The quantitative findings show that while interactive metadiscourse is used significantly more frequently than interactional metadiscourse in MD&A from both countries,American managers tend to use more interactional metadiscourse than their counterparts.In contrast,Chinese managers rely more heavily on interactive metadiscourse.From the perspective of communicative action,Chinese managers emphasized more on the readability of MD&A by using more transition markers,code glosses,endophoric markers,and frame markers to organize the inner logic of the text.In contrast,American managers paid more attention to the sincerity of communication by employing more self-mention,hedges,and boosters to show stance and attitudes.To ensure the objectivity of MD&A,writers from both countries avoided the use of colloquial metadiscourse devices and limited the use of engagement markers and attitude markers to establish an unbiased and professional image.Finally,genre characteristics,register awareness,accounting subculture,and learner strategies might contribute to the observed similarities and differences of metadiscourse patterns in MD&A from Chinese and American commercial banks.This study not only enriches the MD&A research by focusing on its non-propositional linguistic features but also expands the applicability of the metadiscourse approach in business discourse analysis.The findings may provide some practical insights for company managers to improve their MD&A composition through effective use of metadiscourse.