Abstract
By taking Hyland and Tse’s (2004) interactional metadiscourse model, this study attempts to compare the incidence of the interactional metadiscourse markers in letters to shareholders of American and Chinese companies in the financial industry and their rhetorical functions. This study makes American corpus of 41 letters and Chinese corpus of 37 letters both of which are written in English. WordSmith is adopted to find out the differences in incidence of these markers. Chi-square test further confirms these differences are significant. It is consequently found that five types of interactional metadiscourse markers are all deployed in both American and Chinese corpus but the incidence of each marker is much more in American corpus than that in Chinese corpus. Besides, this study identifies that self-mentions and engagement markers are the most frequently employed in both corpora. However, it is noticeable that self-mentions and engagement markers collaborate with another three types of markers more tactically and flexibly in American corpus than in Chinese. In particular, self-mentions markers are found to use with not only boosters, but hedges and engagement markers in American corpus, while self-mentions markers in Chinese corpus only collaborate with hedges. In addition, the engagement markers of model verbs and personal pronouns are more active in American corpus than these in Chinese. This study finds out American companies integrate these markers into building a positive personal or corporate image and closing writer-reader relationship, thereby accomplishing the promotional and persuasive purposes. It may suggest that Chinese companies employ the integration of interactional metadiscourse markers as strategically as American.
Highlights
The annual report is regarded as the most important document which reviews and discloses the corporate performance of the previous fiscal year
20,393 interactional metadiscourse items are totally employed in American corpus, whereas 3,743 markers appear in Chinese corpus
By WordSmith, we identify the difference in frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers and their collocations
Summary
The annual report is regarded as the most important document which reviews and discloses the corporate performance of the previous fiscal year. It is found that the letter is the most prominent and widely read portion of the annual report Hyland (2005) points out that the letter to shareholders is an ostensibly informative genre which lists out the information and seemingly objective evaluation of the company’s activities, performance and future plans, while it goes beyond purely passive disclosure to what amounts to the marketing of a corporate ideology It is not surprising that the letter must be in nature a selectively created persuasive product and plays more rhetorical functions such as building credibility, imparting confidence, persuading or convincing the readers than delivering the fiscal information
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