Speech Acts as Means of Argumentation in Bank's Annual Reports

Abstract

Argumentation is the process of changing others point of view and convincing them to do something or to think in a certain way. Different rhetoricians, like Toulmin (1958) and Aristotle (1984), define argumentation as merits of persuading or an attempt to give justifications. Giving that arguing can convince others to do or think in a certain way puts argumentation within the domain of the speech act theory. The current work aims at shedding light on argumentation from a speech act perspective, particularly in professional genre as banks annual reports. Precisely, the paper attempts to answer the question: How are speech acts used in banks annual reports to convince clients, shareholders, and companies to collaborate with the bank? A model of analysis is developed to identify the pragmatic techniques of arguing used by ARs (Annual Reports) writers to convince their readers. The data used in this paper consist of four bank's ARs for the financial years of 2014 and 2015.