A Multimodal Analysis And Evaluation Of The Interpersonal Meaning Construction Of Listed Company Annual Reports Based On Annual Reports From Pharmaceutical Industry

Nowadays, the high speed development of information technology has brought significant changes in various means of communication. Especially, it brought enormous convenience and possibilities in people’s communication in the business world. It has changed from plain language communication to those integrated with images, diagrams and sounds. A great number of listed companies even change the format of their annual reports following the multimedia trend. They combine visual designs such as photos, geometric figures in colors to better present their information. As a document that is obliged to release to the public, it is also an opportunity to show the company’s corporate value or image to the stakeholders.Richard B. Higgins(2000), an American scholar, has proposed the Strategic Credibility model in investor relations to set up a standard for evaluating the effect of a company’s investor relations management. Company annual report is one of the most important tools for companies to communicate with their stakeholders. In light of its significance in investor relations management, how do the verbiage and visual resources affect the perception of viewers? What kind of interactive meaning do these resources establish between companies and viewers? How do these resources realize the interactive meaning? As multimodal discourse becomes overwhelmingly important, scholars have shown great interest in multimodal discourse analysis.However, in the field of business English, scholars mainly adopt this methodology in analyzing advertisement and the application in other material is few and far between. In this paper, I conducted a multimodal discourse analysis in both visual and verbiage resources in listed company annual reports from the angle of interactive meaning based on Visual Grammar and Appraisal Theory to investigate the information arrangement in annual reports. Six annual reports in pharmaceuticalindustry were selected as research subject in the study. Pilot effort was taken to find out how interactive meaning is constructed by multimodal resources in pharmaceutical annual reports and how they realize the functions listed in Strategic Credibility model.After analyzing 90 multimodal discourse samples extracted from 6 ARs in pharmaceutical industry, the results are as follows:(1) In the analysis of verbiage resources, positive Attitude resources account for99.40%. Positive Affect resources account for only 1.42% of the total resources identified. Companies avoid directly adopting Affect resources in ARs because they tend to maintain a professional image and intend to convince the stakeholders in an objective way. Positive Judgment resources account for 43.30% of all resources, in which positive Capacity(28.49%) is the most dominant one. Judgment resources present the capacity, reliability and social image of a company thus building a strong image. positive Appreciation resources accounts for 54.13%. Positive Imapact resources take up 16.52%, ranking number one in the Appreciation system, followed by positive Valuation resources which account for 15.95%. Positive Quality resources, which is related to emotion, occupies only 2.56%.Positive Balanced and positive Complexity share a close percentage. Positive Balanced resources account for 9.69% and positive Complexity resources accounts for 9.40%. Appreciation resources increase ARs’ attractiveness and intelligibility.(2) In the analysis of visual image, we found that different resources serve for different purposes. On the whole, there is no salient inclination in selecting these images. The visual resources ARs adopted depends on what they intend to convey and, to a great extend, the fitness with verbiage resources. From the perspective of contact, both “demand” and “offer” can be found in ARs and they construct different interactive meanings. From the study, “demand” in these images usually related to the emotion of viewers and grab the viewers’ attention to establish direct relationship with them. For example, in Letter to Shareholders, companies usuallyadopt “demand” resources, mostly a close shot of a CEO who looks into your eyes directly, to establish a relationship of trust and intimacy with the viewers. “Offer”requires viewers’ rational scrutiny. They are often be used in story-telling sections or product-introducing sections. It is two different schemes of constructing interpersonal relationship. Contact schemes relate to the empathy strategy or the objective strategy for a company to convey different information. In terms of social distance, close shorted portrays are adopted to establish close relationship with viewers and arouse viewers emotional reaction, thus enhance the public image of the company. On the other side, frontal angel and eye level angle are preferred though there is no obvious inclination in selecting visual resources on the whole. Frontal angle and eye level angle help companies to establish an equal relationship with the viewers. In communication, equality is considered as a very important element because it can clear the obstacles in social relationship in the first place.To sum up, verbiage resources and visual resources synergize to construct interactive meaning in corporate ARs. Verbiage resources in ARs emphasize more on rationality, i.e. arranging the information in an objective way. It helps ARs to be more convincing with facts. On the other hand, visual resources put more emphasis on emotional effect. It helps companies to interact with viewers emotionally as to strengthen the message ARs want to convey. In this study we define them as objective strategy and empathy strategy. The present study is the first attempt to analyze multimodal discourse on ARs in pharmaceutical companies, which explore the application of MDA in this kind of genre but also propose some references in composing multimodal ARs.