The Study Of Interdiscursivity In Listed Companies' Annual Reports

As one of the most important corporate disclosure documents,the annual report is an indispensable way for companies to communicate with external parties,and it is also an important channel for attracting investors.According to the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC),listed companies must submit annual financial report to disclose the company's operating and financial conditions.In recent years,annual reports have been researched extensively by different researchers.However,the intertextual study of the annual report is comparatively piecemeal.As a special kind of intertextuality,interdiscursivity refers to the intermingling of different genres,discourses or styles associated with institutional and social meanings in a given text.Thus,this notion has a linguistic as well as a social nature.The study of interdiscursivity has great theoretical and practical significance,which can not only enrich the theory of discourse analysis in order to help us develop a dialectical language view,but also enrich related social researches.This thesis attempts to exploit the social origins of interdiscursivity and examine the colonization of the annual report by the promotional genre through analyzing interdiscursivity in the listed companies' annual reports.This study collects fifty American annual reports in 2015 from Fortune Global 500 in order to establish a corpus.With the self-built corpus,we attempt to analyze interdiscursivity from the textual,generic and social perspectives based on the working definition of interdiscursivity and Bhatia's multi-perspective model of discourse.It is found that interdiscursivity in annual reports follows the global discursive trend of the colonization by the promotional genre by bending promotional conventions at the textual and generic level.It is hoped that this study will help the writers of annual reports to make full use of the interdiscursive language strategies in order to achieve communicative purposeseffectively.At the same time,we believe that it will help readers with different intentions to get the key information in annual reports rapidly and efficiently,in order to make reasonable investing or loaning decisions.