A Comparative Study Of Interactional Metadiscourse In Letters To Shareholders Of American Banks Based On Financial Performance

Letter to shareholders not only plays a notable public relations role in a company but also demonstrates the communication between the CEO and stakeholders.Previous studies clearly show that different financial performances impact on certain content properties of letters to shareholders(e.g.readability,themes included,and news attribution etc.).However,prior literature only addresses two questions on the content level,i.e.“Whether different financial performances will impact on the content properties of letters to shareholders?” and “What content properties of letters to shareholders are impacted by different financial performances?”.Nonetheless,they do not further answer the question of “How do different financial performances impact on the content properties of letters to shareholders through non-content linguistic features(e.g.hedges and self-mentions)?”This paper aims to explore the differences in the linguistic features of companies’ letters to shareholders under different financial performances based on Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse.Metadiscourse represents the linguistic resources used by writers to organize texts,present themselves,demonstrate their stance,express their emotions and interact with readers.This paper mainly focuses on the interactional metadiscourse resources as they specifically concern how the writers conduct writer-reader interaction.For this purpose,48 letters to shareholders from eight large American banks appearing on the Fortune 500 list both in the financial crisis period(year 2007 to 2009;24 letters)and postfinancial crisis period(year 2013 to 2015;24 letters)are collected to form two corpora.Chisquare analysis is conducted to quantitatively compare the differences in the distribution of interactional metadiscourse resources in two periods.Differences and similarities between two periods are compared.Reasons for the differences and similarities are analyzed together with core examples.The results show that the total frequency of interactional metadiscourse and its five subcategories all differ significantly between the financial crisis period and post-financial crisis period.In the financial crisis period,executives tend to use less self-mentions and more hedges to distance themselves away from the bad news.By contrast,more self-mentions and less hedges are deployed during the post-financial crisis period,which indicates that the top executives tend to highlight the saliency of their presence in the texts and take credit for the good news under good financial performance.Also,compared to the post-financial crisis period,more engagement markers are deployed in the financial crisis period to shorten the writerreader distance and open a sincere discussion between top executives and stakeholders about the causes of and solutions to the financial crisis.Additionally,the balance between the negative and positive attitude markers in the financial crisis period indicates that more complex messages conveying mixed emotions must be delivered under that context,i.e.reporting the bad news(negative),while simultaneously,imparting confidence into stakeholders(positive)and enhancing the banks’ own image as well as authority(positive).In contrast,an overwhelming “optimism” is presented in annual letters during the post-financial crisis period.Compared to the post-financial crisis period,a higher frequency of boosters is also identified in the downward macroeconomic situation as they are mainly used to admit past losses and offer future solutions.This paper contributes more empirical studies to examining the impact from different financial performances on the linguistic features of letters to shareholders.Also,our paper also offers some managerial implications concerning how to compile a well-written letter to shareholders especially under poor financial performance.