A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Metaphors In Letters To Shareholders Of Chinese And American Banking Industry

As the most widely read part in annual reports,the impact of the letter to shareholders(hereafter refers to as LtS)on investment decision-making cannot be underestimated.The present study investigates how Chinese and American banking companies construct corporate identities by examining linguistic and conceptual metaphors used in their letters to shareholders.The general research orientation is decomposed into four research questions:(1)What are the main metaphors,both on linguistic and conceptual levels,used to construct the major foci in Chinese and American banking companies' letters to shareholders?(2)What types of stances are expressed by these metaphors?(3)What do they reveal about the corporate identities constructed by Chinese and American banking companies?(4)What factors contribute to the observed patterns?In order to address the above research questions,the Corpus of Chinese Letters to Shareholders(CCLtS)and the Corpus of American Letters to Shareholders(CALtS)were built,and the fourth generation corpus concordance tool Wmatrix were used to extract key semantic domains.The results show that(1)Chinese and American companies' LtSs share 12 conceptual metaphors(such as ORGANISM,DIRECTION & MOVEMENT,BUILDING & CONSTRUCTION,and WAR).The dominant conceptual metaphors in CCLtS are DIRECTION & MOVEMENT,ORGANISM,and BUILDING & CONSTRUCTION,contrasting with ORGANISM,DIRECTION & MOVEMENT,and GAME & SPORT in CALtS.Although the two corpora share most conceptual metaphors,their distributions of linguistic metaphors vary to a large extent.(2)Through these metaphors,both Chinese and American banking companies take a positive stance towards the companies per se,their economic conductions,as well as their stakeholders,especially their shareholders.Negative stances are hardly seen in Chinese letters to shareholders;in contrast,negative stances are sometimes present in American letters to shareholders,so as to evade responsibility of poor performance.(3)Both Chinese and American banking companies show an enterprising and progressively developing identity during their corporate development.What's more,Chinese banking companies tend to align actively with their country and government,and project an authoritative identity among peer companies,as well as identities of loyal supporters and beneficiaries of country policies.In contrast,American banking companies project themselves as capable and reliable partners of shareholders,and skeptics of country policies.(4)Embodied philosophy helps to explicate the similarities between metaphor usages of Chinese and American banking companies;while the difference in power distance,individualism and collectivism,variances in Chinese and American banking companies' corporate cultures,as well as differences in writing habits and target readership contribute to the observed metaphorical distribution differences.This study sheds new lights into the genre of letters to shareholders,and the role of metaphor played in the construction of corporate identity.The findings will be able to help Chinese companies to fulfill the mission of “going global”.