A Multimodal Analysis And Comparison Of The Interpersonal Meaning Construction Of Chinese And American Corporate Annual Reports

In today’s society,the means of human communication has changed dramatically due to the rapid development of information technology.What’s more,the rise of the Multimodal Discourse Analysis（MDA）has broken the limitations of Discourse Analysis.American linguist Harris proposed Discourse Analysis in the 1950 s,and since then,many linguists put great efforts in probing different theories and methodologies to analyze discourse.The emerging of Multimodal Discourse Analysis in the 1990 s brought enormous convenience and possibilities to the communication of people’s daily life,especially in the business world.The way of business communication becomes more diversified nowadays.Many companies from home and abroad even changed their traditional way of composing Annual Reports（ARs）and adopted such a multimodal way.They combined words with visual resources,which can reveal their corporate information to the readers in a better and comprehensive way.Since there is few comparison between Chinese and American corporate ARs with the MDA approach by now,thus it is a new aspect worth exploring.This paper probes into the differences of interpersonal meaning construction and information arrangement between the ARs of Chinese and American corporations.This paper aims to answer three research questions: 1)What are the characteristics of the distribution of Attitude resources in the texts of the ARs of Chinese and American companies? What are the differences? 2)What are the characteristics of the Visual resources of Chinese and American corporate ARs? What are the differences? 3)How is the interpersonal meaning constructed and conveyed by verbiage and image resources in the ARs of Chinese and American companies? What are the differences?The author intends to conduct a Multimodal Discourse Analysis in both verbiage and visual resources in the Annual Reports of Chinese and American companies from the angle of interpersonal meaning based on the Attitude System in Appraisal Theory and the Interactive Meaning in Visual Grammar.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted.After the analysis of all the samples of the Chinese and American corporate ARs,the results can be presented as follows:In the analysis of the verbiage resources,the positive Attitude resources make up the most significant part with 92.8%,while the negative Attitude resources make up only 7.2%.In the Affect resources,Chinese ARs tend to use Dis/satisfaction and Dis/inclination resources more,while American ARs prefer to use more Un/happiness and Dis/satisfaction resources.In the Judgment resources,Chinese and American ARs both prefer to use Capacity and Tenacity resources.There are more Judgment resources in Chinese ARs than in American ARs.Appreciation resources take the most prominent part in the sample ARs,which is helpful to project a favorable corporate image in the minds of the readers and trigger the positive evaluation of the readers towards the corporations.In the analysis of the visual resources,there are 99 pictures in the samples of Chinese ARs and 103 pictures in the samples of American ARs.Chinese ARs prefer to choose demand acts more while American ARs would like to use offer acts more.Both Chinese and American ARs prefer to use the images with close-up shots.The images in Chinese ARs are mainly presented in fontal angles,while American ARs prefer to use oblique angle images.With the verbiage and visual resources of Chinese and American ARs analyzed together,it can be concluded that both verbiage and visual resources in the ARs express positive information about the companies.Verbiage and visual resources have cooccurrence and complementary relations in Chinese and American ARs.The former can convey more accurate corporate information to the readers,which is beneficial to the construction of the positive interpersonal relationship between the corporations and the readers or the viewers.At the same time,the latter is helpful to the better construction of the interactive meaning.To sum up,verbiage and visual resources in the ARs not only disclose corporate information but also maintain or create a favorable corporate image.By using the combination of verbiage and visual resources,the interpersonal relationship can be constructed.