The Construction Of Risk Discourse In Annual Reports Of Chinese And American ICT Companies:Based On The Discourse-historical Approach

The development of science and technology has brought about the vigorous development of information and communication technology industry,and people pay more attention to this field.The risk discourse in the annual report is one of the best ways to understand the current situation and development of an enterprise.Therefore,it is of certain practical significance to understand how the enterprise deals with the risk discourse and how stakeholders interpret it.Employing the three-dimensional framework of Discourse-historical Approach and regarding the appraisal resources as the linguistic embodiment of the micro level of the three-dimensional framework,this study analyzes and discusses the distributions of the risk discourses of different themes and the allocations of attitude resources and graduation resources used in the risk discourses of Chinese companies and American companies,aiming to find the similarities and differences,reasons causing them,as well as the attitudes expressed by enterprises.In this study,the annual reports of 18 ITC companies(nine from China and nine from the United States),which are ranked top 500 in the world in the year of2018 according to the report of Fortune,were downloaded from their official websites.And then,the risk discourses were extracted from these reports to establish corresponding corpora(RDCC and RDAC).After that,the needed information in Chinese and American corpus was extracted by manual work and corpus tool,namely Ant Conc 3.4.4,and the data were analyzed by Chi-Square.The results show that there are similarities and differences on the distributions of themes and the allocations of resources between the risk discourses of Chinese and American companies.Firstly,for the purpose of face saving,the risk perception discourse and the risk management discourse of Chinese companies are distributed in a relatively balanced way,compared with those of American companies.Secondly,in terms of the attitude resources,due to the requirement of objectivity by theInternational Accounting Standards,Chinese companies and American companies seldom use affect resources.At the same time,for both American enterprises and Chinese enterprises,appreciation resources are used with the highest percentage in the risk perception discourse.Thirdly,different cultures also can result in differences on the employment of graduation resources between Chinese and American enterprises.American enterprises use more low-value epistemic modal verbs to express an objective attitude of revealing the real situation,while Chinese enterprises use more intermediate-and high-value deontic modal verbs to show their determination to face up to the difficulties.This study has both theoretical significance and practical significance.Theoretically,the current research constructs an analytical model for risk discourse.Practically,through analyzing the influence of culture on the construction of corporate risk discourse,this study provides a certain reference for the organization and interpretation of risk discourse in different cultures.