A Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse In Letters To Shareholders From Chinese And American Technology Companies

With the development of economic globalization,more and more Chinese companies enter international market.As a business discourse,the letter to shareholders is the most widely-read part of annual reports and convey corporate information to investors,including financial performance in the last fiscal year and future development,etc.It plays an important role in maintaining investor relations.Therefore,an important function of letters to shareholders is to persuade investors.Metadiscourse,a set of guiding readers to understand the discourse,consists of interactional and interactive metadiscourse.Former studies show that metadiscourse can realize persuasive function of letters to shareholders from three rhetorical means raised by Aristotle,namely ethos,pathos and logos.This study attempts to explore how metadiscourse in letters to shareholders from Chinese and American technology companies realize persuasive function and to discuss the reasons behind the similarities and differences from a cross-culture perspective,which hopefully will help Chinese companies writing letters to shareholders intended for international readers.Based on Hyland’s model of metadiscourse,this study employs both qualitative and quantitative methods and builds two corpora,including respectively 34 Chinese and 54 American 2008-2018 letters to shareholders from technology companies selected from Fortune Global 500,2019.This study first investigates the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse resources,then explores how metadiscourse helps to realize persuasion from Aristotle’s three rhetorical means,and finally discusses the reasons behind the similarities and differences from the perspective of Hall’s high/low context culture.The main findings are as follows: 1.On one hand,the use of interactional metadiscourse far exceeds that of interactive metadiscourse in both corpora and the most frequently used items,such as self mentions,we,our,are overlapped to a large extent.On the other hand,significant differences exist in the use of certain metadiscourse categories between the two corpora,such as evidentials,code glosses,etc.2.Chinese and American technology companies show different preference when realizing the three means of persuasion.In terms of ethos,Chinese companies tend to build an authoritative corporate image,while American companies,a moderate and objective image.In terms of pathos,American companies are more likely to get closer to readers,while Chinese companies tend to draw a line between companies and readers.In terms of logos,Chinese companies tend to add extra information,while American companies focus more on the coherence and logic of the discourse.3.Chinese companies,from high-context cultures,are likely to convey information in an indirect way by using evidentials and code glosses and to maintain a harmonious relationship with investors.On the contrary,American companies,from low-context culture,use more engagement markers to let investors participate in the discourse and employ more frame markers and transition markers to enhance the coherence and logic.This study enriches metadiscourse researches in business discourse and provides some suggestions to Chinese companies when writing letters to shareholders in English,such as using more engagement markers,frame markers and transition markers,and expressing intentions in a more direct way.However,the size of the corpora is relatively small in this study.Only national culture is regarded as variable in this study.Future studies can adopt larger corpora and try to look into other factors,such as corporate or industry cultures,that might influence the use of metadiscourse in letters to shareholders.