Exploring the Rhetorical Use of Interactional Metadiscourse: A Comparison of Letters to Shareholders of American and Chinese Financial Companies

Abstract

By taking Hyland and Tse's (2004) interactional metadiscourse model, this study attempts to compare the incidence of the interactional metadiscourse markers in letters to shareholders of American and Chinese companies in the financial industry and their rhetorical functions. This study makes American corpus of 41 letters and Chinese corpus of 37 letters both of which are written in English. WordSmith is adopted to find out the differences in incidence of these markers. Chi-square test further confirms these differences are significant. It is consequently found that five types of interactional metadiscourse markers are all deployed in both American and Chinese corpus but the incidence of each marker is much more in American corpus than that in Chinese corpus. Besides, this study identifies that self-mentions and engagement markers are the most frequently employed in both corpora. However, it is noticeable that self-mentions and engagement markers collaborate with another three types of markers more tactically and flexibly in American corpus than in Chinese. In particular, self-mentions markers are found to use with not only boosters, but hedges and engagement markers in American corpus, while self-mentions markers in Chinese corpus only collaborate with hedges. In addition, the engagement markers of model verbs and personal pronouns are more active in American corpus than these in Chinese. This study finds out American companies integrate these markers into building a positive personal or corporate image and closing writer-reader relationship, thereby accomplishing the promotional and persuasive purposes. It may suggest that Chinese companies employ the integration of interactional metadiscourse markers as strategically as American.

Socio-cognitive and Professional Practice Perspectives on Chairperson Statements

“…Firstly, the frequently occurring metadiscourse markers were not examined for their collocated metadiscourse markers, which may be found to have double-edged effects. Collocation patterns can be generated systematically in frequencies by means of the concordance function of Wordsmith Tools as described by Xiaoqin (2017). Secondly, this study did not manage to interview the chairpersons and the investor relations team, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to these two groups of populations.…”

Metadiscourse Features in Risk Management Reports by Local and International Banks in Malaysia

“…Regarding the use of hedges in the RMR, it is clear from Table 5 that IB employs twice as many hedges than LB (103 vs 58 per 10000 words). Hedges are common in economic and business communication (Lejeune, 2018;Xiaoqin, 2017;Resche, 2015). Resche (2015) reported between 4.7% and 5.8% of the words in the corpus of documents from central banks she analysed were classical hedging devices.…”

“…The metadiscourse features have been explored in a plethora of professional discourse ranging from corporation letters (Huang & Rose, 2018;Hyland, 1998;Lee, 2018;Xiaoqin, 2017), corporate press releases (Chen, 2020;Liu & Zhang, 2021) and corporate governance report (Lee, 2018) to business websites (Perez, 2014), business emails (Carrio-Pastor & Calderon, 2015;Jensen, 2009) and oral business presentation (Kuswoyo & Siregar, 2019). By employing Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse model, the studies commonly involved crosscultural and cross-genre contrastive analyses of mostly the use of interactional markers between Western and Chinese companies to interact with the audience in improving their corporate image.…”

“…IB exceeded the number of tokens by 10,903 tokens, indicating that IB tended to use them more assertively than LB. According to Xiaoqin (2017) in her analysis of American and Chinese letters to shareholders, American companies tend to integrate hedges with self-mentions and engagement markers and they were used more tactically and flexibly, thus, was able to build a positive corporate image and create a closer writer-reader relationship in accomplishing their promotional and persuasive purposes. Similarly, IB could have employed a similar approach in risk reporting through more aggressive employment of hedging devices.…”

A Review on the Rhetorical Structure and Linguistic Features of Corporate Annual Reports

“…Several genre-based studies have focussed on the generic features used in different sub-genres of CARs such as the CEO's letter (Xiaoqin, 2017;Dragsted, 2014;Conaway & Wardrope, 2010), operating and financial review (Rutherford, 2005), tax computation letters (Flowerdew & Wan, 2006) earnings presentations vs earnings releases (Camiciottoli, 2009), auditors' reports (Flowerdew & Wan, 2010), CEO's messages Sing, 2014), andCSR (Ilenia, 2019;Fuoli, 2018;Rajandran & Taib, 2014). It is also noticed that different sections or different sub-genres of CAR function differently.…”