You, our shareholders: metadiscourse in CEO letters from Chinese and Western banks
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Ying Huang
Ying Huang received his PhD from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and is currently Associate Professor at China University of Mining and Technology. His research interests are discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. He has published a book,
Discourse as Social Representations in the Chinese Context: A Diachronic Study of the New Year’s Editorials in the People’s Daily (2011, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).Kate Rose holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Université de Montpellier, France, and a BA in International Studies from Boston College. She has published two books of literary criticism, and is Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, China University of Mining and Technology.
Abstract
As China internationalizes its own banks more and more, and the Chinese are an expanding market in Western banks, the linguistic specificities of communication strategies may be understood and applied in the professional environments of banks. The present comparison is based on the key features of metadiscourse markers in the Chinese English-version CEO letters and the Western English-version CEO letters in banking annual reports. Metadiscourse in business genres is an under-represented topic, particularly across cultures; this study invites further inquiry. This paper applies corpus-based contrastive analysis to CEO letters in English from Chinese and Western banks. Comparing distribution patterns of metadiscourse markers, we found that both interactive and interactional metadiscourse was more frequently used in the Western letters. This suggests that Western CEO letters tend to use more credibility and affective appeals, while Chinese CEO letters are based more on rational appeals. Variation in use of metadiscourse is discussed with a focus on the interplay of linguistic and cultural features. This study contributes to the fields of Chinese English professional written communication, and cross-cultural writing in workplaces.
About the authors
Ying Huang received his PhD from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and is currently Associate Professor at China University of Mining and Technology. His research interests are discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. He has published a book, Discourse as Social Representations in the Chinese Context: A Diachronic Study of the New Year’s Editorials in the People’s Daily (2011, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).
Kate Rose holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Université de Montpellier, France, and a BA in International Studies from Boston College. She has published two books of literary criticism, and is Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, China University of Mining and Technology.
Acknowledgments
The paper is financially supported by a Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund of the Ministry of Education, P. R. China (No. 15YJA740067) and by a Social Sciences Research Fund of China University of Mining and Technology (No. JGW111943). We would like to thank Professor Wei Ren at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies for his constructive suggestions during the revision process of the paper. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their kind and valuable comments. All remaining errors are our own.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Negotiating race in post-apartheid South Africa: Bernadette’s stories
- From shrieks to “Stupid poo”: emotive language in a developmental perspective
- You, our shareholders: metadiscourse in CEO letters from Chinese and Western banks
- The discursive construction and realization of the Hong Kong brand: a corpus-informed study
- “If you don’t get better, you may come back here”: proposing conditioned follow-ups to the doctor’s office
- Retailing science: genre hybridization in online science news stories
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Negotiating race in post-apartheid South Africa: Bernadette’s stories
- From shrieks to “Stupid poo”: emotive language in a developmental perspective
- You, our shareholders: metadiscourse in CEO letters from Chinese and Western banks
- The discursive construction and realization of the Hong Kong brand: a corpus-informed study
- “If you don’t get better, you may come back here”: proposing conditioned follow-ups to the doctor’s office
- Retailing science: genre hybridization in online science news stories
