Appraisal analysis of adjectives in letters to shareholders from British and Spanish companies
![Número](https://revistas.uca.es/public/journals/1/cover_issue_427_es_ES.jpg)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25267/Pragmalinguistica.2021.i29.21Info
Abstract
This study compares the expression of appraisal in letters to shareholders from listed British and Spanish companies, a type of analysis that has not been addressed. The present research uses the Appraisal theory (J. R. Martin and P. R. White, 2005) as the framework of analysis and focuses on the use of evaluative adjectives in adjective-noun collocations. Two corpora of around 170,000 words were examined for the ten most frequent adjectives and their collocates. The results show that the usage pattern of these items was largely similar in terms of the adjectives used and the type of Attitude expressed. However, their frequencies were, overall, lower in the British letters. The collocation patterns were also different as the adjectives analysed collocated with distinct nouns. The variations detected are likely to reflect socially and culturally embedded rhetorical strategies in the promotion of positive aspects of these companies’ performance.
Keywords
Downloads
How to Cite
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Hanna Skorczynska Sznajder
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
References
BARTLETT, S. & CHANDLER, R. (1997): “The corporate report and the private shareholder: Lee and Tweedie twenty years on”, British Accounting Review, 29(3), pp. 245-261.
BIBER, D. (2006a): “Stance in spoken and written university registers”, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5(2), pp. 97-116.
BIBER, D. (2006b): University Language: A Corpus-Based Study of Spoken and Written Registers, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
BIBER, D. & FINEGAN, E. (1989): “Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect”, Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 9(1), pp. 93-124.
BRZEZINA, V. (2018): Statistics in Corpus Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CONAWAY, R. N. & WARDROPE, W. (2010): “Do their words really matter? Thematic analysis of U.S. and Latin American CEO letters”, Journal of Business Communication, 47(2), pp. 141-168.
DE GROOT, E. B., KORZILIUS, H., NICKERSON, C. & GERRITSEN, M. (2006): “A corpus analysis of text themes and photographic themes in managerial forewords of Dutch-English and British Annual General Reports”. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 49(3), pp. 217-235.
DOLPHIN, R. R. (2004): “The strategic role of investor relations”. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 9(1), pp. 25-42.
DRAGSTED, B. (2014): “A case study of letters to shareholders in annual reports before, during and after the financial crisis”, LSP Journa,l 5(2), pp. 84-104.
FORTANET, I. (2008): “Evaluative language in peer review referee reports”, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7(1), pp. 27-37.
FUOLI, M. & HOMMERBERG, C. (2015): “Optimising transparency, reliability and replicability: annotation principles and inter-coder agreement in the quantification of evaluative expressions”, Corpora, 10(3), pp. 315-349.
GARZONE, G. (2004): “Annual company reports and CEO’s letters: Discoursal features and cultural markedness”, Candlin, C. & Gotti, M. (eds.): Intercultural Aspects of Specialized Discourse, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 311-341.
GARZONE, G. (2005): “Letters to shareholders and Chairman’s statements: Textual variability and generic integrity”, Gillaerts, P. & Gotti, M. (eds.), Genre Variation in Business Letters, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 179-204
GILLAERTS, P. (1996): “The address to the shareholders in annual reports. A genological approach”, 1996 European Writing Conferences, Barcelona: Institut de Ciencies de l’Educació (CD-ROM: EARLI Special Interest Group Writing).
HALLIDAY, M. A. K. (1994): An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edition. London: Edward Arnold.
HARRÉ, R. (1987): “The social construction of selves”, Yardley, K. (ed.), Self and Identity: Psychosocial Perspectives, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 41-52.
HEWINGS, M. (2007): “An 'important contribution' or 'tiresome reading'? A study of evaluation in peer reviews of journal article submissions”, Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(3), pp. 247-274.
HUANG, Y. & ROSE, K. (2018): “You, our shareholders: Metadiscourse in CEO letters from Chinese and Western banks”, Text & Talk, 38(2), pp. 167-190.
HYLAND, K. (1998): “Exploring corporate rhetoric: Metadiscourse in the CEO’s letter”. Journal of Business Communication, 35(2), pp. 224-245.
HYLAND, K. (2009): “Corpus informed discourse analysis: The case of academic engagement”, Charles, M., Pecorari D. & Hunston, S. (eds.), Academic Writing: At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse, New York and London: Continuum, pp. 110-128.
HYLAND, K. (2010): “Constructing proximity: Relating to readers in popular and professional science”, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 9(2), pp. 116-127.
HYLAND, K. & TSE, P. (2004): “Metadiscourse in academic writing: A reappraisal”, Applied linguistics, 25(2), pp. 156-177.
KOHUT, G. F. & SEGARS, A. H. (1992): “The President’s letter to stockholders: An examination of corporate communication strategy”, The Journal of Business Communication, 29(1), pp. 7-21.
LUTZ, C. & WHITE, G. (1986): “The anthropology of emotions”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, pp. 405-436.
LUTZ, C. & ABU-LUGHOD, L. (1990): Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LUZÓN, M. J. (2012): “Your argument is wrong”: A contribution to the study of evaluation in academic weblogs”, Text & Talk, 32(2), pp. 145-165.
MALAVASI, D. (2007): “Lexical analysis of implicit promotional devices in bank annual reports”, ILCEA, Revue de l’Institut des Langues et Cultures d’Europe, Amérique, Afrque, Asie et Australie, 9, pp. 171-184.
MARTIN, J. R. (1992): English text: System and structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins
MARTIN, J. R. (2000): “Beyond exchange: Appraisal systems in English”, Hunston, S. & Thompson, G. (eds.), Evaluation in Text, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 143-75.
MARTIN, J. R. & WHITE, P. R. (2005): The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
MATTHIESSEN, C. (1995): Lexicogrammatical cartography: English systems. Tokyo: International Language Sciences
NICKERSON, C. & DE GROOT, E. (2005): “Dear shareholder, dear stockholder. The business letter genre in the annual general report”, Gillaerts, P. & Gotti, M. (eds.), Genre variation in business letters, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 325-246.
POOLE, R. (2017): “New opportunities” and “Strong performance”: Evaluative adjectives in letters to shareholders and potential for pedagogically-downsized specialized corpora”, English for Specific Corpora, 47, pp. 40-51.
QUEROL-JULIÁN, M. & FORTANET-GÓMEZ, I. (2012): “Multimodal evaluation in academic discussion sessions: How do presenters act and react?”, English for Specific Purposes, 31(4), pp. 271-283.
RUIZ-GARRIDO, M. F., FORTANET-GÓMEZ, I. & PALMER-SILVEIRA, J. C. (2012): “Introducing British and Spanish Companies to Investors”, Artiz J. & Walker, R. R. (eds.), Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communication, Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 159-178.
RUTHERFORD, B. A. (2005): “Genre analysis of corporate annual report narratives: A corpus linguistics–based approach”, The Journal of Business Communication, 42(4), pp. 349-378.
SKORCZYNSKA, H. & GIMÉNEZ-MORENO, R. (2016): “Variation in letters to shareholders from British, Polish and Spanish Companies. A comparative study”, Journal of Intercultural Communication, 40, pp. 1-15.
SWALES, J. M., & BURKE, A. (2003): “It’s really fascinating work”: differences in evaluative adjectives across academic registers”, Leistyna, P. & Meyer, C. F. (eds.), Corpus Analysis. Language Structure and Language Use, Amsterdam & New York: Brill Rodopi, pp. 1-18.
THOMPSON, G. & HUNSTON, S. (1999): “Evaluation: An introduction”, in Thompson, G. & Hunston, S. (eds.), Evaluation in Text, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-27.
TOSUN, N. (2004): “Financial value and public relations”, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 9(3), pp. 202-208.