上市企业年报多模态人际意义构建分析与评价--以医药行业年报为例

CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background

Annual reports are not only a company’s window for stakeholders to interpret itsstate of operation but also serve as a significant external communication tool for acompany to obtain investment and trust from stakeholders. Today, thecompositionof an AR is much more than presenting plain words and tables. In most of ARs fromfortune 500, there exists a great number of ARs composed of pictures and geometricdesigns in color beside language. Though it is required by jurisdictions (such asSecurities and Exchanges Commission) to disclose their activities and financialperformance to a certain degree, companies can furnish their annual reports withwords polishing and visual designs.

Since American linguist Harris proposed the new research area - discourseanalysis in 1950s (Harris, 1952), discourse analysts have contributed great effort inproposing various theories and methodologies for discourse analysis. Through agreat amount of empirical studies, they analyze the inner rules of discourse activitiesand the relationship between people’s ideology and cognitive modes (Zhu, 2003) In1990s, following the development of information technology, Multimodal DiscourseAnalysis (MDA) emerged and attracted scholars’ attention. As it is different fromtraditional discourse analysis, MDA provides a methodology to study meaningconstruction not only from the perspective of language but also images, sound, color,animation, etc. In business English, MDA has been applied in many areas such asadvertisement and new product launching event. However, the application of it inannual reports is few and far between.

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1.2 Annual Reports and Investor Relations

Another term strongly related to AR is “investor relations” (IR). A research carriedout by Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR) indicates that,among the tools that companies employ in financial communication, ARs rank at thetop of the list in terms of the frequency used, accounting for 76% of the tools used.AIMR also found that investors tend to employ ARs, teleconferences and annualmeetings to satisfy their need for company management information. Previousstudies show that ARs play an important role in investor relations management(IRM). Richard B. Higgins (2000), the author of Best Practices in Global InvestorRelations, proposed the model of Strategic Credibility to measure the effect ofinvestor relations. Strategic Credibility refers to how others view the company’soverall corporate strategy and its strategic planning capability. The model mainlyconsists of 4 determinants, namely (1) a company’s strategic capability, (2) pastcorporate performance, (3) the credibility of a firm’s top management team, mostnotably the chief executive officer, and (4) communication of corporate strategy tokey stakeholders. To a great extent, ARs should meet the criteria of this model tofully optimize its function.

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CHAPTER TWOLITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Previous Studies on Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Since American linguist Harris (1952) brought out the research field of discourseanalysis, discourse analysts from all over the world contributed great effort inproposing various theories and methods for discourse analysis subsequently.Through a great amount of empirical studies, they analyze the inner rules ofdiscourse activities and the relationship between people’s ideology and cognitivemodes (Zhu, 2003). However, these theories and methods mainly take language astheir research object, i.e. they only focus on the relationship between linguisticsystem and semantic structure itself and social culture and psychological cognition,ignoring other forms such as images, sound, color and animation, which is a greatlimitation (Zhu, 2007). In 1990s, with the publication of Reading Images (G. Kressand T. van Leeuwen), Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) came on the stage andbecame popular. MDA provides a methodology to study meaning construction notonly from the perspective e of language but also images, sound, color, animation, etc.It helps scholars overcome the shortcomings we pointed out above. Rose. G (2001),Cartwright L. & Sturken M. (2000) and G. Kress and T. van Leeuwen (1996) wroteabout up-to-date methods of describing and analyzing visual and verbiageinformation; R. Scollon and S. Wong Scollon (2003) discussed ways of examiningwritten language examples found in everyday life from the multimodal perspective.Yet, there is not much literature similar to the work of G. Kress and T. van Leeuwen(2001), which focuses on methods of multimodal analysis integrating both linguisticand visual aspects.

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2.2 Previous Studies on Annual Reports“

The annual report is a comprehensive communication that has the potential to makecompany information easily and routinely available in a single document” (Hooks etal., 2002). This makes “the annual report much more than a financial report; insteadit is a multi-objective, multi-audience communication” (Anderson & Imperia, 1992).Over the years, studies of ARs are conducted in many different areas and most of them focus on the readability and self-serving attributional bias. Besides, linguistsalso pay attention to ARs and have conducted some research in this field.

Oversea studies on the readability of ARs can be dated back to the middle of20th century. Some scholars proposed that the intelligibility of information in ARs isdetermined by a parallel relationship constructed by the readability of themselvesand the information users’ ability to understand. Western scholars widely considerthat most of the financial information in ARs of listed companies does not projectreadability to consumers. The users’ cognitive degree of accounting information isfar behind the information presented in ARs. Without exception, studies in differentcountries at different times all draw to a same conclusion: basically ARs are “hard”or “very hard” to understand. (Courtis, 1998) Another view is proved by scholarsthat the language of ARs can be subjectively manipulated. It is related to the“gatekeeper theory” that the management team acts as the gate keeper to process theaccounting information. Management team tends to exaggerate the goodperformance and minimize the bad performance at the meanwhile. In this case,readability is one of the characteristics of ARs language design. Many studiesconcerns with the relationship between ARs readability and profitability ofcompanies. Adelberg (1979) took earning per share as a criterion to examine thisquestion and the result shows that they are perfectly correlation. However Jones(1988) made an opposite stance. 

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CHAPTER THREE THEORECTICAL FRAMEWORK....................15

3.1 The Appraisal Theory....................15

3.1.1 Attitude System..................17

CHAPTER FOUR PROCEDURES AND DATAANALYSIS ............ 27

4.1 Data Collection.............. 27

4.2 Specific Procedures..................28

CHAPTER FIVE INTEGRATED ANALYSIS OF VISUAL-VERBIAGERESOURCES IN ANNUAL REPORTS........51

CHAPTER FIVEINTEGRATED ANALYSIS OF VISUAL- VERBIAGE RESOURCES INANNUAL REPORTS

In the above chapter, we have discussed the verbiage and visual resources separatelyunder a rather universal definition of interactive communtication. In this chapter, wewill analyze both verbiage and visual resources as a whole (what we defined asstudy object in the part of data collection) with the Strategic Credibility Modelproposed by Richard B. Higgins (2000), so as to find out the interactive meaningrelated to investor relations. In order to conduct the comprehensive analysis, weselect one representative sample-Annual Report of Abbott Laboratories 2013 as anexample.

Richard B. Higgins (2000), the author of Best Practices in Global InvestorRelations, proposed the model of Strategic Credibility to measure the effect ofinvestor relations. Strategic Credibility refers to how others view the company’soverall corporate strategy and its strategic planning capability. (Higgins, 2000) Themodel mainly consists of 4 determinants, namely (1) a company’s strategiccapability, (2) past corporate performance, (3) the credibility of a firm’s topmanagement team, most notably the chief executive officer, and (4) communicationof corporate strategy to key stakeholders.

Since company ARs are one of the most important documents for enterprises tocommunicate with their investors, they should fully take the above factors intoaccount. In the following part we will take four study objects consist of bothverbiage resources and image resources to analyze how they achieve the purpose ofconstructing Strategic Credibility.

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CHAPTER SIXDISCUSSION AND CONLUSION

6.1 Major Findings of the Present Study

Firstly, from the perspective of verbiage resources, Affect resources, to a great extent,can weaken the profession and objectivity of a company, thus making it fail to be anappropriate choice for companies to use directly in building their images. Judgmentresources, especially <+Capacity>, are used frequently so as to establish acompany’s reliability. On the other hand, in order to improve the intelligibility ofAnnual reports, companies also pay attention to the aesthetic elements of theircontents. Balance and Complexity resources are adopted at a relatively highfrequency to help arrange the imformation format. Valuation resources are of highfrequency beacause it can project a positive, capable and responsible image of thecompany to investors and consumers.

Secondly, in visual image analysis we found that different resources serves fordifferent purposes. On the whole, there is no salient inclination in selecting these images. The visual resources Annual reports adopted depends on what they intend toconvey and, to a great extent, the fitness with verbiage resources. From theperspective of contact, both “demand” and “offer” can be found in Annual reportsand they construct different interactive meanings. From the study, “demand” in theseimages usually related to the emotion of viewers and grab the viewers’ attention toestablish direct relationship with them. For example, in Letter to Shareholders,companies usually adopt “demand” resources, mostly a close shot of a CEO wholooks into your eyes directly, to establish a relationship of trust and intimacy withthe viewers. “Offer” requires viewers’ rational scrutiny. They are often be used instory-telling sections or product-introducing sections. It is two different schemes ofconstructing interpersonal relationship. 

reference(omitted)