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
