CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Topic
Chairman’s statements, as one of the accounting narratives, are relatively new phenomena. In 1973, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) recommended that financial statements should not be limited solely to quantified information. Amplification, in narrative form, of data included in financial statements may be required. Currently, it is rare to find an annual report which does not contain extensive narratives. These narratives are now encouraged by the regulatory authorities (for example, the management discussion and analysis section is mandatory in the US and the operating and financial review is recommended in the UK). The Companies Act of South Africa in1973 requires that a company’s financial statements must be accompanied by a narrative report, i.e. the director’s report, complementing and explaining the main features underlying the results and financial position (Cilliers, Rossouw and Mans, 1995). With the development of technology, many high-tech companies emerge and go bankruptcy. This industry is highly changeable. The scale of emerging companies become bigger and they intend to get listed to get more funding from the public and enlarge their scale. All of these companies have to use chairman’s statement to manage their companies’ image in profitable and unprofitable times. In spite of the increasing importance of chairman’s statement, little research has been done in this area, let alone comparative study on chairman’s statements of technical companies. Therefore, the author chooses this topic to give a more clear view of this area.
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1.2 Rationale and Significance
The current study mainly focuses on text analysis, especially semantic level from the linguistic view, focusing on identifying the interpersonal meaning of chairman statement. The rationale and significance of the study can be illustrated in the following aspects. First and foremost, the author intends to analyze the interpersonal meaning of chairman statement. Different from the financial figures and reports, chairman’s statement has more interpersonal meanings. Chairman’s statement is written by the chairman assisted by a firm’s top executives and other department to its shareholders to provide a broad overview of the firm’s operations throughout the year. It covers the firm’s basic financial results, its current position in the market, and some of its future plans. The interpersonal meaning of the chairman’s statement is important since it decides a company’s image. So the author tries to find the effective way that companies communicate with rela
