Linguistic variation in the discourse of corporate annual reports: A multi-dimensional analysis

Combining the frameworks of multi-dimensional (MD) analysis and rhetorical structure theory (RST), this study examines the linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of corporate annual reports (CARs) and interprets their underlying functional dimensions. Our corpus consists of texts of corporate 10K reports from firms listed on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE; N of texts = 642, totally 14,674,047 tokens). Five functional dimensions are quantitatively extracted and qualitatively interpreted: (1) expression of direct persuasion; (2) expression of impersonal stance; (3) subjective versus objective positioning; (4) integrative expression of stance versus fragmented expression; and (5) expression of reliability. All these dimensions contribute to the communicative function of persuasion. The analysis of the rhetorical structures of excerpts with high concentrations of co-occurring linguistic features on each dimension further indicates the communicative strategy of persuasion. The proposed MD model is then applied to analyze the effect of firm performance on the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. We found that firm performance can significantly affect the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. CAR discourse from firms with good performance is more reliable. The result reveals managements’ use of concealment strategy in impression management. This study has implications for MD analysis, business discourse analysis, language pedagogy and accounting research.