A critical discourse analysis of annual reports in a cross-cultural perspective: views from a grammatical metaphor and systemic functional linguistics

The study of linguistic strategies in financial and corporate discourse has always been important to gain some understanding of how corporate discourse enables effective communication with a wider customer base. This can offer new perspectives on how companies interact with key stakeholders, not only to convey transparency and a trustworthy image, but also to attract investment. In the light of Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, the purpose of this study was to examine and analyse the annual reports of Asian and Western public companies involved in oil refining and power generation from the point of view of the functions and frequency of grammatical metaphors. More specifically, grammatical metaphor – through the lens of CDA – is used as a theoretical tool to analyse a synchronic cross-cultural study of the communicative strategies used by Asian and Western companies to communicate social and environmental sustainability to local and global communities and key stakeholders. According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), grammatical metaphor is divided into two broad areas: ideational and interpersonal. This study focuses on the first type, ideational grammatical metaphor, which includes de-adjectival and de-verbal nominalization. The dominant and more effective grammatical tropes used by Asian and Western companies in their annual reports were examined from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective. The aim was to categorize and explain how ideational grammatical metaphor is constructed cross-culturally and presented through structural language patterns involving re-mapping between semantics and lexico-grammatical features. This approach enables companies to convey transparency and trustworthiness through their annual reports as they seek to report and promote efficiency, profit, and social and environmental sustainability, thus advocating stakeholder engagement and investment.