You, our shareholders: metadiscourse in CEO letters from Chinese and Western banks

As China internationalizes its own banks more and more, and the Chinese are an expanding market in Western banks, the linguistic specificities of communication strategies may be understood and applied in the professional environments of banks. The present comparison is based on the key features of metadiscourse markers in the Chinese English-version CEO letters and the Western English-version CEO letters in banking annual reports. Metadiscourse in business genres is an under-represented topic, particularly across cultures; this study invites further inquiry. This paper applies corpus-based contrastive analysis to CEO letters in English from Chinese and Western banks. Comparing distribution patterns of metadiscourse markers, we found that both interactive and interactional metadiscourse was more frequently used in the Western letters. This suggests that Western CEO letters tend to use more credibility and affective appeals, while Chinese CEO letters are based more on rational appeals. Variation in use of metadiscourse is discussed with a focus on the interplay of linguistic and cultural features. This study contributes to the fields of Chinese English professional written communication, and cross-cultural writing in workplaces.