A Corpus-based Comparative Genre Analysis of CEO’s Letters from Chinese and American Companies
Abstract
The CEO’s letter in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports is considered as a significant approach to communicate with stakeholders and it is also an important business genre in the corporate practice as well as in applied linguistics. This study investigated the CEO’s letter as a business genre and attempted to compare the rhetorical move structure and lexical-grammatical features between Chinese and American companies, aiming to have a better understanding of CSR reporting in the global context. To achieve this purpose, the present study adopted a corpus of 60 CEO’s letter in English version CSR reports from Chinese and American companies of Fortune Global 500 companies in 2019. The result reveals that the Chinese and American CEO’s letters have a similar move structure, while there is a significant difference between the move distribution and lexical strategies in choosing personal pronouns, adjectives, and political terms. This study seeks to provide suggestions for writing the CEO’s letter and a new insight to oversee corporate communication.
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