Corporate Discourse in Building Corporate Identity: on Some Pragmalinguistic Features of Annual Reports

Abstract

The increasingly growing relevance and attractiveness of business and corporate discourses as an object of study by researchers, can be attributed to placing discourse in the heart of business activities aimed at profit maximization through successful negotiations, productive communication at meetings, building lasting relationships with all stakeholders via improved communication practices at workplaces, the marketplace, stock exchanges and anywhere business is concerned. This paper aims at revealing some consistent pragmalinguistic strategies used in corporate discourse and its role in promoting corporate image and identity. Annual reports, being a powerful tool for building a strong motivation, involvement and bond between the company and its stakeholders, served as a study material. Through a detailed discourse analysis based on the annual reports of some companies, we focus on the use of the most common linguistic and pragmatic strategies by the speech writers for projecting the desired image and influencing the target audience’s decisions. The paper findings come to verify the existing opinions on the complex and multilayered nature of corporate discourse and eventually increase the target audience’s competence of correctly decoding the received information.