Letters to Shareholders and Chairman's Statements : Textual Variability and Generic Integrity

This chapter looks at the CEO’s Letter as a genre, and aims at verifying its generic integrity against the background of a number of elements which put such integrity into question. The discussion is based on the analysis of a corpus of letters and messages to shareholders (about 1 million bytes in size, 150,000 tokens) which has been extracted from a larger corpus of 100 Annual Company Reports (ACRs) of multinational companies based in different European countries and the U.S. The research on which the chapter is based relies both on traditional qualitative investigation and on automatic computer queries, the latter being mainly used to confirm hypotheses formulated by means of text-linguistic and discourse-analytical instruments.