1.1 Research Background

During the last three decades, corporate financial disclosure practices have been increasingly investigated from a variety of perspectives.Scholars in the field of accounting and finance have recognized the importance of linguistic and textual data in evaluating the quality of financial disclosure and predicting market sentiment and security prices.Their interest in the language used in financial texts converges with the research of scholars in the field of linguistics and associated disciplines, who have explored such issues as linguistic features, genre conventions, and communication strategies of different genres of financial disclosure.

Swales（1990:58）gives a detailed definition of genre, in which the communicative purposes constitute the rationale for a specific genre:

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes.These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre.This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style.Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action.

From the above interpretation of genre, some key parameters can be identified:a class of communicative events, shared communicative purposes, and a specific discourse community.In the corporate context, a financial disclosure genre is used by the corporate community for the purpose of reporting financial results to their stakeholders, i.e.shareholders, investors, customers, employees, as well as the general public.Common financial disclosure genres include annual reports, corporate press releases（especially in the form of earnings releases）,earnings announcements, shareholder circulars, etc.

In today's business context, these financial genres are used more than simply to communicate financial information, and thus in most cases cannot be categorized as merely informative.As Bhatia（2010:39）puts it, corporate disclosure documents"seem to be changing in their function from 'informing and reporting'to increasingly'promoting'the companies by a strategic underplaying of corporate weaknesses".In his study of the interdiscursivity of annual reports produced by 15 Hong Kong Stock Exchange listed companies,Bhatia（ibid.）identifies four distinct types of discourses within an annual report, namely accounting discourse, discourse of economics, public relations discourse, and legal discourse.The major part of a typical annual report could be characterized as accounting discourse, based on the company's financial performance of the preceding fiscal year.The accounting discourse mainly consists of various numbers and calculations displayed in the form of tables and graphs, which have been certified by public accountants to be true and honest representations of the profits and losses of the corporation in question.The discourse of economics usually constitutes the financial review section of an annual report.It offers a discussion and analysis of facts and figures given in the accounting section.However, this kind of interpretation of accounting information"may not be a consistent and true representation of the statistical information"（ibid.:41）,and may be manipulated to understate a relatively weak corporate performance and to project a promising future outlook.The public relations discourse, often in the form of"a letter to shareholders"or"chairman's statement",summarizing the company's past performance and giving predictions about future development, primarily seeks to promote a positive corporate image.Legal discourse, which forms a major part of disclaimers, can be used to disclaim information disclosed in an annual report.Among these four types of discourses, the accounting discourse and public relations discourse reflect two distinct corporate practices, i.e.,legally required accounting procedures and public relations activities.According to Bhatia（ibid.:45）,"by placing public relations discourse within the socio-pragmatic space of the accounting discourse, the readers are encouraged to draw positive implications from this interdiscursive proximity".Similar blends of informational and promotional discourses have been found in other financial genres, including corporate press releases, earnings calls and earnings presentations（McLaren Gurǎu,2005;Maat,2007;Henry,2008;Crawford Camiciottoli,2010ab;etc.）.For instance,Maat（2007）finds evidence of promotional language in the form of evaluative and intensifying adjectives in corporate press releases.Henry（2008）identifies subtle promotional techniques in earnings releases, such as the selective textual commentary of data presented in numerical form, highlighting only positive trends while ignoring negative ones.Crawford Camiciottoli（2010b）investigates the earnings calls of some major multinationals listed on the US stock markets.She notes a strong promotional and persuasive undercurrent in the executives-speeches, in which they emphasized the positive results and expressed optimism for the future.All these studies suggest that even if financial disclosure genres exist to report objective data, they also have an underlying promotional and persuasive dimension, which is the subject of the present study.