Means of Arguments in Bank's Annual Reports

Abstract

In line with the most recent trends in genre analysis (Swales, 1990; Bahatia,
1993) and discourse studies on business communication (Dudley-Evans and St.
John, 1998;Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and C. Nickerson, 1999, the article focuses on a
particular financial genre, Bank's Annual Reports (ARs). More in detail, in contrast
in widespread claim about the purely financial and informative nature of ARs,
addressing experts only, this paper aims at illustrating in accordance with Bexley
and Hynes (2003), and Burrough's (1986) considerations, that those reports
endeavour to promote the company image and to leave a positive impression on
readers. Generally speaking, companies communicate because they exist: they have
a name, headquarters, offices, a logotype, and provide cosumers with products and
services that help people to come closer to the company's reality (Brioschi,
1990:51). However, another type of communication exists, this of argumentation: it
is essential to inform the public about the company's activity, to charge its mind
(Cantoni, Di Blas, 2002) and to it act in a certain way. Thus, argumentation aims at
convincing the counterpart that a thesis should (not) be accepted by using
reasonable arguments that impress the hearer/ reader. More specifically,
argumentation can be found in an extremely important economic and financial text:
the ARs. These are considered comprehensible not only to experts but also the
layman: they develop arguments that are within everyone's reach; they use plain
language and effective stylistic devices in order to be readable, to delight and
convince the public (Mignini, 2005:1).
(Some research so far has been based on the definition as well as the content
analysis of ARs, and on their writing's techniques and strategies, but few had taken
into account their argumentative stylistic features and discursive (in the sense of
other-than-purely-financial) sections.
There has been not much research focusing on argumentation in the economic
and financial world up-to-now; in this paper the researcher examines how
argumentation is carried on in banks ARs, what the most exploited topics are, and
how they are arranged to win the public over. A glance at the textual structure is
given first so as to have an idea about how the readers are introduced into the bank's
world. Then, an analysis of the most common topics and the way they are usually
presented (their argument) is provided: examples are also given in order to clarify
the content. 

The corpus of material gathered for the analysis includes four Bank's ARs. All
the selected ARs are published on the web between 2003 and 2006 by the following
prestigious big banks: Deutsche bank (2003), Bank of England Annual Report
(2004), Raiffeisen Centrobank (2005), and Bank of America (2006).