"The Corporate Annual Report as Genre Mixing. Making Meaning Through Interdiscursivity"

This paper presents the initial results of a research carried out on a corpus of Corporate Annual Reports (ARs). Using a methodology which combines tools and perspectives from different linguistic fields, namely Genre and Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics, the research studies interdiscursivity in ARs as exemplifications of genre mixing. Specifically, we assume that the documents forming the AR, namely the CEO’s Letter to the Shareholders, the Chairman’s Letter and the Financial Statements, can be considered as representative of genres which provide conflicting representations of the same reality by adopting different communicative strategies. While each genre represents the same corporate facts differently, they shed light on each other, thus enabling the addressees, both shareholders and stakeholders, to make sense of the implicit and explicit messages of the documents. We also assume that the study of interdiscursivity can prove advantageous to linguists and translators, too.