Means of arguments in bank's annual reports

Abstract EN

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 with 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 endeavor 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 consumers 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 activities, to charge its mind (Cantoni, Di Blas, 2002) and to make 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.

It can be said that more specifically ; argumentation can be found in an extremely important economic and financial texts : 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 delightful and convincing to 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 no much research focusing on argumentation in the economic and financial world up-to-now ; in this paper we shall examine 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 Centro bank (2005), and Bank of America (2006).