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Abstract Abstract: Letters to shareholders are one of the important ways for enterprises to communicate with shareholders. This article presents a multidimensional analysis of the register features of letters to shareholders by Chinese and American enterprises. The results show that 1) while Chinese and American letters to shareholders share some common features, both belonging to the information-intensive learned exposition text type, there are significant differences between them on five dimensions, i.e., Chinese letters are more narrative and informative, but less interactive, less dependent on the context of the discourse, with a lower online informational elaboration; 2) The differences of the functional features between Chinese and American letters are attributed to differences in the co-occurrence frequency of 45 linguistic features; 3) The observed similarities and differences can be interpreted with respect to communicative functions of letters to shareholders, differences in power distance of two countries, corporate culture of Chinese and American enterprises as well as the language proficiency of the authors. This study provides more objective and pertinent suggestions for Chinese enterprises in the crafting and translation of letters to shareholders.
Key words: corpora; letters to shareholders; register features; multi-dimensional analysis
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