Banks’ Annual Reports: An Analysis of Lexical Evaluation across some Sections

The paper illustrates the ways in which evaluation is distributed throughout Banks’ ARs. More specifically, the similarities and differences in the occurrences of evaluation are foregrounded in four specific sections of the reports (Chairman’s Statement, Chief Executive’s Report, Bank and Business Description and, finally, Corporate Governance Description). On the basis of a cognitive categorization of AR evaluative lexis, a comparative and contrastive analysis of attitudinal vocabulary (viz. adjectives and verbs) was carried out across the four segments. This article, in reporting the findings of the investigation, stresses not only the evaluative aura perceivable throughout ARs but also its ‘good-ness’ (Hunston and Thompson, 2000; Martin, 2000; Stubbs, 2001; White, 2002). Specifically, the study reveals that evaluative adjectives occur most frequently in Chief Executive’s Reports, Chairman’s Statements and Bank and Business Descriptions. While banks’ competitiveness and international importance values are strongly emphasised in Chief Executive’s Reports and Bank and Business Descriptions, innovation appears to be the most notably focused on principle in Chairman’s Statements. Furthermore, the study suggests a clear orientation to customers in all the sections investigated and, in particular, in Corporate Governance Descriptions, in which clients are very often shown to be the primary concern of governance. Verbs also turn out to provide their contribution to the expression of positive evaluation and to a further differentiation of AR segments. On the basis of the twofold categorization of evaluative verbs, the task-oriented ones tend to be more frequently identified in Chief Executive’s Reports, Bank and Business Descriptions, and Chairman’s Statements, whereas the involvement-oriented ones seem to be an exclusive prerogative of Corporate Governance Descriptions.