Banks’ Annual Reports: An Overview of the Linguistic Means Used to Express Evaluation

The paper concentrates on the lexical expressions of evaluation in Banks’ Annual Reports, along the so-called Value dimension in terms of ‘good-ness’ or ‘bad-ness’, and confirms the notion –already brought home by Garzone (2004) for Annual Company Reports as a text genre – that although in theory these documents are supposed to have “an essentially objective, ‘ideational’ focus, in actual fact an element of involvement and stance is inherent in the genre itself” (Garzone 2004:317). In particular, the study focuses on the descriptive and narrative sections of Reports and is based on the words group(s), bank(s), business(es) and service(s), considering not only the frequency of such evaluative items, but also looking at their meaning in context, in a qualitative perspective. Results indicate a predominance of laudatory adjectives and verbs, which can be traced back to the function that evaluation is used to accomplish in ARs, i.e. to build a positive image of the bank, expressing its points of strength and values, for the sake of clients and potential investors.