Language variation across genres: the discussion of results in letters to shareholders and marketing research articles.

Genre-based research has been prominently conducted in two macro-fields of enquiry: academic and professional discourse (Swales, 1990 and 2004; Bhatia, 1993 and 2004; Dudley-Evans, 1994). More recently, however, the attention paid by genre analysis to text similarities has incipiently switched towards the examination of cross-disciplinary, cross-discursive and cross-generic differences. In the light of these latest analytic perspectives, the study relies on two corpora comprised of instances of two genres: the Letter to Shareholders appearing at the beginning of company’s financial annual reports (ARs), and the discussion section of marketing academic research articles (RAs). The paper brings insights into the different strategies and metadiscursive devices which are deployed by banks’ Presidents and RA authors to discuss findings and to fulfil more rhetorical purposes, i.e. to build credibility and to impart confidence in readers. The comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis suggests that from the ideational viewpoint, the genres under study share similar research- and result-oriented lexical items. However, it is from the viewpoint of interpersonal or interactional metadiscourse (Vande Kopple, 1985 and Hyland, 2005) that discrepancies can be identified. Financial and professional writers insist on themselves (by means of self mentions) to emphasise their credibility and expertise, whereas, by contrast, RA authors more conspicuously downplay their authority by means of uncertainty and tentativeness markers, such as hedges.