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4.1 Research questions .........................20

4.2 Corpus data........................20

CHAPTER FIVE RESULTS AND ANALYSIS...........................25

5.1 Conceptual and linguistic metaphors in CCLtS and CALtS..........................25

5.2 Stances and corporate identities revealed by conceptual and linguisticmetaphors in CCLtS and CALtS ...........28

CHAPTER SIXDISCUSSION

6.1 Accounts for the similarities between CCLtS and CALtS

The shared major foci of CCLtS and CALtS can be explained through thecommunicative goals of the genre and formation processes of letters to shareholders.Letters to shareholders are formed by CEO to inform their audience about the pastperformance and future prospects of a company, aiming at maintaining existingshareholders, and attracting potential shareholders. In addition, letters toshareholders are recontextualizations of the accounting discourses and financialdiscourses in annual reports. These help to explicate the shared key semanticdomains of “money (I1 and I1.1)”, and “business (I2.1 and I2.2)”, and “service(S8+)”, which refers to “banking services”, which are typical terms in bankingaccounting and financial discourses.

Accounts for the shared conceptual and linguistic metaphors can be traced toLakoff & Turner (1989). They put forward the “Great Chain of Being”, whichexplicates how objects and things in the world can be conceptualized through asystem of metaphors, ranking top-down asgod-cosmos-society-humans-animals-plants-complex objects-natural physical things.The elements in this chain map with each other to form the system of metaphors.“Business” and “money” fall into the category of “society”, and they are constantly conceptualized as those notions behind them, e.g. human, animal, and plant, etc.

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CHAPTER SEVENCONCLUSION

7.1 Summary of major findings

The present study is mainly concerned with similarities and differences of metaphorsand identities in letters to shareholders of Chinese and American banking companies.It contributes to the understanding of metaphors in business context and providesnew insights into a more detailed analysis of the relations among metaphor, stance,and identity.

Through the detailed analysis of the data, it is found that Chinese and Americanbanking companies’ letters to shareholders share the major concerns profit-orientedbusiness issues, manifesting in the semantic domains of “business” and “money”,and “service”. Compared with their American counterparts, Chinese bankingcompanies are more concerned with economic reform and refer to the topmanagement of the companies more often, manifesting in the semantic domains of“change” and “power”. American banking companies, on the other hand, concernsmore about the loans and mortgage services and the relationship built among thestakeholders, manifesting in the semantic domains of “debts” and “belonging to agroup”.

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