Risk management report (RMR) has been mandated in annual reports published by all public listed companies in Malaysia. However, literature on the schematic structure of RMR to communicate factually based persuasion has been scarce. To address this scarcity, the study analyses metadiscourse markers in the corpus data of the RMR of international and local banks currently operating in Malaysia. The study adopted a corpus-based analysis using AntConc (Version 4.0.7) (Anthony, 2022). Hyland’s (2005) Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse was adopted as the analysis parameter and SPSS version 24 was used to compute and conduct descriptive statistics and a nonparametric test of Chi-square of the data. The findings suggest that the RMR of both bank categories were more interactive than interactional. The use of hedges was found to be significant, with the international banks employing twice as many hedges than local banks (103 vs 58 per 10000 words). Although both international and local banks employed the same number of hedge types, the difference lies in the density of their use. This study, to an extent, has managed to provide the description of how MDMs are realised in RMR and provide insights into the roles of interaction in risk taking reporting.
Anthony, L. (2022). AntConc (Version 4.0.7) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.
Alyousef, H. S. (2015). An investigation of metadiscourse features in international postgraduate business students’ texts: The use of interactive and interactional markers in tertiary multimodal finance texts. SAGE Open,5(4), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015610796.
Aziz, R. A., & Baharum, N. D. (2021). Metadiscourse in the Bank Negara Malaysia Governor’s speech texts. Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research, 2(2), 1-15.
Bingler, J. A., Kraus, M., Leippold, M., & Webersinke, N. (2022). Cheap talk and cherry-picking: What ClimateBert has to say on corporate climate risk disclosures. Finance Research Letters, 47(102776), 1-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3796152.
Carrio-Pastor, M. L., & Calderon, R. M. (2015). A contrastive analysis of metadiscourse features in business e-mails written by non-native speakers of English. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 173, 214-221.
Cazier, R. A., McMullin, J. L., & Treu, J. S. (2021). Are lengthy and boilerplate risk factor disclosures inadequate? An examination of judicial and regulatory assessments of risk factor language. The Accounting Review, 96(4), 131-155.
Chen, Xi. (2020). Metadiscourse in corporate press releases. Proceeding of 2020 3rd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences & Humanities (SOSHU 2020), 37-43. https://doi.org/10.25236/soshu.2020.008.
Gao, X., Wang, X., & Tian, F. (2019). Do significant risk warnings in CARs increase corporate bond credit spreads? Evidence from China. China Journal of Accounting Research, 12(2), 191-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cjar.2019.04.002.
Harle, P., Havas, A., Kremer, A., Rona, D., & Samandari, H. (2016). The future of bank risk management (McKinsey Working Papers on Risk). New York: McKinsey & Company.
Huang, Y., & Rose, K. (2018). You, our shareholders: Metadiscourse in CEO letters from Chinese and Western banks. Text & Talk, 38(2), 167-190. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2017-0041.
Hyland, K. (1998). Exploring corporate rhetoric: Metadiscourse in the CEO letter. The Journal of Business Communication, 35, 224–245.
Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. London: Continuum.
Hyland, K. (2007). Applying a gloss: Exemplifying and reformulating in academic discourse. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 266-285.
Hyland, K. (2017). Metadiscourse: What is it and where is it going?. Journal of Pragmatics, 113, 16-29.
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2004). Metadiscourse in academic writing: A reappraisal. Applied Linguistics, 25(2), 156-177.
Jensen, A. (2009). Discourse strategies in professional email negotiation: A case study. English for Specific Purposes, 28(1), 4-18.
Kuswoyo, H., & Siregar, R. A. (2019). Interpersonal metadiscourse markers as persuasive strategies in oral business presentation. Lingua Cultura, 13(4), 297-304.
Lee, W. L. (2018). A cross-cultural and contrastive investigation of the corporate governance report and the chairman's letter of Chinese and US companies. [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Lejeune, P. (2018). The epistemic status of predictions in Central Bank Reports: A cross-linguistic study. International Journal of Business Communication, 55(3), 357–382. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329488418768691.
Liu, S., & Zhang, J. (2021). Using metadiscourse to enhance persuasiveness in corporate press releases: A corpus-based study. SAGE Open, 11(3), 21582440211032165. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211032165.
Mills, K. R. (2019) Talking about regulation in 10-K Annual Reports; Uniformity in a naive sample. [Unpublished Thesis]. University of Colorado.
Mur Duenas, P. (2011). An international analysis of metadiscourse features in research articles written in English and Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3068-3079.
Osei-Tutu, F., & Weill, L. (2020). How language shapes bank risk taking. Journal of Financial Services Research, 59(1), 47-68.
Perez, F. M. I. (2014). Cultural values and their correlation with interactional metadiscourse strategies in Spanish and US business websites/Los valores culturales y su correlación con las estrategias del metadiscurso interaccional en las páginas web de negocios espanolas y estadounidenses. Atlantis, 36(2), 73-95.
Resche, C. (2015). Hedging in the discourse of central banks. Studies in Communication Sciences, 15(1), 83-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scoms.2014.12.008.
Xiaoqin, L. (2017). Exploring the rhetorical use of interactional metadiscourse: A comparison of letters to shareholders of American and Chinese financial companies. English Language Teaching, 10(7), 232-241.
