Lexical Features in Corporate Annual Reports: a Corpus-based Study

nnual reports (ARs) are the most important external documents and the most used channels for communication between organizations and stakeholders. The study uses self-built one self-built large corpus and nine small self-built sub-corpora to investigate lexical features in ARs to help AR users understand written financial discourses. The corpus consists of 120 pieces of 2011 annual reports. The results showed that financial aspect is mostly concerned in CARs; vocabulary of chairman’s statements is the richest while that of auditor’s report is not rich; words in auditor’s reports and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are longer and more complex than those in chairman’s statements and financial statements; fuzzy words are noticeably more frequent in the section of chairman’s statements and business overview; the personal pronoun “our” is the most frequently used personal pronouns in ARs especially in chairmen’s statement; more positive words are used than negative words in CARs.