“New opportunities” and “Strong performance”: Evaluative adjectives in letters to shareholders and potential for pedagogically-downsized specialized corpora

This paper analyzes the use of evaluative adjectives within letters to the shareholders from the top 100 corporations from the 2016 Fortune 500 list. The letter represents an important promotional genre and is published annually to report financial performance while also projecting a vision for future success and continued growth. These influential messages detail and frame institutional vision and strategy as they attempt to maintain relationships with current investors while attracting new ones. This paper adopts Thompson and Hunston's term of evaluation and its definition as “the expression of the speaker or writer's attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or proposition” (2000, p. 5) as it investigates the semantic classes of evaluative adjectives present in the letters and their function within this ESP genre of interest. While there are many features that reflect and realize evaluation, adjectives are the focus of this inquiry because their overt evaluative quality makes them an accessible item to extract and analyze with basic corpus techniques which could be taught and applied within a classroom setting. This paper reports the use of evaluative adjectives while also displaying that little salient variation exists between a sub-corpus of only 10 letters and the full corpus collection. With little noticeable variation and numerous learning affordances, a pedagogically-downsized specialized corpus can be easily compiled, analyzed, and implemented in EBP and other ESP contexts.