Communication strategies in letters to shareholders

Letters to shareholders are an important element of annual reports characterized by a lack of legal formalism. As a result, companies often use these documents as a channel for relatively free communication with investors. Letters often serve to create the company's image, interpreting the reality captured in the hard data presented in financial statements. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of a company's financial performance on communication strategies in letters to shareholders. The study includes an analysis of letters from British, American and Polish companies - in the case of the latter, two language versions: Polish and English.The dataset includes:a genre-based comparable-parallel corpus, which includes a parallel sub-corpus of letters to shareholders of ten Polish companies and two comparable sub-corpora containing letters to shareholders of ten UK and ten US companies. The companies were selected randomly from the list of enterprises included in the major indices of the respective markets: WIG30 in Poland, FTSE100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index) in the UK and the Dow Jones Composite Average (covering 65 constituents) in the US. The letters were drafted from 2013 to 2022, i.e. for every company ten letters were collected. Companies which have been operating for less than ten years were excluded from the study. The Polish subcorpus includes letters that were drafted in Polish and translated into English – letters that did not have the English translation of their letter or have drafted their letter in English were excluded from the study;a folder containing spreadsheets with: 1) the list of the companies with basic identifying information; 2) financial data used in the study; 3a) number of tokens per text in the corpora; 3b) number of words and tokens in the corpora used in the study; 4) raw frequencies of expressions analysed; 5) normalised frequencies of expressions analysed; 6) results of the correlation between financial indicators and linguistic data;a folder containing spreadsheets with data used for a multidimensional analysis (MDA) for the letters to shareholders: 1) the list of abbreviations for variables (linguistic features identified by Biber 1988, extended by Nini 2019) used in the spreadsheets; 2) the list of normalised frequencies of the variables in respective texts in the corpus; 3) Z-score for the data in spreadsheet 2; 4) calculation of dimension scores.

致股东函是年度报告的重要组成部分，其特点是不受法律形式主义的严格约束。因此，企业常将此类文件作为与投资者进行相对自由沟通的渠道。致股东函通常承担着塑造企业形象的功能，通过解读财务报表中呈现的详实数据所反映的经营实况。
本研究旨在分析企业财务表现对致股东函中沟通策略的影响。本次研究的分析对象涵盖英国、美国与波兰企业的致股东函；其中波兰企业的函件包含波兰语与英语两种语言版本。
本数据集包含一个基于文体的可比平行语料库：其中包含10家波兰企业致股东函的平行子语料库，以及分别涵盖10家英国企业、10家美国企业致股东函的两个可比子语料库。研究样本企业均从各对应市场的主要指数成分股名单中随机抽取：波兰市场的WIG30指数、英国市场的富时100指数(Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index)以及美国市场的道琼斯综合平均指数(Dow Jones Composite Average，涵盖65只成分股)。
函件的撰写时间跨度为2013年至2022年，每家企业共收集10份函件。经营时长不足10年的企业被排除在本次研究之外。波兰语子语料库仅包含以波兰语撰写并译为英语的致股东函；未附带英语译本或直接以英语撰写的函件均被排除在本研究之外。
此外还包含一个存储各类电子表格的文件夹，其中涵盖：1）附带基础标识信息的企业名录；2）本研究使用的财务数据；3a）语料库中单篇文本的Token(Token)数量；3b）本研究使用的语料库的总词数与Token总数；4）待分析表达式的原始词频；5）待分析表达式的归一化词频；6）财务指标与语言数据间的相关性分析结果。