Evaluation in Banks’ Annual Reports: A Comparison of EL1 and EIL Texts

Business communication has been currently affected by the latest worldwide globalization, technological advance as well as the use of English as lingua franca in intercultural situations. As a consequence, it has been claimed that there is a generally widespread tendency to standardization, homogeneity and simplification in the language used in business transactions (Louhiala-Salminen, 1996; Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998; Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson, 1999). Starting from these assumptions, the paper analyses the language used in written financial communication tools, Banks’ Annual Reports. By making a comparison between Annual Reports written by British Big Banks in English as their L1 and those issued by other-than-British financial institutions in English as IL (International Language), this paper aims at investigating the similarities and differences in the lexis used to express evaluation (Hunston and Thompson, 2000), in order to detect some general patterns of the language employed in international financial contexts. More specifically, the investigation demonstrates that the EIL used in the particular case of financial statements cannot be intended as an impoverished variant of L1 English. ARs issued by non-British banks (EIL) turn out to contain a more diversified repertoire of evaluative lexical items, whether adjectives or verbs, than those issued by their British counterparts (EL1). The recognized non-homogeneity of the language used in non-British banks' ARs seems to confirm Seidlhofer’s (2001), Mauraneen’s (2003) and House’s (2003) claims about the non-standardized nature of English as IL and its continuously evolving essence in which new variation is brought by the linguistic outcome of English NNS. Deflecting from some of the spreading claims about the tendency to the standardization, and simplification in the language used in international business transactions, the paper demonstrates that the language and, more specifically, the evaluative lexis employed in EIL ARs are not homogeneous but much more diversified than the vocabulary appearing in British banks’ financial statements. Thus, this study has given further evidence to the enriching effects that languages in contact with each other have on international communicative practices and on the lexis used in them