A comparative linguistic analysis of statements by the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in BP plc’s published annual report of 2010

Abstract

This paper examines statements by the Chairman and CEO of BP plc from the company’s 2010 annual report. Working on the premise that the reputational fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010 would have heightened the need for the company to engage in reader positioning through its annual report to protect and repair the company’s legitimacy, it is suggested that differences would manifest in the approach to and strength of that positioning because the Chairman and CEO occupy different roles. Following M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, a comparative register analysis was undertaken of the respective statements of the Chairman and CEO of BP plc from the company’s 2010 annual report. This concentrates on relevant aspects of the interpersonal metafunction, Tenor and the experiential metafunction, Field. Reviewing the Tenor of each statement framed an examination of how the Chairman and CEO each present to the reader through their respective statements, i.e. the persona which comes across through lexicogrammatical choices and how this is likely to impact upon reader interpretations. Each persona was drawn through interpretation of stance, personalisation, social distance and standing. Reviewing the Field of each statement framed an examination of each statement’s angle of representation through the characterisation of events/entities and elements of agency and affectedness. Particular consideration was given to how connections are made or avoided between participants through clausal structures, evidence of agency through transactional and non-transactional actor roles and agent deletion/de-emphasis through intransitive and passive grammatical constructions. The findings from this comparative register analysis were revisited and informed by corpus analysis of the two statements and of two additional largerscale corpora constructed from Chairman and CEO statements extracted from the annual reports of 25 FTSE100 companies published in 2013. The findings suggest that readers’ perceptions are shaped by the statements of the Chairman and CEO of BP plc in the company’s 2010 annual report, but similarities and differences are apparent in the way this positioning is engineered. Broader corpus analysis suggests that these similarities and differences are not localised to BP plc.