Building Corporate Identity Through Interactional Metadiscourse: A Corpus‐based Study of the US and Chinese CEO Letters

ABSTRACT Interactional metadiscourse plays an important role in constructing identities, yet it receives scarce attention in corporate identity construction, especially from a cross‐cultural perspective. This study explores how interactional metadiscourse is used to construct corporate identities in the US and Chinese chief executive officer (CEO) letters of corporate annual reports by employing the self‐built checklist with the aid of Wmatrix tools. The results show that the US companies construct themselves as caring, cautious, and individual‐oriented corporate citizens, whereas the Chinese companies build themselves as reserved, determined, and collective‐oriented corporate leaders. The observed differences can be mainly attributed to the variations in national culture. This study sheds new insights into the pivotal roles played by interactional metadiscourse in building corporate identities and offers implications for applied linguists and corporate communication researchers to critically evaluate and assess companies’ tone at the top in different cultures.