CEO Letter as a Generic Compound: A Systemic Functional Perspective

This paper sets out to analyse the generic features and communicative goals of CEO letters from a systemic functional perspective. The data analysed include 362 CEO letters from 122 American, British and Chinese Fortune 500 companies. Informed by Martin’s (1994) notion of macro genre, it is found that generic structures of English and Chinese CEO letters are: (Title) (^ Salutation) (^ Orientation) ^ Retrospect ( Prospect) (^ Coda) (^ Complimentary close) ^ Signature, and the whole CEO letters are genre simplexes composed of metaphorical elemental genres through layers of embedding and complexing. It will be argued that there exist metaphorical elemental genres that are generic compounds consisting in features of both the surface and symbolized genres, serving the argumentative goal of projecting positive corporate images. Symbolized genres are realized by language through evaluative lexis, process types, clause embedding and complexing, etc. A tentative model adapted from Martin’s notion of contextual metaphor (Martin, 1997; Martin & Rose, 2008) is proposed to capture the symbolizing phenomenon.