Metadiscourse Features in Risk Management Reports by Local and International Banks in Malaysia

Abstract

Risk management report (RMR) has been mandated in annual reports published by all public listed companies in Malaysia. However, literature on the schematic structure of RMR to communicate factually based persuasion has been scarce. To address this scarcity, the study analyses metadiscourse markers in the corpus data of the RMR of international and local banks currently operating in Malaysia. The study adopted a corpus-based analysis using AntConc (Version 4.0.7) (Anthony, 2022). Hyland's (2005) Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse was adopted as the analysis parameter and SPSS version 24 was used to compute and conduct descriptive statistics and a nonparametric test of Chi-square of the data. The findings suggest that the RMR of both bank categories were more interactive than interactional. The use of hedges was found to be significant, with the international banks employing twice as many hedges than local banks (103 vs 58 per 10000 words). Although both international and local banks employed the same number of hedge types, the difference lies in the density of their use. This study, to an extent, has managed to provide the description of how MDMs are realised in RMR and provide insights into the roles of interaction in risk taking reporting.