Probing the Dynamics of Addressee-Management in Corporate Sustainability Reports: A Corpus-Assisted SFL Study

Miller and Bevitori (chapter 3) note that elements of the text which would tend to invoke an attitude could also be seen to invoke further (positive) assessments of the authors themselves. In the authors’ data, comprised of a purposely built corpus of Corporate Sustainability Reports (CSRs), regular positive self-assessments when addressing an audience of stakeholders seem an obvious requirement in promoting the legitimacy of their claims, and their analysis reveals how such subtle self-evaluation has been managed in this social context. Their chapter represents a contribution to research on register in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by offering insights into addressee-management through noting the artful construal and enactment of meanings which have the potential to engender alignment with writer positioning in corporate reporting, problematizing the dynamics of writer engagement with their stakeholders in the socially contextualized discourses of sustainability. Their composite approach also exploits Hasan’s cline of dynamism (1985/1989, p. 46), White’s recent work regarding the “putative addressee” (2021a, 2021b) and Don’s work on both invoked appraisal and addressee affiliation (2016, 2019a). They note that: experientially, the texts implied a markedly asymmetrical speaker-addressee power hierarchy, coupled with substantial interpersonal projection of speaker’s values/beliefs onto their addressees via monogloss, “warrants” (i.e. unstated assumptions on which an argument depends – Toulmin, 1958/2003), as well as invoked evaluation and its intra-and inter-textual propagation. Their investigation reveals numerous addressee-managing mechanisms signalling anticipation that the reader will be aligned/likeminded with writer positioning – an adequate number to enable them to assert that stakeholders are indeed putative addressees onto which the writer’s beliefs and attitudes are being persistently projected. It also emerged that the social context of the CSRs in which these mechanisms occur is one that typically finds unproblematic, and even sanctions, such ways of saying and meaning. What is more, they insist that one needs to reflect on the considerable, and considerably slippery, issue of the conceivable inevitability of the meaning-making practices their study reveals, not simply due to EU directives, but by reason of their being but one of many widely accepted, albeit questionable, linguistic practices in the increasingly technologized social spaces we are made to inhabit.