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

Our ongoing study contributes to SFL register theory by offering insight into addressee management through the artful construal/enactment of meanings constraining alignment/affiliation with speaker positioning. Research is into socially-contextualized discourses offering ‘transparent’ disclosure of environmental performance to satisfy stakeholders’ expectations (e.g., Rhodes 2021). Recent studies claim ever-increasing stakeholder role prominence (e.g., Bellucci & Manetti 2018). Our inquiry aimed at problematizing that claim. In a specialized diachronic corpus of five major corporations’ CSRs, all concordances of ‘we’ co-selected with ‘stakeholder*’ were retrieved, ‘grown’ and manually analyzed at clause and meaning strata (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 70). Our initial RQs asked to what extent these CSRs genuinely engage with their stakeholders and what linguistic mechanisms enact such engagement. Hasan’s cline of dynamism (1989 [1985]: 46) was then applied to concordances, and subsequently, ‘coupling’ experiential with interpersonal analysis (e.g., Knight 2010), also dialogistic positioning resources ‘writing the reader into the text’ (cf. Martin & White 2005: 95) were probed. The construed speaker-stakeholder power hierarchy emerged as essentially asymmetrical and stakeholders as but ‘putative’ addressees (Martin & White 2005: 210; White 2021a & b). This presentation will further assess the consistently indirect mechanisms by which speakers project values/beliefs onto these, via theoretical/analytical tools gleaned especially from Don (2016), on invoked appraisal, and (2019), on alignment/affiliation.