Abstract

For listed companies, disclosure of annual reports is necessary. As the first part of annual report, chairman’s statement plays a key role in conveying information to the readers of the annual report. Hedges in chairman statements, which are often used to achieve specific communicative purposes, can guide readers to make the response the writer wants. This study explores the application of hedges in chairman’s statements of Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd. and explores their pragmatic functions. The authors build a corpus of chairman statements from Huawei 2017–2022 annual reports, and analyze the distribution and pragmatic function of hedges in the chairman’s statements. It is found that the frequency of lexical hedges in chairman statements was much higher than the non-lexical ones. Among the lexical hedges, adverb hedges are used most. The findings also indicate that the large number of hedges in chairman statements play a positive role in risk management and strategic communication.

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