Ricerc@Sapienza

Despite the dramatic innovation brought about in the field of corporate communication by the advent of the World Wide Web, when it comes to annual company reports (ACRs), companies seem to introduce few innovative digital elements in the drafting and formatting of the narrative sections. The present study, as the last step of a long-term research project, aimed at investigating this genre from a diachronic point of view by concentrating on the transformations that ACRs’ corporate narratives undergo once they migrate to the Web.

Annual reports are both simultaneously and ambiguously,
required financial documents and marketing tools to advertise businesses.
Such ambiguity reflects on the communicative content of these reports. In
this paper, we carried out a diachronic analysis of Walmart’s annual
reports. The study integrates visual, lexical, and syntactical analysis of
annual reports over an eight-year time span. Our objective was to describe
discursive aspects of annual reports at multiple textual levels and to