Genre hybridization in annual reports. The case of Walmart

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 observe whether and toward what direction the discourse has developed. In order to achieve this aim, we identified Walmart’s annual reports as an ideal corpus. Firstly, they are freely available online, encouraging this way the attraction of both technical and non-technical audiences; moreover, older reports are also available for consultation and comparison. Secondly, Walmart is a huge American multinational business, which operates in 28 countries and is considered the world's largest company by revenue. It turns out that Walmart is inherently global and serves a very diversified audience.