Pathos in ECCs during COVID-19: Discourse Analysis Based on Sino-A Companies

Abstract

This study compares the pathos strategies of Chinese and U.S. companies in the earnings conference calls. The earnings conference calls (ECCs) are important channels for listed companies to voluntarily present their disclosure. In the face of the covid crisis, different companies use different pathos strategies when summarizing the past operating conditions and expressing future development trends in ECCs. Based on the self-built corpus, this paper makes a comparative analysis of pathos strategies in the ECCs texts of Chinese and American companies in 2020 and 2021. We use the sentiment lexicon method and TF-IDF algorithm to calculate the sentiment index and keywords. The two parallel corpora show great differences in the following four aspects: emotional attitude, discourse perspective, ecological awareness, and actions. This research broadens the pathos research contents to the earnings conference calls and makes a certain theoretical contribution to the financial text research from the discourse perspective. The findings also help listed companies to further study how to use pathos in the ECCs to shape a good corporate image, enhance the audience’s perception of the positive image of the companies and attract more investors.