Let the Text Talk. A Corpus-Driven Analysis Approach to Investigate Accounting Narratives

The increasing importance that accounting narratives are assuming in corporate communications arises the need to find new investigation toolsthat enrich the research in this field.In this paper the potentialities of a research methodology that is widely used in linguistics but mostly unexplored in the accounting domain is presented. This isCorpus- Driven Linguistics (CDL), a discipline of corpus linguistics, integrated with discourse analysis. The automated nature ofCDL, its theoretical basis in contextual and functional theory of meaning, its balanced quantitative and qualitative analysis are discussed in the paper to point out how CDL can add to other methodologies usually used to investigate narrative disclosure, like readability formulas, keyword dictionaries, orindexicals. To illustrate the main phases of a CDL analysis, a specialized corpus was built by collectingthe risk reviews published by FTSE MIB companies in 2009. Through the qualitative analysis of recurring clusters based on keyword frequency and concordances, the main features of language concerning risks in a period of crisis are identified and discussed.