Rhetorical organization of the genre Financial Stability Report: a contrast between the report of the Central Bank of Chile and the German Federal Bank

Abstract

The study of the rhetorical organization of genres has allowed us to know the regularity patterns underling the way in which the knowledge of a genre is organized and how it is configured for the achievement of its communicative purposes. The aim of this study is to describe the rhetorical organization of the professional genre Financial Stability Report (Informe de Estabilidad Financiera, IEF) in Spanish and German, based on a corpus from the Central Bank of Chile and the German Federal Bank. The analysis of the rhetorical and functional structure was carried out according to Swales’s identification of moves (1990, 2004). The results indicate that the rhetorical organization of the IEF genre is composed of three macromoves: Presentation, Review of financial stability and Bibliographic support. Moreover, it was observed that in both languages this organization differs, since in Spanish there is a fourth macromove: Orientations for the reading. In German, on the other hand, the third macromove (Bibliographic support) is inserted in the second macromove (Review of financial stability). In both languages, the macromove Revision of financial stability is the most important for the achievement of the genre’s communicative purpose: to guide the financial stability of the country.