Mecanismos linguísticos (des)favoráveis para a readability das demonstrações financeiras: uma análise das empresas listadas no mercado de capitais brasileiro

Abstract

The accounting professional who prepares financial statements, which must be clear and accurate, needs to consider the comprehension degree of the user of financial information. Therefore, they have to enhance the language quality necessary to prepare these statements. In this context, there has been an increase in readability studies and a need to increase the written language of financial information. The aim of this research was to verify the (un) favorable linguistic features in financial statements of companies listed in Brazilian capital market, in Brazilian Portuguese. In this regard, the Textual Linguistics was chosen as a basis theory, because it allows the study of grammatical, semantic and pragmatic features of the Language. Based on the proposed aim, a tool was designed – a checklist of (un) favorable linguistic features pointed in financial information literature. Two constructs were considered for this end: cohesion and coherence. The favorable linguistic features categorized in the tool are: pause, ellipsis, simple sentences, sentences up to two lines, connectors and substitution. And the unfavorable are: repetition of words, long sentences, complex sentences, lack of parallelism, lack of pause, confused text, words of more than three syllables and jargon. The financial statements of IBRX50 BOVESPA 2015 social year were researched, and, for each one, the Flesch test was applied. It was observed very little variability in Flesch results. Therefore, three companies with the highest Flesch results and three with the smallest were chosen and analyzed in Atlas TI Software, through the codes. For each code, a(n) (un) favorable feature was categorized and observed in the six selected financial statements. All (un) favorable features were detected in the financial statements, in higher or smaller quantity. However, when comparing these results with the Flesch ones, there was no relationship between them. It was expected that companies with higher Flesch for readability would present more favorable features, and companies with smaller Flesch, more unfavorable. Nonetheless, this was not found in the researched sample. In this sense, it could be said that the Flesch test alone is insufficient for Financial Statements readability. It is necessary to consider other qualitative features.