Genre Analysis Of Company Statements In Crisis Public Relations

Modern business is developing rapidly and companies are facing severe competition. While concentrating on profit of business, more and more company managers begin to pay special attention to the image of company, which results in more and more importance attached to the department of Public Relation. Public Relation to some extent affects the attitude the public takes towards a company and even decides its profit. Crisis is inevitable in business. How to deal with the crisis is a critical issue to be discussed for the company. As a branch of Public Relation, Crisis Public Relations is the key. In this research, the object is set as statements proposed by company for dealing with Crisis Public Relations.Genre analysis has been carried out in many academic and ESP settings, yet few researches have been devoted to the systematic analysis of such professional business genres as statements in Crisis Public Relations. This study combines genre analysis with Crisis Public Relations, which is a new attempt.The present study aims to discover the move structure and the Generic Structure Potential of the company statement in Crisis Public Relations both in Chinese and English. The author adopts Swales'Create a Research Space model and Bhatia's seven-steps to uncover the move-structure according to the object's communicative purposes and then employs Hasan's Generic Structure Potential theory to exploit the obligatory and optional moves. After careful examination, it is found that the company statement is composed of eleven moves, among which showing attitude, stating event background, describing present situation, explaining further, reaffirming purpose of company, offering advice, invite further communication, giving promise, expressing hope or thank, expressing formal apology are optional moves while providing solution is obligatory. All moves serve to fulfill its communicative purposes.It is hoped that these findings are useful for providing information about how to compose statement in CPR, for better understanding of business communication and making contribution to development of genre analysis, as well as ESP teaching.