A Cross-cultural Analysis Of American And Chinese Corporate Apologies

As a common speech act in our daily life, apology has always been a hot topic in the field of linguistics. Previous studies on apologies, however, have mainly focused on individual apologies in face-to-face interactions, and much less attention has been paid to corporate apologies. When a crisis strikes, companies often resort to apologies in order to defuse the crisis as well as to repair their tarnished reputation. It can be seen that corporate apology is of high practical value. Therefore, this study aims to make a contrastive study of American and Chinese corporate apologies in the light of genre analysis, attempting to find the similarities and differences in generic structure and specific realizations between them and also to explore the underlying cultural factors.The data collected for the present research consists of two corpora, one made of50American corporate apologies, the other of50Chinese corporate apologies. The present study is carried out at both macro-structure level and micro-strategy level. The main findings discovered at the macro-structure level are:there are six moves involved in both of American and Chinese corporate apologies, namely, Extending Explicit Apologies, Giving Accounts, Acknowledging Responsibilities, Repairing Damage, Repairing Image and Repairing Relationship. Besides, they share the same obligatory moves, that is, Extending Explicit Apologies and Repairing Damage, which proves that they belong to the same genre. The differences lie in frequencies of some optional moves. At the micro-strategy level, the two corpora display significant differences in frequencies and contents of some strategies. And most differences can be explained by the distinction in cultural dimensions of high-context/low-context, high/low power distance, individualism/collectivism and so on.It is hoped that this study could help people to get a better understanding of corporate apologies. It is further hoped that it could provide companies with some valuable suggestions on how to apologize cross-culturally so as to ensure the smoothness of cross-cultural communication.