A Study On Interpersonal Meaning Of Hedges In Corporate Statements In Crisis Public Relations

At the high speed of economic development and globalization, the corporate reputation is becoming more fragile and crises seem to be occurring more frequently. These crises are bound to bring about negative effects on corporate reputation and public image. That’s why studies on crisis public relations are attracting much more attention today than ever before. The most common and effective way for the corporations to do in the face of crisis is to issue official statements, where the linguistic choice plays an important role in the effectiveness of CPR practices. Previous studies on corporate statements in CPR took this discourse as a whole from genre or pragmatic perspective,leaving out the importance to study specific linguistic strategy used in corporate CPR statements. Therefore, the present study aims at conducting a relatively innovative research in a different way, that is, through focusing on one specific linguistic strategy used to realize the communicative goal in corporate statements in CPR.Hedges are a linguistic strategy widely used by corporate statements writers in CPR. Lakoff refers to hedges as words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. Combining his definition and Hyland’s research on hedges in scientific discourse, the present study proposes a definition of hedges. And then under the framework of classification adapted from Wu’s,Hyland’s and Prince et al.’s researches, frequency of hedges in the 30 collected data is calculated. These 30 pieces of corporate statements in CPR are issuedby some of World Fortune 500 and of America Fortune 500. As is known to all,the corporate statements in CPR mainly serve as a way for the company to interact with the public and maintain a good relationship with them. Those are the concerns of interpersonal meaning in Systemic-Functional Grammar.Therefore, the aim of the present study is to elaborate on the features of hedges used in the corporate statements in CPR and to analyze the interpersonal meanings realized by adopting the hedges.It’s found that the use of hedges accounts for more than 6% of the total number of words in the corpus, which proves that hedges are a linguistic strategy widely used in writing corporate statements in CPR. And the use of adaptors takes the largest part; the use of plausibility shields nearly accounts for one-third of the total appearances of hedges in the corpus; the rounders are not used so frequently as the adaptors and only account for 16%; the attribute shields are rarely used in the corpus.Interpersonal meanings are realized by hedges used as three kinds of resources. By applying adaptors as graduation resources, CPR statements writers try to sound objective, leave some leeway for their statements; and the use of rounders allows them to make their statements more precise. As modality resources, a large number of plausibility shields are used to defend the company and draw readers’ attention to it or sometimes show the determination of the company to overcome the crisis while they relieve the writer of the responsibility for his/her statements. There are also some plausibility shields to show that the company cares for the customers andvalues their opinions. Attribute shields only account for a little part in the corpus and serve as engagement resources to improve the reliability of the statement.By analyzing the interpersonal meanings of hedges in the corporate statements in CPR, this study is hoped to provide useful guidance for the future statement writing and a new perspective to study hedges and interpersonal meanings.