| Chinese corporations have been using Weibo to advertise or maintain public relationship ever since it came out on stage. Due to the constant and quantitative complaints from customers, corporate apologies have become an important part of their postings. Being authentic in nature and latest in its form, corporate Weibo apologies are worth studying. This study combines a quantitative and qualitative research method and studies 270 corporate apologies posted on Weibo from 30 Chinese corporations. It aims to find out the characteristics of Chinese Weibo apology strategies as well as the potential reasons.To conduct this study, the author classifies the apology strategies(hereafter AS)in this corpus under the framework of Janet Holmes(1990:167) in the beginning, and identifies the characteristics of the distribution of Chinese corporate strategies. Later,these apologies are rated in the scope of Grice’s four maxims of the Cooperative Principle(hereafter CP) from 0-3(the higher the score, the more ‘cooperative ’ the apology strategy is, see Appendix A), and a chi-square test is used to prove the significant difference between the four maxims and the apology strategies. In this study, CP means the combination of the four maxims and the generation of conversational implicature, which is formed on the basis of previous research. The analysis shows the correlative relationships between AS and CP maxims, as well as the characteristics of conversational implicatures generated by disobeying some certain maxims. In the discussion, the author analyzes the reasons for the characteristics presented from the perspective of cultural dimensions. |
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