A Study On Commissive Verbs In Crisis Public Relation Statements From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

In the process of commercial operation,crisis has become an inevitable issue in almost every transnational corporation.Faced with crisis,the usual way that the corporations choose is releasing news and issuing statements to restore corporation’s image.Commissives verbs are important parts in CPR.Therefore,it is of great significance to study commissive verbs.The author collected CPR statements from official websites of Fortune Global 500 and built corpus of crisis public relations of 100286 tokens and with the aid of AntConc,ten commissive verbs are selected.Under the theoretical framework of Searle’s speech act theory and Leech’s politeness principle,the author does a qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,aiming at discussing the distribution features,felicity conditions,lexical features,syntactic features and semantic features of commissive verbs.The research results are as follows:Firstly,commissive verbs can be divided into direct speech act verbs and indirect speech act verbs,in which indirect speech act verbs account for a large proportion.Secondly,there are propositional content,preparatory preconditions,conditions on sincerity and the essential condition in CPR,which are the felicity conditions of commissives in CPR.Thirdly,with regard to lexical features,there are modal verbs and explicit commissive verbs in CPR to perform the acts of promising,in which modal verbs occupy the majority.Fourthly,commissives in CPR are mainly performed in declarative sentences,including simple sentences,coordinate sentences,adverbial clauses of condition,that-object clauses and adverbial clauses of concession,which are the syntactic features of commissives in CPR.Fifthly,as for semantic features,sentences about speaker’s intention to perform an act accounts for the largest proportion.Theoretically,the study enlarges the research fields and makes contributions to the study of CPR.Practically,On the one hand,the thesis will facilitate the understanding of CPR and on the other hand,it can help the choice of proper commissive verbs in the writing of CPR statements.