A Pragmatic Study On Identity Construction In Corporate Product Recall Statements

Corporations inevitably encounter product quality issues and release product recall statements to ask consumers to return the deficient products to the corporations.Previous studies on product recall statements are mainly from the perspectives of business administration,economics,science of law,public relations,communication and so on.The studies from the linguistic perspective are relatively few and mainly on the linguistic features and politeness strategies.This study is from the pragmatic perspective to explore the identity construction in product recall statements.The analysis is from the following aspects:the types of identities that are constructed in product recall statements;the identity construction's adaptation to context;the identity construction's adaptation to structural objects;the dynamics of identity construction;the degree of salience of identity construction.Accordingly,five research questions are answered:(1)What types of identities are constructed in product recall statements?(2)How does the identity construction adapt to context?(3)How does the identity construction adapt to structural objects?(4)Is the identity construction dynamic?(5)Is the identity construction salient?The quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this study to analyze the collected data which include 30 intact product recall statements of the latest 7 years,from 2010 to 2017.The quantitative method is employed to calculate the types of identities constructed and the frequency of the occurrence of each type.The qualitative method is applied to explore the identity construction in product recall statements on the basis of Linguistic Adaptation Theory.The findings of this study are as follows:(1)Eight types of identities are constructed in the collected product recall statements.Each product recall statement constructs at least three types of identities and at most six types of identities.The product-recaller,the reason-explainer and the adviser are the top three types of identities constructed in product recall statements.(2)The identity construction in product recall statements is the adaptation to the physical world,the social world and the mental world.(3)Corporations tend to choose we,our,us,you and your to construct identities.The simple present tense and the present perfect tense are more welcomed in identity construction than other tenses.(4)The identity construction in product recall statements is dynamic.The shift from one type of identity to another is inconspicuous.(5)The identity construction in product recall statements is under high degree of social consciousness.This study which attempts to analyze the identity construction in product recall statements from the perspective of Linguistic Adaptation Theory is of high research value.It further enriches the interdisciplinary researches on product recall statements as well as the present studies on identity and identity construction,and it further verifies the explanatory power of the Linguistic Adaptation Theory.Besides,it is a beneficial guidance to corporations and consumers in commercial communication and an enlightening instruction to utterers and interpreters in daily communication.