An Analysis Of Appraisal Resources And Image Repair Strategies In English Apologies Issued During Corporate Crisis

The burgeoning development of new media renders everyone the right to transmit and receive information.Coupled with enhancing awareness of consumer consumption and frequent wrongdoing of enterprises,any corporate crisis events can come into focus of the public online.The proper management of corporate crises has an important bearing on corporate image and even survival.Releasing a corporate apology has become one of important means of crisis management.Generally speaking,most researchers studied corporate apologies from such linguistic perspectives as genre theory,pragmatics,and systemic functional grammar,but few studies have been conducted from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.Besides,corporate apology,as one type of image repair discourse,deserves relevant research on how corporate image is repaired.Therefore,the present study,based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory and Benoit and Coombs’ s crisis communication theories,conducts a descriptive and interpretative analysis of 35 English corporate apologies from both linguistic and strategic perspectives.The major findings are as follows:First,there are altogether 1370 units of Appraisal resources in the corpus.Attitude resources make up 50.29%,Graduation resources 27.58% and Engagement resources 22.13%.More positive Attitude resources are used than negative ones,showing that expressing mortification is only one part of apology but the overall tone of apology should be positive to exhibit the company’s confidence and commitment in redressing the unfavorable situation.The substantial employment of Appreciation resources of Impact and Quality demonstrates enterprises’ caring and empathy for customers’ damage and suffering,and commitment to putting things right.There is more Dialogic Contraction than Dialogic Expansion in Engagement resources.Dialogic Contraction serves to clarify misconceptions about crisis events by using Deny and Counter resources,admit mistakes perceived by the public and boast good points of enterprises by using Concur resources.Among Graduation resources,Force greatly outnumbers Focus.Especially the frequent usage of upscale Force resources renders enterprises’ attitude more sincere when they express mortification,and renders their attitude more determined when they make commitment and promise.Second,three functions of Appraisal resources in repairing image can be summarized: making the public perceive the apologies as sincere;revealing the enterprises’ involvement in crisis response and commitment to putting things right and creating a better future;being persuasive to align the public with the enterprises,shorten their distance and make the enterprises’ propositions more acceptable.Third,the Mortification and Corrective Action strategies are the most basic image repair strategies in apologies,which corresponds to the findings about Appraisal resources.However,the employment of other strategies must depend on specific crisis situations.The Mortification is often represented by the combination of negative Affect resources,Intensification with upscale feature,negative Impact resources and Concur while the Corrective Action is often represented by using such Attitude resources as positive Quality,positive Capacity and positive Tenacity.The above findings show that plentiful Appraisal resources are contained in English corporate apologies on the one hand,and diverse image repair strategies are utilized on the other hand,which serves for the purpose of corporate image repairing.The significance of the present study lies in that theoretically,it testifies the feasibility of Appraisal Theory for discourse analysis of corporate apologies and explores the relationship between Appraisal resources and image repair strategies,and practically,it provides enterprises in crisis with enlightening suggestions for composing English corporate apologies from both linguistic and strategic aspects.