| With the development of electronic information technology,internet has drastically changed people’s lifestyle with its features of convenience,information sharing and low cost.E-commerce has gradually replaced the traditional brick-and-mortar shop and is becoming a new engine in national economic development.In addition,with the implementation of “The Belt and Road Initiative”and other national strategies,Chinese enterprises are accelerating the pace of “going global” and actively participating in the international cooperation and competition.In order to gain global competitive advantages,enterprises have been opening accounts on various social platforms to publicize their products and activities so as to construct positive corporate images.As a world-famous social platform,twitter has become an important channel for many enterprises to promote themselves.For a long time,researches on corporate image construction are mainly from management and other fields.The 1980 s witnessed a “linguistic turn” in the study of corporate image construction,with corporate managers’ letters,speeches,and advertisements as research objects,but so far few attention has been paid to twitter discourse.Intertextuality is a heated research topic in the domain of discourse analysis.The notion refers to the absorption and transformation of one text to other texts in terms of contents and forms.The use of intertextual resources can serve various communicative purposes.However,among current researches,few studies focus on intertextuality and corporate image construction,and their research objects are generally limited to corporate social responsibility reports and promotional discourse.To date,intertextuality in social media,such as twitter,has received little attention.But abundant intertextual resources can be found in twitter discourse.In this context,this thesis attempts to conduct a comparative study of the twitter discourses of the Chinese corporate Alibaba Group and the American corporate Amazon,which aims to figure out the following three questions:(1)What are the intertextual resources employed in the twitter discourses of Alibaba Group and Amazon?(2)What corporate images do Alibaba Group and Amazon respectively construct by employing intertextual resources?(3)What intertextual strategies are employed by Alibaba Group and Amazon to construct corporate images in the twitter discourse?All together 564 tweets of Alibaba Group and Amazon from July 2019 to June2020 are collected from twitter’s official website as research objects and they are analyzed with both quantitative and qualitative methods.The results of the current study are as follows:Firstly,both Alibaba Group and Amazon have been exploiting various specific and generic intertextual resources to construct positive corporate images.The linguistic resources deployed for specific intertextuality include mentioning,retweeting,quoting tweets and hyperlinks.Both Alibaba Group and Amazon frequently mention their own accounts,but Alibaba Group mentions numerous news media,while Amazon mentions more individual accounts such as singers,actors and ordinary people.Meanwhile,Alibaba Group retweets and quotes tweets mainly from news media and experts,while Amazon’s retweeted and quoted tweets come from a much wider range of sources,including organizations and customers.Compared with Amazon,Alibaba Group tends to use more hyperlinks,employing websites from other news media in addition to its own official website.With regard to generic intertextuality,Matthiessen’s register typology(Matthiessen,2009)is adopted to examine the various combinations of registers in the collected tweets.In all,three typical register combination modes have been identified: reporting + sharing,reporting + recommending,and reporting +exploring,in which different registers can be intermingled in embedded and mixed relationships to achieve multiple communicative purposes.Secondly,through twitter discourse,both Alibaba Group and Amazon strive to construct themselves as companies that care about customers,value social equality,offer high-quality products and services,and maintain good relationships with a wide range of brands and companies.In addition,while Alibaba Group endeavors to promote itself as the leader in E-commerce industry,committed to realize the digital transformation of businesses,Amazon attempts to construct a corporate image popular among customers.Such differences can be attributed to their corporate and cultural background.Finally,concerning the intertextual strategies in corporate image construction,the results of the current study indicate that mentioning,retweeting and quoting tweets can be utilized not only to report the situation of the company through others’ voices,thus making the information more convincing and authentic,but also to show readers its broad social partnerships.Besides,hyperlinks can also be employed to embed external resources and break the word limit of twitter.Most of the links are employed to publicize corporate values and products,which are conducive to the enterprise’s self-promotion.In terms of generic intertextuality,different registers represent different activities.Texts producers can choose different combinations of registers to achieve their communicative purposes and construct certain corporate images.The results of the study are expected to help Chinese enterprises to facilitate their efforts to further“go global”. |
