A Study On Pragmatic Identity Construction Of Chinese Corporates In Apology Statements On Weibo

With the development of network technology,corporate crises are becoming more sudden,uncertain and highly destructive.More and more corporates choose to issue an apology statement to restore damaged image and win back public trust.In recent years,domestic and foreign scholars have conducted research on identity construction from different perspectives such as linguistics,pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics.However,there are few studies on identity construction of Chinese corporates in apology statements on Weibo from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis,based on the analysis and reference of previous studies,selecting 50 corporate apology statements on Weibo as the research corpus,adopting the qualitative and quantitative research method,based on pragmatic identity theory proposed by Chen Xinren(2013,2018),combined with the core ideas of adaptation theory,to make a detailed analysis of the identity construction process of Chinese corporates in apology statements.This thesis mainly explores the following three questions:(1)What discourse practices are used by Chinese corporates in apology statements on Weibo to construct identities?(2)What pragmatic identities are constructed by Chinese corporates in apology statements on Weibo?(3)What are the motivations for identity construction of Chinese corporates in apology statements on Weibo?The results show that Chinese corporates construct pragmatic identities through the discursive practices including formal style,speech act,lexical choices,personal pronouns and address form.Chinese corporates mainly construct two types of pragmatic identities in apology statements,namely,the default identity and the deviational identity.The default identity refers to the identity of the corporate apologizer.The deviational identity includes timely rectifier identity,defender of values identity,partner identity and expert identity.At the same time,this thesis points out that these identities constructed by corporates are dynamic.In this process,the corporates use different discourse practices to switch their identities according to different contexts.And the main motivations for corporates’ constructing different identities in apology statements are to adapt to physical world,social world and communicators’ mental world so as to achieve successful communication.This thesis has important theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,this research uses Chen Xinren’s pragmatic identity theory combined with adaptation theory to analyze in detail the pragmatic identity construction of Chinese corporates in apology statements,providing a new research perspective for the study of identity construction.Practically,this research has important practical guiding significance for how Chinese corporates use language strategies to construct their identities and recover their images in apology statements so as to win the trust of consumers.