A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Corporate Statement For Crisis

In modern society, the competition becomes more and more fierce; thus, to win the public’s hearts, maintaining a positive corporate image is an important mission for companies since good image is intangible asset. On the other hand, with the rapid advancement of social media, especially the great strides of social network in recent years, it becomes easier for the public to expose one company to the negative events or crisis when something bad happens. Therefore, managing the crisis effectively can be the crucial measure which decides one company’s fate. Among the process of crisis management, issuing a statement, here, corporate statement for crisis, is the key step since it can be used to explicate the event, convey attitudes and so on to win back the public’s support and recognition. The attention that has been paid to statements for public relations has been great including perspectives of managerial communication and genre; however, the study of corporate statement for crisis from both genre-based and stance aspects is not so rich.In this paper, both Bhatia’s(1993, 2008) and Hasan’s(1989) theories about moves and GSP are applied to generalize all the possible moves, sequences, recursions and natures, that is to say, whether one move is obligatory one or optional one. On the other hand, Biber et al.’s(1999), Hunston and Thompson’s(2000) and Hyland’s(2005) stance theories are integrated to study stance markers with some new interpretations of several concepts.By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, the analysis is unfolded with findings summarized about moves, GSP, as well as linguistic devices. At the structure level, nine moves have been identified in Chinese corporate statements for crisis while eight ones in English ones; Chinese GSP is more flexible than English one in terms of fixed sequence. At lexical level, attitudinal verbs and self-mention are the obligatory stance markers in both Chinese and English possible moves; both sides show similar tendency to choose adjectives; much more complete moves(moves that contains all stance markers) are exploited in English corporate statement for crisis; adverbs gain more popularity in Chinese context.It is hoped that this study can provide insights for the effective writing of corporate statement for crisis, for better cross-cultural business communication and understanding in different contexts, for practical teaching in linguistics, English for Special Purpose and Business English.