| In recent years,with the rapid development of new media,consumers’ supervision over corporations has been enhanced greatly so that the possibility of exposure of corporate negative incidents increases accordingly.If corporations can take effective measures to deal with the exposure,they might rebrand and reduce corporate loss,turning the crisis into opportunity.Public apology,as the most used and one of the important effective measures for corporations to cope with crises,has received extensive attention of the academia.However,little study focus on the interdisciplinary and corpus-based approach to corporate public apologies,especially in the linguistic features.Therefore,this paper attempts to conduct a corpus-based and interdisciplinary study on 100 English public apologies from foreign corporations to explore how the corporations in crisis repair their images via public apology in terms of linguistic features,pragmatic strategies and pragmatic functions comprehensively.By using Antconc 3.5.7,the high-frequency lexical words and keywords were generated.The most salient lexical features were identified as follows:(1)extensive use of the first and second personal pronouns and possessive pronouns,(2)high frequency of direct apology expressions and(3)frequent occurrence of business terms.As for syntactic features,amounts of salient language patterns and fixed tense structure were ascertained in the concordance analysis on several keywords in CPAs:(1)“verb(something)+(to)customers” phrases are frequent,and the word “customers”is always modified by “our” or “valued/esteemed/respected”;(2)“will” is often followed by positive verbs like “improve”,“upgrade”,“do better”,etc.in sentences to express willingness and make promise in the future;(3)the expressions of apology are relatively conventionalized,such as “we deeply/sincerely apologize for/to” or “we are extremely sorry for”;(4)nearly all expressions of apology are qualified by the adverbs like “sincerely/truly/deeply/extremely”;(5)present perfect and future tense are widely employed together to offer compensation and make promises,the typicalstructures being “we have done something and we will/will not do something”,etc..Based on the Image Restoration Discourse theory(IRDT)proposed by Benoit(1997)and Situational Crisis Communication Theory(SCCT)put forward by Coombs and Holladay(2007),the study found that five strategies,which are realized and manifested by specific linguistic devices,were largely employed by corporations in crisis to issue public apology to repair their images :(1)strategy of expressing apology,realized by such linguistic devices as IFIDs,self-referring terms and other-referring terms;(2)strategy of intensifying affection,reflected by the intensifiers and expletives;(3)the strategy of mitigating responsibility,manifested by formulaic expressions for the incident happened by accident and was out of good intention,vague references and downtoners at lexical level and if-clause at syntactic level;(4)rebuilding strategy,demonstrated by formulaic expressions for compensation and corrective actions;(5)bolstering strategy is also applied frequently in public apology,realized by stressing the past achievements and reiterating corporate philosophy.The comprehensive employment of these strategies in public apology is conducive to corporate image restoration,specifically by expressing mortification to the victims,blurring the offensiveness of acts and mitigating or even evading corporate responsibility.These findings would not only shed light on the pragmatic strategies and linguistic devices for corporations in crisis to issue a public apology so as to help them repair images,but also offer implications to the teaching of English practical writing.Besides,it can also be regarded as an application and supplement of corpus-based approach to corporate public apology and an interdisciplinary research bridging management,pragmatics and linguistics. |
