A Comparative Study Of Chief Executive Officers’ Pragmatic Identity Construction At Product Launches Of Apple And Xiaomi

In recent years,pragmatic identity has been a heated topic of identity studies.It inherits the constructivism’s ideas about identity and explores identity from the perspective of pragmatics.It views discourse construction of identity as dynamic and adaptive to the context.This kind of dynamic pragmatic identity construction is closely connected with speakers’ communicative aims.In this study,based on Chen’s(2018)pragmatic identity theory,a comparative analysis is made concerning the pragmatic identity construction of Sino-US chief executive officers(abbreviated as CEO)at product launches,taking product launches of Apple and Xiaomi as examples.In this research,CEOs’ speeches of Apple and Xiaomi at product launches in the latest five years(2015-2019)are collected and two small corpora are built.It is planned that three research questions need solving in this study:(1)In terms of discourse practices related to pragmatic identity construction,what are the similarities and differences between the Chinese and American CEOs at product launches?(2)In terms of pragmatic identity construction,what are the similarities and differences between the Chinese and American CEOs at product launches?(3)What causes the similarities and differences of pragmatic identity construction of the Chinese and American CEOs at product launches? A combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis is adopted to conduct this study.At first,a statistic of style,speech act,and person pronoun use of the two countries’ CEOs is made.Then,based on the results of statistics and speech contents,an analysis is made concerning their pragmatic identity construction.Lastly,the reasons for the similarities and differences of their pragmatic identity construction are explored.The findings can be divided into three parts.(1)Both CEOs use “pointing to company” person pronouns frequently.But the speeches of the American CEO are formal and show more frequent use of expressives speech act.The speeches of the Chinese CEO are less formal and present more use of assertives speech act.(2)When constructing professional pragmatic identity,both CEOs use “company representative” pragmatic identity.For the personal pragmatic identity construction,the Chinese CEO constructs “specialist” pragmatic identity,while the American CEO constructs “host” pragmatic identity.In constructing interactional pragmatic identity,the Chinese CEO uses “friend” pragmatic identity,while the American CEO uses “professional speaker” pragmatic identity.(3)In the explorations of the reasons behind the similarities and differences of pragmatic identity construction of the American and Chinese CEOs,it is believed that their similarities consist in the attribute of product launch,which is to promote the new products.The differences result from the different power distances and relationship marketing ways between China and America.Theoretically,this study testifies the operability of pragmatic identity theory in the business genre.Practically,this study cannot only provide references for the product launch organization of transnational enterprises,but also offer some enlightenments for the teaching of business English presentation.