| The last few decades have witnessed a number of high-profile corporate trust crises that have challenged the relationship between corporations and their stakeholders.If companies in crisis cannot deal with problems timely and correctly,the unfavorable public opinion will rapidly spread and may seriously damage their corporate trust,which is widely claimed to be critical to the survival of enterprises.Therefore,it is imminent for enterprises in crisis to repair broken corporate trust.However,most enterprises cannot respond to trust crisis with effective methods,resulting in long-term and even devastating influence on enterprises.Apology,as one of the most popular crisis communication strategies,has become an effective tool for companies in crisis to communicate with their stakeholders,which will directly affect corporate trust repair.Corporate trust repair has attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad recently,but the application of corporate apologies for corporate trust repair in crisis communication is insufficiently investigated.Hence,this thesis aims to study how corporations in crisis employ apology strategies to repair corporate trust from the perspective of Business Pragmatics.By collecting 30 corporate apologies from information,communication and technology industries,coding linguistic resources with the aid of UAM software,and identifying apology strategies based on the integrated apology strategy classification adapted from Olshtain and Cohen’s and Trosborg’s typology,this study analyzes how enterprises repair corporate trust via apology strategies from the three dimensions of trustworthiness,namely Integrity,Ability and Benevolence.The main findings of this study are as follows: 1)Four types of linguistic resources are frequently utilized among 30 corporate apologies,of which Affect resources account for 37.50%,Pragmatic Empathy resources occupy 27.82%,followed by Contract and Expand resources,and finally Inscribed and Invoked resources;2)Five types of apology strategies have been identified in the corpus,i.e.,Expression of apology,Explanation or justification of the situation,Acknowledgement of responsibility,Promise of forbearance and Expressing concern for the hearer.Each apology strategy can help enterprises repair corporate trust,but not all are equally employed.Acknowledgement of responsibility is the most frequently used by companies to shoulder responsibility for the crisis and show their willingness to repair the mistake;(3)Companies in crisis put more emphasis on repairing Integrity among three dimensions of trustworthiness to repair corporate trust,with the application of Expression of Apology,Explanation and Justification of the Situation,Offer Repair/Redress and Promise of Forbearance,accounting for 57.51%among all detected apology strategies.Ability is reestablished by Explanation or justification of the situation,Accept blame,Offer repair/redress and Promise of forbearance,occupying 25.49% among all apology strategies.Benevolence is restored mainly through Expression of concern for the hearer.Hence,the broken corporate trust is repaired via corporate apologies.Theoretically,this thesis has made some contribution to the research on the relationship between corporate trust repair and corporate apologies,providing a new research orientation for corporate trust repair.Practically,this research indicates that enterprises achieve trust repair mainly by repairing Integrity,and proposes several feasible apology strategies and linguistic resources for enterprises to achieve this goal. |
