A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study Of The Construction Of Tesla’s Corporate Identities

The success of a company substantively relies on its identities since they can determine its corporate image,reputation and thus influencing its core competitiveness,which is evident in today’s information age.Under this background,corporate identity deserves further explorations.And among the studies focusing on corporate identities,few of them focus on corporate identity constructed in corporate news releases which are the major channel for companies to construct their identities.Therefore,the present study investigates how Tesla constructs corporate identities by analyzing the main topics chosen,main linguistic resources used and main discursive strategies employed in Tesla’s news releases.This study has four research questions: 1)What are the typical macro topics of Tesla’s news releases at its three stages? 2)How are the discursive strategies realized by key linguistic resources in Tesla’s news releases at different stages? 3)What are the corporate identities discursively constructed by typical macro topics and discursive strategies in Tesla’s news releases along the three stages? What are the changed and consistent parts? 4)Why are there these observed changes and consistencies in Tesla identities?To address the answer to the above questions,Tesla’s news releases are annotated based on the type of their topics and the corpus of Tesla news releases was divided into three sub-corpora.The corpus tool Wmatrtix was used to extract key semantic domains and Ant Conc for keywords.The results show that 1)in terms of topics,at the first stage,Tesla news releases mainly focus on its products and users’ stories as well as Tesla cofounders’ visions.At the second stage,Tesla’s news releases center on business expansion and stressing promises and achievements.At the third stage,the focus shifts to CSR practices.In terms of keywords,the first stage tends to use more first-person and second-person pronouns;the second stage tends to use more formal self-reference words like ’Tesla’ or ’the company’ and the third stage uses more words referring to its stakeholders like ’NHTSA’and ’shareholder’;2)At the first and the third stage,Tesla prefers to take the discursive strategy of perspectivization;the second stage tends to use more strategy of predication;3)The first stage tends to construct Tesla as an open-minded and technology-savvy innovator;the second stage tends to depict Tesla as an optimistic promiser and constant accomplisher,and the third stage prefers to shape Tesla as a legitimate corporate citizen;4)The reasons behind the changes in Tesla identities result from the changes in industrial and social culture and the consistencies lie in the consistencies of corporate culture.This study sheds new insights into the exploration of the genre of corporate news release,and the role of corporate news releases in the construction of corporate identity.The findings will be able to help some Chinese companies better manage their corporate identities when going global.