A Study Of Interactional Metadiscourse In Boeing’s Crisis Public Relation Statements For Trust Repair From The Perspective Of Rapport Management

Trust is key to business organization’s development and survival.In the face of crises,stakeholders’ trust will be subjected to damage.Therefore,the company has to take immediate actions to handle the crisis and re-earn stakeholders’ trust.According to Mayer et al.,trust comprises three elements: ability,integrity and benevolence.Therefore,most strategies are intended to repair trust from these three aspects.Crisis public relations statements are critical for restoring damaged trust.The statements function as an instrument to express the company’s stance and actions,update information on the crisis,and persuade the target reader that the company is reliable and trustworthy.Crisis public relations statements include both spoken and written forms,and the strategical use of language is critical for persuasion and trust repair.Interactional metadiscourse is an important device to persuade the target reader and it includes language resources which imply the writer’s stance and attitude,so the use of metadiscourse in the statements is helpful for achieving desired aims.Therefore,this study aims to shed a light on the discursive strategies of trust repair,arouse practitioners’ awareness of the genre and enable then to compose the crisis public relation statement more wisely and effectively.This study takes Boeing’s crisis public statements on two air crushes in 2018 and2019 as the research object,total 30 pieces of statements.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in the study to explore how interactional metadiscourse resources are used to repair trust.Meanwhile,this study takes a three-level analytical framework.On micro-level,based on Hyland’s interpersonal model quantitative method is applied to calculate the frequency of interactional metadiscourse with the aid of annotation software,UAM.On meso-level,qualitative method is used to analyze how interactional metadiscourse resources are employed to repair trust from three aspects:ability,integrity and benevolence.On macro-level,Spencer-Oatey’s rapport management is used to explore the possible factors behind the use of interactional metadiscourse.Through quantitative analysis,it is found that interactional metadiscourse is prevailing in Boeing’s crisis public relations statements.All the five sub-categories of interactional metadiscourse exist in the statements and their proportions are different.Qualitative analysis confirms the interactional metadiscourse plays an important role in rebuilding the company’s trustworthy identity,and the different interactional metadiscoursal devices help to rebuild the trust from different dimensions,for example,Attitude markers and engagement markers collocated with self-mentions discursively reconstruct benevolence.Considering the context of the crisis and the goal of the statements,it is found that the use of interactional metadiscourse is mainly influenced by rapport orientations and contextual variables.