A Study On Trustworthy Corporate Identity Construction For Energy Companies From The Perspective Of Stance Markers

Trust is recognized as a crucial factor in the interaction between companies and their stakeholders.From a macro perspective,public communication serves as an effective way through which a corporation can attain trust from its stakeholders.At a meso level,language plays a significant role in constructing a corporation’s trustworthy identity.To be micro,linguistics resources help to meet multiple stakeholders’ different expectations by addressing three important aspects of trust: ability,benevolence and integrity.Among diverse public communication materials,corporate annual report serves as an important approach for trust-building between companies and stakeholders.With both informative and promotional functions,corporate annual report is designed to provide necessary information and persuade investors into continuing their investment and support.In particular,letters to stakeholder contains a more important function in affecting investor’s decision as it is not regulated by laws and its promotional effect could be maximized as much as possible.In this business discourse,stance markers work as one kind of effective linguistic resources used by writers to express their attitude,feeling,judgment and assessment,and to persuade the target readers.Therefore,this study aims to investigate how stance markers realize the mention of trustworthiness factors and the construction of corporate trustworthy identity for global energy companies listed in Fortune 500 in their English annual reports’ letters to shareholders.This study combines qualitative and quantitative research methods.After collecting42 pieces of letters to stakeholder from 17 energy companies in 10 countries as data,this study adopts a corpus tool Word Smith 7.0 and a tabular tool Excel to deeply analyze the use of multiple stance markers.Furthermore,in accordance with Meyer et al.’s organizational trust model,this study analyses the mention of trustworthiness factors and the construction of enterprises’ trustworthy identities.Results reveal that:(1)In the use of stance markers,modality reoccurs most frequently;and there exists a similar frequency between altitudinal stance and epistemic stance.(2)In the mention of trustworthiness factors,ability is most frequently addressed,followed by benevolence and integrity.(3)In the construction of corporate trustworthy identity,in terms of ability,these companies describe themselves as objective,profitable,able and promising business operator.As for benevolence,they present as considerate and socially responsible.Concerning integrity,a law-abiding and honest identity is constructed.