A Study of Pragmatic Identity Construction of Merchant Response Behaviors in Online Business Context

Abstract

Facing customers’ complaints and negative reviews in business, merchants often construct a positive business image through specifi c discourse choices. This study uses the hotel’s responses to customers’ negative reviews in Zhixing App as a corpus to explore various identities constructed by diff erent responses. The study fi nds that merchants use diff erent speech acts to reply, which are refl ected in the opening, middle and closing moves. In the beginning and closing moves, the hotel establishes a specifi crelationship identity with customers through the speech acts of greeting, thanking and so on, and in the middle moves, the hotel constructs diff erent positive identities through explaining, promising, stating and so on. This study intends to provide insight into the choice of appropriate speech acts for merchants to construct appropriate identities in their responses to achieve the desired communicative goals.