A Study of Pragmatic Function of Speech Acts in Mission Statements on the Basis of Adaptation Theory

Abstract

orporate mission, a core part of corporate culture, plays an important role in the development and competition of companies. The study of mission statements is beneficial to both companies and stakeholders. This paper explores corporate mission from the perspective of linguistics on the basis of speech act theory and adaptation theory and reveals that assertives account for a large proportion with a small proportion of commissives and zero proportion of directives, expressives and declarations. Some skills can be used to polish the language of mission statements, like pun, personification and parallel structures. And some high frequency words are summarized. Several characteristics and writing skills are summarized about mission statements. The criteria of judging whether the mission statements are good or not are given in this paper.