Abstract
Based on four maxims of Grice’s cooperative principle framework, a small scale study is conducted to examine the communication strategies employed by experienced ground service staff. Data have been collected from questionnaires and in –depth interviews with Chinese domestic airlines’ ground staff. This study identifies that the communicative challenges usually happen in service failure and service recovery. And it finds out violation of four maxims of Grice’s cooperative principle is taken as sub-strategies of overinformativeness, telling a white lie, irrelevance, and ambiguity or prolixity. These strategies lead to overcommunication which could be routinely employed for the specific professional purposes of saving the passenger’s face, gaining the passenger’s understanding, reducing conflicts, avoiding complaints, or even establishing a harmonious relationship with passengers. This study moreover exploits that in the ground service communication context, two salient reasons stimulate the overcommunication strategies. Firstly it is to improve the service quality and secondly to enhance the passenger’s satisfaction which are the determining factors to the sustainable development of the airlines. This study is ambitious to seek a new means of understanding and investigating the ground service communication from the perspective of pragmatics. By integrating business communication in ESP context to the classical theory of pragmatics, this study attempts to offer practical suggestions to the frontline communicators.
Highlights
China has been the second largest aviation market in the world in terms of the volumes of passengers and air cargo moved in its domestic market since 2007 (Jiang & Zhang, 2016)
Aiming to obtain rich and detailed data that may lead to a greater level of understanding of the pragmatic interaction between ground staff and passengers, and to generate insights into the conversational implicature or purposes of their communication, this study distributes 200 questionnaires through e-mail, we-chat, or QQ into ground staff in several Chinese domestic airlines
To be noticeable, the challenges often occur in the service failure or service recovery
Summary
China has been the second largest aviation market in the world in terms of the volumes of passengers and air cargo moved in its domestic market since 2007 (Jiang & Zhang, 2016). Face stiffening competition and are beset with problems arising from economic fluctuations and world political instability (Low & Lee, 2014). Despite such problems, they try to retain a pool of satisfied and loyal passengers through both effective ground and in-flight service delivery and complaint-handling processes. Front-line service delivery systems of air transportation may be generally divided into airport (ground) service and in-flight service. Ground staff members of airline companies are quite considered to be front-line employees and play a salient role in service delivery and complaint-handling processes (Yang & Chang, 2012). Ground staff deal with routine work and variety of unexpected emergencies daily through face to face communication with passengers, which requires that ground staff must be good at communicating in English, in order to serve passengers well
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