Ecolinguistics: A Study on Identity Construction of Alibaba Group

Ecolinguistics investigates how language could establish ecologically identities, aiming to explore and examine whether those identities are of ecological appliability or not.And the studies are to help people resist identity which might encourage ecologically-destructive behavior, and re-shape and maintain identity which could encourage people to behave in ways to protect the whole system of ecology.To gain some insights into the identity of Alibaba Group, this paper attempts to investigate the ecological appliability of the identity constructed by Alibaba Group based on the corpus of the letters to shareholders written by Jack Ma from 2015 to 2018 via NVivo 11.The result shows:(1) The identities of Alibaba Group are“Weilai(future)”, “Zhongguo(China)”, “Jishu(technology)”, etc.; (2) The identities constructed are of ecological appliability.Of the established ecological identities, Alibaba Group would play an active role in the construction of a well-balanced economy.Besides, ones who have invested and would make decisions to invest into Alibaba Group, would be shaped by the company's ecological identity as well.Such ecological identity would encourage men to protect the well-balanced economy, and further the community of human society.