An Empirical Study Of Medical Consultants’ Pragmatic Identity Construction From The Adaptationist Perspective

Pragmatic identity is the contextualized manifestation of communicators’ social identity, and a kind of pragmatic resource at their disposal. This dissertation provides an empirical study of the dynamic adaptability of consultants’ pragmatic identity construction within a proposed new version of the adaptationist analytical framework. Based on the analysis of three constructed pragmatic identities of the medical consultants from 45 naturally-occuring consultations, the study yields the following major findings:Firstly, the consultants construct three types of pragmatic identities, namely, those of an expert identity, a peer identity, and a sales representative identity, each manifesting some variability in terms of propositional content and pragma-linguistic realization. The variability of the expert pragmatic identity construction is reflected by the use of disease introduction, medical suggestions, professional address terms, pragmatic strengthening markers, disease-inquiring questions, and reformulations and interruptions; the variability of the peer pragmatic identity construction is realized as small talk, emphatic deixis and pseudo-relative address terms; the sales representative pragmatic identity construction is reflected by the use of medial price information, after-sale service information, sellers’ positioning markers and client’s positioning markers. In addition, the three constructed pragmatic identities show a different distribution in the different stages of the consultation discourse, namely, identity recognition stage, question construction stage, question solution stage and conversation-closing stage.Secondly, by constructing the various identities, the consultants perform either transactional function or interpersonal function, or both. The expert identity fulfills the authority-establishing function, aiming at constructing higher power and winning callers’and potential listeners’ trust, by performing a variety of speech acts, especially requests and advices distributed in every stage; the peer identity accomplishes solidarity-establishing function, constructing friendship and alignment with callers and potential listeners, conveying an image of affinity and friendliness, by the main production of consolations and blesses, located chiefly in question solution and conversation-closing stage; the sales representative identity implements medicine-promoting function, delivering social information of medicine promotion to callers and potential listeners, facilitating the business deal, by mainly performing persuasions, assertives and promises, residing primarily in identity recognition stage and conversation-closing stage. The functional motive of the shift of the consultants’ identity lies in the fact that the construction of expert and peer identities facilitates the realization of their communicative goal, i.e. medicine promotion and selling.Finally, the consultants’pragmatic identity construction is negotiable in terms of its adaptation to contextual correlates. In order to balance their communicative needs and the pragmatic force of their language use, the consultants mobilize the contextual resources to accomplish the construction of the three pragmatic identities; On the one hand, contextual correlates set constraints on pragmatic identity construction; on the other hand, the consultants make strategical use of contexts to construct different identities. These strategies include strengthening and mitigating strategies in the utterances produced with the expert identity, the strengthening strategies in the utterances produced with the peer identity, and the implicit constructing strategies in the utterance produced with the sales representative identity. Generally, the expert pragmatic identity construction and the peer pragmatic identity construction serve a stepping stone for the construction of the sales representative identity.These findings have important theoretical, pedagogical and methodological implications. Theoretically, this research deepens the existing study of speakers by focusing on their purposeful pragmatic identity construction and thus enriches the study of social psychological pragmatics, In addition, it proposes an analytical framework that may reveal the dynamic adaptability of consultants’ pragmatic identity construction in medical phone-in consultations within the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation. Moreover, the study incorporates the speech act theory, the pragmatic balance theory into the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation, thus contributing to the operationaliability and explanatory power of the adaptation framework. Pedagogically, the study suggests that business people attend to negotiators’ pragmatic identity construction, and that instructors improve pragmatic teaching and learning by resorting to authentic language input, and by realizing the significance of social parameters and contextual resources, so as to avoid "the textbook face" in online verbal communication. Methodologically, the conversation analytic approach with the combination of qualitative and quantitative method adopted in the study of natural authentic data helps describe an overall picture of pragmatic phenomena.