A Linguistic Adaptation Approach To Self-presentation In Competitive Context

As a ubiquitous language phenomenon, a large bulk of studies onself-presentation have emanated from the fields of sociology, social psychology andother disciplines. However, as a commonly utilized strategy to reach some unsharedgoals in multi-competitor contexts, particularly in institutional settings,self-presentation has rarely been delved into from a pragmatic perspective, norexplored specifically within competitive settings. Besides, having failed to considermore social variables and put in a more natural context, previous studies onself-presentation merit a pragmatic perspective for a more thorough understanding.Taking the linguistic adaptation approach (Verschueren,1999), this study makesa qualitative and quantitative inquiry into the self-built corpus VOC (the Voice ofChina) for exploring self-presentation strategies in competitive context, a public andinterest-conflicted setting where at least two competitors vie for the same kind ofresource for individual goals at the same time. In this corpus, famous musicians ascoaches in each Season are involved in the competition for excellent voice. Ascoaches and their group members make profit through further cooperation, coaches asself-presenters play the roles of competitors, rivals while the contestant singers ascompetition resources are electors. Thus, to that end, three research questions areproposed below:1. What is the distribution of self-presentation strategies adopted by thecompetitors in competitive context?2. How do contextual correlates affect competitors’ choice of self-presentationstrategies?3. Why do competitors employ self-presentation strategies in competitivecontext?For the above questions, main results and findings are presented as follows:First, it is found that coaches as competitors employ four types of self-presentation in competitive context. Based on Schütz (1998), we made thefollowing some adjustments:(1) Assertive self-presentation is a self-oriented strategybetween competitor and elector (contestant singer in this study). Sub-strategies thatshow attempts to convey favorable impressions include common ground seeking,complementing, self-boosting, promise-making and self-depreciation.(2) Offensiveself-presentation is an other-directed strategy between competitor and rival,encompassing five strategies of questioning, negation, mocking, derogation andthreatening, which form a continuum of imposition and aggression from low to high.(3) Defensive self-presentation is a self-oriented strategy between competitor andrival. Strategies such as denial, reframing, dissociation, justification, excuses,concession, apologies, and remediation are often used.(4) Protective self-presentationis also a self-oriented, passive strategy among competitor, rival and elector. Typicalbehaviors of protective self-presentation contain avoiding public attention, minimalself-disclosure, cautious self-description, minimizing social interaction, remainingsilent, passive but friendly interaction. According to the statistics data, assertive,offensive, defensive and protective types of self-presentation accounted for49%,41%,5%and5%respectively. Also, the distributed proportion of assertive, offensive typeover defensive, protective type is nine to one.Secondly, competitive context and number of competitors which are twopragmatic correlates have been accounted for. There are four conditions under whichcoaches adopt self-presentation strategies in competitive context: presence ofcompetitor, explicitness of objectives, availability of rival’s information andjudge-ability of competition process, in particular, by the decision maker. Besides,competitive context enjoys three distinctive features: goal-orientedness ofperformance, non-share-ability of object and intenseness of talk. It has been suggestedthat it is competitive context and its features do drive coaches to choose assertive andoffensive self-presentation strategies rather than defensive and protective ones, as theformer are more demanding in effort than the latter. Notably, the statistics of Pearson’schi-squared test shows that there is significant correlation between the number of competitors and types of self-presentation.Thirdly, we have concentrated on two pragmatic reasons which produced suchself-presentation strategies in competitive context. For one thing, linguistic adaptation,particularly, adaptation to competitive context, i.e., adaptation to competitor,adaptation to rival and adaptation to elector, motivates coaches to make properlinguistic and non-linguistic choices to present themselves for certain communicativeneeds. For another, pragmatic function, i.e., pragmatic effects, including ideal coachidentity construction, manipulation of contestant singer’s decision making and interestrealization in the further cooperation, impels coaches’ effort in best performance ofself-presentation in the competition. These two facets are interpreted within theblended framework of Adaptation Approach in Chapter Six.This study has made some contributions. A new notion “competitive context” isproposed, which delimits the exploration of self-presentation in the study and canbring some new inspiration about context in pragmatics. Besides, an AdaptationApproach to Self-presentation in Competitive Context is integrated, which is athought-provoking application of the Linguistic Adaptation Theory in use. In practice,this study can shed some light on people’s strategic use of self-presentation in dailyand institutional settings.