| Although numerous researches have been conducted to probe into identity construction in the virtual space,few scholars have carried out research on WeChat users’ identity construction.Therefore,the analysis of the study mainly investigates WeChat users’ discursive practices posted on Moments,with the purpose of exploring how WeChat users invoke,negotiate and shape their identities and getting a comprehensive understanding of both the identity types and the mechanism behind these identity constructions.The author identifies 785 pieces of screenshot collected from Moments of the Chinese messaging app WeChat,including the author herself and her ten friends,and as one piece of discursive practice may contain more than one type of identity types,a comprehensive analysis of these pieces of discursive practices resulted in a total of 1046 occurrences of identity types.And it aims to explore the three questions:(1)What is the overall distribution of different identities constructed by the discursive practices the WeChat users posted on Moments?(2)What kinds of identities do WeChat users construct by adopting different kinds of discursive practices and how?(3)What are the possible factors influencing the construction process of WeChat users? For the purpose of answering these questions,this thesis applies Tracy & Robles’ s(2013)theoretical framework of identity and the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to make a comprehensive analysis of the data,yielding the following results.(1)There are mainly four types of identities constructed on Moments,namely,master identity,interactional identity,relational identity and personal identity.And these identities don’t exist independently but have overlaps to some extent.Specifically,interactional identity,as a kind of situated identity,is constructed whenever online-communication occurs.In terms of the distribution of the other three identity types,relational identity takes up the largest proportion with the percentage of 46.18%followed by master identity and personal identity with the percentages of 34.13% and19.69% respectively.The uniqueness of the research lies in the diverse subtypes of the major identities,the frequency of which also displays great diversity.The commonly constructed subtypes of master identities include gender identity and professional identity;relational identity is composed of public relational identity and private relational identity;and personal identity consists of personality identity and evaluative identity.(2)The study also attempts to transform the tacit knowledge of the link between discursive practices and identities into explicit knowledge.From the rhetorical perspective,it mainly investigates how the person-referencing practices and speech acts from the discursive practices of the WeChat users shape their identities;From the cultural perspective,it explores the ways preexisting identities shape their discursive practices.(3)The potential reasons for this identity-work have been analyzed in detail.With regard to the deep reasons for these identity constructions,it lies in the users’ desire for impression management,maintaining relationship with other users,their dynamic adaption to the physical world of Moments and the mental world of other WeChat users.The present study bears both theoretical and practical values.Theoretically,it is an empirical attempt to the study on identity construction from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics and is a crucial part in the field of computer-mediated communication.From a practical point of view,the findings of the study are conductive to provide interlocutors with guidance on identity constructions whether in the virtual context or real life communication.However,the study is only an initial attempt to the study on the construction of identity from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics,and all the identities summarized from the data are online identities.It is hoped that further research can discuss the relationship between online identity-work and real life(RL)identity-work. |
