A Study Of Pragmatic Identity Construction In Implicit Conflict Talk From Shakespeare's Plays

Implicit conflict talk is the talk in which the speaker or hearer in interaction performs face threatening act in an implicit way to achieve communicative goal(s).Pragmatic identity refers to contextualized identity intentionally or unintentionally constructed to identify self,the hearer or the third party.Although there are many PI strategies in ICT,the previous studies have not involved them.In addition,PI studies have touched upon its application to different contexts and discourse types,but its application to ICT has not been mentioned.Therefore,this thesis probes into what PI strategies are employed to implicitly attack the hearer.It also attempts to account for these strategies.The data of this thesis are collected from 36 Shakespeare's plays,including 114 ICT in which 184 turns constructing PI 211 times.Based on observation and the trichotomy of PI,the strategies are divided into three groups,namely PI construction for one party,for two parties and for three parties.There are sub-strategies in the former two: PI construction for one party including that for speaker,for hearer and for the third party;PI construction for two parties including that for speaker and hearer,for speaker and the third party,and for hearer and the third party.With the need of analysis,the sub-strategies are further broken down into different types.However,there is only one situation under which PI is constructed for three parties,so it does not require further division.Through the statistical analysis of the data,we find that:(1)PI construction for one party takes the largest share;then comes PI construction for two parties,and finally PI construction for three parties.(2)Among the turns constructing PI for one party,those for hearer occur with the most times,for the speaker ranks the second,and for the third party is the least.(3)Among the turns constructing PI for two parties,those for speaker and hearer occupy the largest proportion while the rest two types are equal in the times of PI construction.The tendency towards these strategies not only reflects the property of PI that it can be taken as a communicative resource,but also reveals the characteristics of ICT.This thesis expands the field to which PI is applicable,enriches the pragmatic studies of Shakespeare's plays,and is of practical significance to promote social interaction by the use of different PI strategies.