On The Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokespersons’ Pragmatic Identity Construction

Identity has obtained a remarkable centrality within the field of psychology,sociology,philosophy and so forth since the last century,during which identity has long been deemed to be unchangeable and static in accordance with the essentialist view.With the postmodern turn of identity research,however,the number of scholars who turn to concentrate on identity’s dynamics and fluidity in communicative discourse has increased significantly.On the basis of the social constructionist view,there is a widespread consensus among those scholars that identity and its construction are dynamic in essence,which fundamentally challenges the traditional essentialist view.Later,the study of identity from the pragmatic perspective is of great significance and has drawn tremendous attention among scholars.Thus,the concept of pragmatic identity comes into being.Pragmatic identity refers to one type of contextualized social identity which is chosen by interlocutors consciously or automatically in verbal communication.Additionally,pragmatic identity is constructed linguistically in a dynamic way with the aim to satisfy temporary communicative needs.As China gradually gains international heft,the widespread focus has been attained on China’s voice conveyed by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons on behalf of the Chinese government in the regular press conference.In this sense,within the theoretical foundation of the Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Pragmatic Identity Theory,this thesis attempts to make an investigation into the pragmatic identity construction of spokespersons in the regular press conference,which aims to examine the pragmatic identity categories and language resources employed for their construction,to investigate the dynamic process of pragmatic identity construction as well as to explore its inherent motivations.Taking spokespersons’ remarks concerning the South China Sea issue in the regular press conference as corpus,which are collected from the website of Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the whole year of 2018,this thesis focuses on analyzing them to answer the following three research questions:(1)What pragmatic identities have spokespersons constructed in the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s regular press conference?(2)How do spokespersons employ language resources to construct those pragmatic identities?(3)Why do spokespersons construct varying pragmatic identities dynamically in the context of regular press conference? To address the above issues,the qualitative and quantitative analysis,together with the descriptive and explanatory approaches,will be adopted in this thesis.On this basis,the study yields the major findings as follows.Firstly,it has been found that two types of pragmatic identities are primarily constructed,namely professional identity and situated identity,in which,the former refers to the identity of news spokesperson,and the latter includes the identity of national interests’ defender,the identity of relationship promoter,the identity of attacker of external forces and the relationship coordinator identity.Besides,the language resources employed to construct these pragmatic identities can be generally concluded as discourse contents and linguistic forms,in which,discourse contents are mainly concerned with semantic meanings conveyed by spokespersons’ discourses and linguistic forms primarily include speech acts performed,lexical and syntactic selections.Lastly,the study reveals that spokespersons’ motivation of dynamically constructing various pragmatic identities can be explained by adapting to contextual correlates to satisfy certain communicative needs.This thesis not only further verifies the applicability of the Linguistic Adaptation Theory in pragmatic identity analysis,but also is conducive to interpreting how spokespersons construct pragmatic identities to demonstrate their political positions for audiences.