A Study Of Pragmatic Identity Construction From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Identity research has traditionally been the focus of social science,especially for social psychology.As the academic trend has undergone a transition from essentialism to constructivism,identity gradually changed from its static state to a dynamic and changeable feature in essence.Scholars continuously study identity construction from the perspective of pragmatics.Nowadays,the Internet is a virtual space for public,where communicator can construct a better identity to meet communicative demands and avoid the constraints of actual daily communication.Hence,how to construct a specific pragmatic identity in the context of Internet is worth discussing.What is more,the industry of e-commerce live streaming has become the most popular model of online shopping,dominated by anchors and watched by millions of viewers.It is necessary to explore how anchors construct their identities to attract viewers’ attention in live streaming.Nevertheless,research on live streaming industry and anchor’s identity is numbered.Therefore,this thesis studies anchor’s pragmatic identity construction in the context of Taobao live streaming from the perspective of Adaptation Theory,taking Viya“Queen of hawking goods” as an example.This thesis aims to explore pragmatic identity types,strategies of construction,and its process in live broadcasting with qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,which refer to three considerable points.The first point is the pragmatic identity types constructed by Viya.The second point is the discursive construction of Viya’s pragmatic identity.The final point is the adaptational process of Viya’s pragmatic identity to the contextual correlates of Taobao live streaming.This thesis regards live videos of Taobao anchor Viya as the research material,randomly selecting four videos of live streaming,whose overall time is nearly sixteen.Then they are transferred into text by research tool Video Srt.for better analyzing.Verschueren’s(1987)Adaptation Theory has a strong explanation for the study of communications and insists the dynamics of language choice and dynamic generation of meaning.Based on Adaptation Theory and Chen Xinren’s(2018)definition of pragmatic identity and his classification of discursive construction,the author independently completes the extraction and marks up the collected corpus,counts the types and summarizes the occurring frequency of respective pragmatic identity constructed by the anchor.Discourse analysis is conducted by the author in analyzing strategies on pragmatic identity construction and its adaptability to communicative contexts of Taobao live streaming.Three research findings are proposed in this thesis,corresponding to the above three research points:Firstly,pragmatic explorations on the typical pragmatic identity types constructed by Viya in live streaming are conducted,finding that the anchor constructs the key opinion leader identity,interviewer identity,friend identity,consumer identity,and so forth.Secondly,manners of anchor’s discursive construction in live streaming mainly contain discourse contents,intensifier,professional jargon,person deixis,paralanguage and turn-taking,etc.Thirdly,based on the Adaptation Theory,anchor’s pragmatic identity construction adapts to the physical world,the social world and the mental world.In light of the physical world,temporal and spatial factors are considered frequently.As for the mental world,the speaker focuses more on emotion and intention.Lastly,in terms of the social world,the adaptability of pragmatic identity construction to social status,rights and obligations is particularly significant.Due to the research findings,this thesis proposes three strategy suggestions on anchor’s pragmatic identity construction from three perspectives: manners of discursive construction,dynamic choice of utterer’s pragmatic identity as well as the contextual correlates of adaptability.Moreover,this research provides a new research object and perspective for research on Linguistic Adaptation Theory and enriches the research on pragmatic identity construction.