| Identity construction has been a focal point in humanities and social sciences research for a long time and it has a wide range of research areas and applications.Although numerous studies have explored the issue of identity construction from a variety of perspectives,relatively few have focused on identity construction for its core theoretical framework and empirical exploration.Nonviolent communication is a classical psychological work that was proposed by Dr.Marshall Rosenberg in 1963 and it has gained widespread attention.Many empirical studies have found nonviolent communication to be one of the most effective practices for the resolution of conflict with extensive empirical significance.On this basis,this study combines identity construction and nonviolent communication theory as a means of exploring the types of identities that are constructed by nonviolent communicative parents in adolescent families during parent-adolescent communication in addition to the way in which they construct their identities as nonviolent communicative parents through their discursive practices.In this study,430 valid discourses were collected from transcriptions of daily observations and audio recordings through a home-school integration program with local schools,151 of which were consistent with nonviolent communication theory.The following questions were the focus of this study:(1)What identities are constructed by parents in their nonviolent communication with adolescents?(2)How are these identities distributed and how are these identities constructed through discursive practices in the corpus?(3)What is the pragmatic implication of parents identity construction in their nonviolent communication with adolescents?This study utilized the identity construction theory of Tracy and Robles(2013)to answer these questions and Nvivo 12.0 software for the analysis of the collected corpus qualitatively and quantitatively.The following main conclusions were reached:Firstly,parents in nonviolent communication primarily construct a core identity of non-evaluators,with four sub-identities of listeners,observers,expressers,and requesters.Secondly,the identities also vary in terms of distribution.The highest proportion is expressers with 54 reference nodes,requesters have 43 nodes,listeners have 35,and observers have the least to fall with 19 reference nodes.Multiple levels of discursive practices such as personal-referencing practices,speech acts,interaction structures,style,and stance are employed by these identities to construct the identity types of parents in nonviolent communication.Moreover,the four sub-identities can be both independent of each other and a continuum.The optimal mode of non-evaluators is to construct all these sub-identities simultaneously in a conversation.Thirdly,identity construction is a performance resource and communicators can use relevant discursive practices as a means of constructing appropriate types of identities,which helps in the achievement of communicative purposes.This study has a certain amount of theoretical significance and practical value,theoretically providing a new case of empirical analysis for discourse identity construction theory.In addition,it provides applicable discursive practices for nonviolent communication research,realizing the disciplinary integration of psychology and linguistics.In practical terms,this study is a proactive response to the call by General Secretary Xi Jinping to focus on family,family culture and family education by refining the discursive characteristics of nonviolent communication in adolescent families and the identity construction of family members behind discursive practices,while proposing countermeasures and solutions for discourse construction as a means of promoting family harmony and ecological civilization.However,this study has limited corpus collection,the dataset that was used is small and the identity classification of nonviolent communication parents only serves to provide a preliminary investigation.Additional research will hopefully provide a more comprehensive identity analysis while also improving the depth and breadth of the study. |
