A Study On The Construction Of Pragmatic Identity Of Counselors In Emotional Counseling Radio Programs

At present,with the increasing pressure of life and the complexity of interpersonal relationships,people are confronted with frequent emotional fluctuation which results in plenty of emotional problems such as inferiority complex,anxiety,and depression.The negative emotions not only affect the state of personal life but even relate to the life safety of individuals,hence,the necessity of emotional counseling is enhanced.Under such a background,the emotional counseling radio program,as one of the important ways of emotion regulation,which could give fundamental guidance and help to the general emotional problems of the common people to a certain extent has come into being.As the research hotspot in the realm of humanities and social sciences,identity construction has attained wide popularity from quite a few scholars in recent years.With the blooming of Linguistics,scholars presented that the studies on identity construction should be investigated dynamically by taking specific context into account in the communication process.Therefore,the research on pragmatic identity construction has become the new research focus.Taking the recordings of emotional counseling radio programs as data,this study integrates the theoretical framework of Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Pragmatic Identity Theory,aiming to probe into various pragmatic identities constructed,the language resources adopted by counselors,and the inherent motivations for dynamically constructing pragmatic identities in emotional counseling.This study focuses on answering the following three research questions:(1)What pragmatic identities have counselors constructed in the context of emotional counseling?(2)How do emotional counselors utilize language resources to construct various pragmatic identities?(3)Why do counselors dynamically construct various pragmatic identities in the context of emotional counseling? To answer the above research questions,the present study combines qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis and yields the primary findings as below.To begin with,three typical types of pragmatic identities are dynamically constructed in the communication process,notably,expert identity,peer identity,and course presenter identity.In addition,the language resources utilized to construct the three pragmatic identities above could be categorized as discourse content and language form.The former is principally concerned with semantic contents conveyed by counselors’ discourse and the latter mainly involves salutation,grammatical choices,speech acts,discourse features,and so forth.Moreover,the inherent motivations for counselors to dynamically construct pragmatic identity are revealed in this study,that is,to satisfy certain communicative needs and adapt to contextual correlates.Lastly,the author puts forward some suggestions on how to better construct pragmatic identities for emotional counselors in this study,simply put,the appropriate utilization of jargon and dialect.Exploring the process of pragmatic identity construction of counselors from the perspective of emotional counseling discourse enriches pragmatic identity research and reveals the mutual construction of language and identity.Additionally,this study is conducive to enlightening communicators to choose language resources reasonably and constructing appropriate pragmatic identities for amicable communication,so as to promote the smooth realization of communicative purpose to a certain extent.