A Study On The Identity Construction Of Micro-Language Users

The Internet has not only enriched our lives,but also our language.Micro-language,which emerged with the advent of the Internet age,has been of great concern since its inception.Associated with its propagation characteristics,micro-language reflects the identities of its users and conveys communicative emotions.As a new type of language variation,microlanguage could be regarded as a showcase for public opinion and a choice of opinion.In order to achieve certain communicative purposes,micro-language users make choices in linguistic forms to adapt to the contextual factors by employing various pragmatic strategies within a certain register.Based on the Linguistic Adaptation Theory,this thesis regards micro-language as the research object and proposes that micro-language users should go through three stages of identity construction: motivation——adaptation(choice)——construction.The results show that micro-language users could construct five identities,including supporter of emergency service,perpetrator of cyber violence,proponent of national spirit,disseminator of online entertainment culture and leader of public opinion by employing some pragmatic strategies such as pragmatic presupposition,pragmatic empathy,code-switching,pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening.It has been observed that micro-language users construct specific pragmatic identities in order to achieve certain communicative purposes through employing pragmatic strategies.The theory of Linguistic Adaptation provides a good guidance to build a relatively complete model of identity construction for micro-language users.It also helps them optimize their choices of pragmatic strategies in the process of identity construction,and deal with various identity construction phenomena in micro-language discourse scientifically.