The Discursive Construction Of Bicultural Identity

Against the backdrop of multicultural society, bicultural identity has aroused great attention of many researchers in cross-cultural communication both at home and abroad. Though these studies have expanded our vision of bicultural identity greatly, the settings of the studies have been limited to schools and societies, and the data have been confined to autobiographies or narratives.In order to extend the scope of the research this paper aims to examine the relationship between language and bicultural identity, with interview program as its setting, face-to-face conversation as its data. Due to the significant role of Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) in the investigation of social interaction and its intimate relationship with culture, we use IS as our analytical device to investigate the discursive construction of bicultural identity through a case study.In this paper we select a 45-min interview with Da Shan in Up-close as our data to find out what discourse strategies are employed in building Da Shan's bicultural identity and how these discourse strategies are used to achieve this goal with the help of both verbal (e.g., lexical choices, tones, stress and tempo) and nonverbal (e.g., gestures, body movement and facial expression) contextualization cues.The findings demonstrate that five discourse strategies, namely, code-switching strategy, borrowing strategy, quotation strategy, metaphor strategy and comparison strategy, are involved in building Da Shan's bicultural identity. Under the theoretical framework of IS, a thorough analysis has been made to explain how these five discourse strategies contribute to Da Shan's bicultural identity construction along with verbal and nonverbal contextualization cues.Thus this study enriches and develops IS both at theoretical level and practical level, and also connects cross cultural communication with discourse and identity.