Astudy Of The Protagonist Celie’s Identity Construction In The Color Purple From The Perspectiveof(Im) Politeness Theories

(Im)polite discourses,as an important part of human language,widely occur in various communicative texts such as literary works.Interpersonal pragmatics focuses on exploring how people use language to construct,change or maintain interpersonal relationships and pragmatic identities so as to meet their communicative needs.Thus,the research of identity construction in combination with interpersonal pragmatics and(im)politeness has gradually become a hot field of pragmatics research.Based on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory and Culpeper’s and Bousfield’s impoliteness strategies,this study takes conversations between the protagonist Celie and different characters in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple as the research corpus to explore Celie’s employment of(im)politeness strategies and her identity construction,aiming to answer the following research questions.(1)What are the features of Celie’s employment of(im)politeness strategies in The Color Purple?(2)What kinds of Celie’s identity consciousness are reflected through the employment of(im)politeness strategies?(3)How is the dynamics of Celie’s identity construction represented through the employment of(im)politeness strategies?With the priority given to the qualitative research,combined methods of qualitative and quantitative research are adopted in this study.Through frequency statistics and detailed case analysis of the research corpus,the following conclusions are drawn.(1)Both politeness and impoliteness strategies are widely used by Celie,but the tendencies are different.Generally speaking,the use of impoliteness strategies accounts for the vast majority.Among the 200 utterances collected,142 has employed impoliteness strategies with a proportion of 71.0%.More specifically,on-record impoliteness strategies are used 97 times and account for 68.3%,which are obviously more than off-record impoliteness strategies that appear 45 times.While politeness strategies are only employed 58 times and account for 29.0%,between which,positive politeness strategies appear 34 times,making its proportion of 58.6%,while negative politeness strategies are used 24 times and account for 41.4%.In brief,the frequency of on-record impoliteness strategies is higher than that of off-record impoliteness,and the frequency of positive politeness strategies is higher than that of negative politeness.(2)Through the use of(im)politeness strategies,Celie’s conversations with different characters in different contexts reflect her different identity consciousness,including powerful identity,weak identity,salient identity and affective identity.In her conversations with white woman,Celie constructs salient identity and affective identity through the employment of(im)politeness strategies.In her conversations with black men,Celie uses more impoliteness strategies to construct powerful identity,weak identity and salient identity in different periods.In her conversations with black women,Celie tends to adopt(im)politeness strategies to construct powerful identity,weak identity and affective identity in different contexts.(3)By making a comprehensive view of the whole process of Celie’s identity construction,it is found that Celie’s identity consciousness has undergone three transformations: “the oppressed” who completely loses her self-identity consciousness;“the rebel” who dares to resist against the bullying and seeks for self-value;“the liberator” that realizes dual independence of economy and personality.Celie employs slightly more impoliteness strategies than politeness strategies at the first stage,and adopts a lot of impoliteness strategies to attack the other’s face at the second stage.While at the third stage,Celie is more inclined to use politeness strategies to maintain equal interpersonal communications.