Pragmatic Identity Construction In Graduates’ Dissertation Abstracts For Information Communication Engineering

Since the reform and opening up has been carried out,intercultural communications with foreign countries have become increasingly frequent,and academic communications have become more prominent.Scholars usually makes use of abstracts to show their academic identities.A clear,comprehensive and standard can greatly increase the possibility of being retrieved,downloaded and cited of academic papers.Thus,English abstract has become such an important communication tool to build a more convenient platform for academic communications at home and aboard.This study built a small corpus of English abstracts of 100 dissertations of Chinese learners majoring in information and communication engineering to analyze its pragmatic identity construction based on Chen’s Pragmatic Identity Theory and Sun’s classification framework.Then,based on Tse’ s classification framework of subjects and Hyland’s meta discourse classification mechanism,the frequency of language strategies used in the construction of specific identities is counted with the help of AntConc.What’s more,the chi-square test is used to show whether there are significant differences between the data or not.Combined with the method of discourse analysis,the characteristics of language strategies used during identity construction are explored.Finally,this paper analyzes dynamic adaptation to the academic environment in the construction of pragmatic identity on the basis of adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren.Present study have gotten some results through the survey in the thesis:(1)From the view of pragmatic identity construction,generally speaking,the narrator identity constructed in the masters’ dissertation abstract is higher than that in the doctoral thesis abstract,while the number of interlocutor identity is significantly lower than that in the doctoral dissertation abstract;Specifically,doctoral students mostly construct their identities based on the principle of result-oriented;comparatively speaking,masters construct their identities based on the guidance of content-oriented.The reason for the above differences lies in the different knowledge levels of masters and doctors which results in different cognition about abstracts;(2)From the view of language strategies,compared with master abstract writers,doctoral abstract writers use more impersonal subjects and frame markers to emphasize the objectivity and logic of the dissertation abstracts,but the linguistic strategies weakens academic identity of writers and are helpful to academic internationalization;(3)From the view of dynamic adaption,in the process of abstract writing and identity construction,the same writer makes the adjustment of language strategies in contextual correlates of adaptation and structural objects of adaption to adapt to the change of the environment after promoting from a master to a doctor.This study describes the characteristics of pragmatic identity construction and the use of language strategies in academic abstract writing,and how to adapt to the changing academic environment.It aims to deepen the understanding of English writers on identity construction and to improve the awareness of making rational use of language strategies to construct academic identity.On the one hand,this study has implications for improving graduates’ skills of academic English writing and adapting to the dynamic academic environment.On the other hand,it provides a reference for young scholars to realize academic internationalization.