The Clothing Symbol And Identity Construction Under The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Identity has always played an important role in our everyday lives, and the studies of identity has attracted more and more attention of the researchers in the field related to linguistics. In recent years, the studies on identity construction at home and abroad have achieved productive results. And identity construction is studied from various approached respectively, which mainly includes social-linguistics, pragmatics, systematic-functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis(CDA) and so on. However, these studies are mainly focused on the relationship between language and identity construction, illustrating how people construct identity through the choice and use of language. There are few studies on the relationship between non-verbal signs and identity construction. Actually, besides language, non-verbal signs can also be used to construct identity, take the sign of clothing for an example. With the development of society and culture, clothing has been bestowed many connotative meanings apart from the original function of body protection. So clothing has gradually become a sign which is used by people to express themselves. As a cultural sign, clothing can present the wearers’ social identity, status, classes, belief, gender, age, ethnic, profession, degree of education and so on. And we can identify a person’s identity through what he wears. Different clothing presents different meaning in different communicative context and different cultures, so people need to choose the proper clothing according to different communicative needs and communicative context to construct their identities. This process of choices(including the choices of clothing’s form, color, material, etc) is an adaptive process, mainly adapting one’s mental world, physical world and social world. So, sign of clothing possesses the adaptive nature.Based on the Linguistic Adaptation theory, with the sign of clothing as research subject, the thesis will study how people use the sign of clothing to construct identity.And the process of identity construction through the sign of clothing is the process of choosing proper clothing to present oneself by adapting different communicative needs and communicative context, thus providing a new point of view for the study of identity construction.