A Study Of Identity Construction And Its Adaptability In Verbal Communication

In verbal communication, people consciously or unconsciously build their own or someone else's identities when using language to communicate with each other. Obviously, the pervasive identity construction phenomena have become pragmatic phenomena worthy of study and can not be ignored. Scholars at home and abroad in different academic fields have conducted analyses on identity construction from their own theoretical views and achieved fruitful research accomplishment, which provides broad perspectives and rich literature for a more comprehensive research on identity construction. After conducting a comparative detailed review on identity construction in everyday interactions studied by Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis and analyzed their major findings and limitations, the study has summarized related issues of identity construction in everyday verbal communication. In light of this summary, the study attempts to apply Verschueren's (2000) Adaptation Theory to do a social, cultural, and cognitive research on identity construction from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, aiming to propose an Adaptation Model for identity construction to probe into the cognitive mechanism behind and to give an elucidation to the adaptability of identity construction in the communicative context.According to Adaptation Theory, identity construction has been depicted as a dynamic choice-making and adaptation process in this thesis. Then, on the basis of the structure of a pragmatic theory, the overall framework of Adaptation Theory, the adaptation model for identity construction has been proposed for the investigation of the cognitive and pragmatic mechanism of identity construction. This adaptation model has described the whole process of identity construction as a dynamic choice-making and adaptation process. That is, under the direction of salience, participants can make negotiable linguistic choices and motivate negotiable contextual correlates from a range of variable possibilities to realize the dynamic interadaptation of linguistic choices and contextual correlates so as to approach points of satisfaction for communication needs in identity construction. Then, a comparative analysis on the adaptability of identity construction has been elaborated from the three worlds of communicative contexts, that is, the mental world, social world and physical world.From the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, the study has delineated identity construction as a dynamic choice-making and adaptation process, proposed the adaptation model for identity construction, and illustrated linguistic choices in identity construction from three aspects, that is, adaptation to the mental world, adaptation to the social world, and adaptation to the physical world. Theoretically, the study is not only conducive to the observation and analysis on identity construction in verbal communication, but also contributive to enrich and deepen relevant pragmatic theories. Practically, the present study can also give guidance to people who want to effectively construct their identities so as to facilitate the expression and acquisition of identity information, and to successfully mold good images of their own.