Cultural Identity Constructing In Language Use

The thesis has made a tentative pragmatic study on cultural identity construction in language use in Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club, from the perspectives of discourse approach and speech act theory. For this purpose, the three questions will be addressed in the thesis:1. Is the framework of discourse analysis and speech act theory possible to help analyze characters' cultural identity (cultural background) in the novel of The Joy Luck Club?2. How does Scollon's discourse system contribute to explain the two different cultural discourses in the novel?3. How does speech act theory work together with discourse analysis to help analyze the characters' cultural identity in The Joy Luck Club?What theory of discourse approach is mainly used is inspired by Scollon's discourse system which is defined as a system of ideology, socialization, forms of discourse and face system. As we know, discourse approach is a useful way to analyze literary text, and speech act theory is an effective theory to interpret the speaker's implied meaning. They both focus on language use. If we combine them to analyse speakers' utterance, it would be an effective approach to interpret the theme of the literal text and the character's feature. On the basis of analyzing via the above method, the characters' cultural background is revealed through their speech.Considering that the object of my study is based on the novel, I adopt the method of qualitative analysis in my thesis. I make use of the conversations in the novel including conversations between mothers and daughters, mothers and mothers and daughters and daughters as my base of analysis, and put the different conversations in the discourse framework on the basis of Scollon by adopting speech act theory as an analyzing method.