| Discourses are language in use. Discourses are "forms of life"(Wittgenstein, 1958) and ubiquitous ways of knowing, valuing, and experiencing the world. In using discourses, people are not just conveying information, exchanging ideas, expressing feelings and reflecting the reality, they are also concomitantly building social activities, social identities and social institutions.From its birth, the mobile phone text-message, as a type of newly-born form of discourse, has become an integral part of modern life and begun to change people's social life and the world. Today, mobile phone text-messages have become a very popular socio-cultural phenomenon. Among the numerous mobile phone text-messages people send and receive every day, chain messages (CMs), as a form of discourse which is new and interesting in many ways, have attracted the interest of many scholars. Most of their studies focus on the following aspects: (1) the classification of CMs (Wang Li, 2005); (2) the linguistic characteristics and discourse properties of CMs (Zheng Qingjun, 2006, 2007; Fu Yuanbi, 2005, 2006); (3) the historical development and current situation of CMs (Wang Kun, 2008). On the one hand, these studies are helpful to our understanding of the forms and functions of CMs. On the other hand, we find that these studies are mostly concentrated on the CMs per se and few are on CMs' interrelationship with society and their building functions in society. Based on these studies, we attempt to explore CMs from a socio-cultural angle in this study.Chain messages in this study refer to those text-messages that can be shared and passed on from messager to messager. CMs can be classified into three major types: CMs for amusement and entertainment, CMs for emotional communication and CMs for informational communication. With reference to M. A. K. Halliday's functional grammar but mainly based on James Paul Gee's framework for discourse analysis, we first discuss briefly the linguistic characteristics of CMs and then explore in great detail their social functions, especially their social building functions from a social-cultural perspective. Research materials of this study are CMs we collected in large number during the study. We hold that CMs are not just used for emotional communications and informational exchange, but also for building social identities, social activities and building the world. Therefore, CMs are not a type of "peripheral" form of discourse. By contrast, they play a special role in building our social identities and activities. On the other hand, our discussion also shows that James Paul Gee's framework is an efficient tool for discourse analysis. This framework can help us analyze any piece of discourse comprehensively and deeply by means of the six building tasks of discourses. At the same time, based on the above analysis and discussions, we are confident to say that CMs will show further diversity in both forms and functions, and continue to exert their influence on people's social life and the world in the future.This thesis is composed of four chapters apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion. Chapter One is a brief literature review of the studies on CMs. Chapter Two introduces the theoretical foundation of the present study. Chapter Three and chapter Four are the core of this study. Chapter Three focuses on the social activity building functions of CMs and Chapter Four is a detailed analysis of the socioculturally-situated identity and relationship building functions of CMs.
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