A Study Of Identity Construction In Conversations Of Virtual World

The language spoken by people and their identities as speakers of this language are inseparable. Language acts are acts of identity. People always build their own identities consciously or unconsciously when they are using language to communicate with each other. Needless to say, the pervasive phenomena of identity construction have become a hot issue worthy of study in pragmatics. Linguists at home and abroad have conducted a great number of studies on identity construction from a variety of perspectives and achieved fruitful accomplishments. Although scholars have offered rich literature in the field of identity, there is not much literature from the perspective of Adaptation Theory. In order to conduct a detailed study of identity construction in the field of Internet language, the author introduces a new perspective for the study of identity construction—Adaptation Theory. Generally speaking, there are mainly two approaches of studying identity:the cognitive approach and the pragmatic approach. The study aims to apply a new perspective—Adaptation Theory to integrate the two approaches.In this thesis the main views of Adaptation Theory have been summarized; meanwhile, the adaptation model of identity construction in the virtual world is proposed and justified through the analysis of corpus collected by the author. This model considers identity construction as a dynamic choice-making and adaptation process. We could find out that according to this model all participants are able to make negotiable linguistic choices and at the same time they could recognize and motivate negotiable contextual correlates from a wide range of variable possibilities to achieve the dynamic interadaptation between linguistic choices and contextual correlates in order to realize the adaptability of identity construction. Theoretically, the study not only enriches the theories of identity construction, but also deepens the relevant pragmatic theories of adaptability. Practically, the results of this study offer references to how to construct identity in a virtual community for netizens.