On The Heroine Serena’s Identity Construction In Gossip Girl From The Perspective Of CDA

The American TV drama Gossip Girlbecomes increasingly popular all over theworld in recent years, which tells the story about a group of the privileged teenagersin the upper east of New York City, who attend an elite private high school and whoselife is full of rumors and gossip. Among the characters, the heroine Serena van derWoodsen is believed to be the most popular and conspicuous, who is undergoing thecrisis of identification after her return to this circle, and endeavoring to re-identifyherself as a teenager, female and upper class.The TV drama involves abundant casualconversations, taking place in various kinds of occasions and locations, including allwalks of the society, with diverse topics ranging from love, family and friendship tofashion and social issues. Therefore, it is viewed as a vivid reflection of Americanmodern society and its prevailing ideologies.There are several different approaches to casual conversation analysis, includingCritical Discourses Analysis (CDA), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) andConversation Analysis (CA), which are mainly concerned in this thesis. As a branchof linguistics, CDAis a subject of discourse analysis, emphasizing the role oflanguage in structuring power relations in society and aiming to uncover thenaturalized ideology.Until now, it has been widely applied to non-literary discourses,like political addresses, news reports, official documents, casual conversations, etc.Afunctional approach for applying CDA theory is SFL. According to SFL, there arebasically three metafunctions of language: ideational function, interpersonal functionand textual function.Ideational function of language is used to expresses people’sexperience of the world and mainly realized by transitivity; interpersonal function isused to establish and maintain relations between participants and mainly realized bymood and modality; textual function contributes to coherence and cohesion in textsand is realized by theme-rheme.Based on the theory of Conversation Analysis (CA),the conversation analysts examine conversational data, trying to explain howparticipants both produce and respond to evolving social contexts and what theconversations reveal about social and cultural interaction and practices. The analysisof turn-taking in conversations can reveal the power relations between participants.Based on Fairclough’s theory of CDA and the approaches of SFL and CA, thethesis attempts to establish a synthetic framework to analyze the casual conversations in American TV drama Gossip Girl and studies the heroine Serena’s identityconstructionthrough her different linguistic choices. It investigates the microlinguistic features and macro discursive structure of Serena’s conversations fromgenerally four aspects: vocabulary, transitivity, modality and turn-taking. The data foranalysis is selected form the first season of Gossip Girl, which has the best say in thecharacter shaping as the beginning season, and processed through manual check andthe “Research” function of Word2011. After the statistical analysis of vocabulary,transitivity processes, modality and the frequency of interruption and silence inturn-taking, it is found that in Serena’s language:(i) the lexical classification and thefrequent adoption of the intensifiers demonstrate Serena’s re-identification and strongemotions;(ii) by frequent choosing herself as Actor, Sensor, Identified and Sayer,Serena emphasizes individual independence; meanwhile, the adoption of “we” and“us” to represent her family, friends, people of lower class, her boyfriend and herselfcontributes to the establishment of interpersonal relationship and social connection;(iii) the predominance of low modal value indicate her intention to be modest andsubmissive while the second most frequent adoption of high modal value suggests herstrong desire to be respected and understood;(iv) the interruption and silence areoften used to resist the power control in polylogues, in which she is usually the lesspowerful participant. In addition, Serena’s identity construction is closely related tothe power relations in conversations and the mainstream ideologies in society. Thestudy has proved that from the perspective of CDA, both SFL and CA provide usefulmethods in bringing out identities in conversations.To sum up, the present study takes the perspective of CDA, constructs a synthetictheoretical and analytical framework to reveal the identity construction in casualconversations and testifies its practicality and validity, hence providing theoretical andmethodological support for other relevant researches of people’s identity constructionin conversational discourses.