| Identity is an important social symbol in the process of communication, and it plays animportant role in our daily life. Identity construction is very widespread in communicativelanguage. As a linguistic phenomenon identity construction is attached great importance to byscholars in different fields since the last century, such as philosophy, sociology, psychology,culturology and literary criticism, etc. The concept of identity construction bridges language andsocial researches together, and the studies concerning language and identity constructioninvolves in several fields. The present study focuses on the construction of discourse identities inpersonal press conferences based on Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory which believesthat using language is making linguistic choices and these choices have to be adaptable withcontext in the process of using language. Specifically, it aims to dig out the deep causes for theconstruction of discourse identities in a specific context of utterance, so as to make the process ofdiscourse identity construction become transparent.This article will adopt a qualitative research method to analyze the data which contains22personal press conferences at home and abroad from2001to2014. This paper will discuss theprocess of the adaptation between identity construction of spokesman and the context, whichincludes physical world, social world and mental world. A language producer consciously makessome linguistic choices which include language forms and strategies so as to achieve certaincommunicative goals. The choice is not in a stable situation but an outcome of a set of dynamicnegotiation. After a series of choosing and negotiating, including the violation of the CooperativePrinciple, the various variables in the specific context will be adapted. In this process discourseidentities would be constructed. In this paper, the main research results are as follows:Firstly, according to the interpretation and the analysis of the structure of discourse identity,it has double roles: production roles and reception roles. On the basis of the diversity of theprincipal in production roles, discourse identities in personal press conferences have beenclassified into group-identity and self-identity in the present study. We find that there exists aninter-transportable relationship between group-identity and self-identity. This paper finds thatthese two identities can convert to each other because they coexist in one spokesman.Secondly, it is found that in personal press conference constructions of discourse identitiesare based on the adaptation to context, which includes: adaptation to the physical worldincluding temporal reference and spatial reference; adaptation to social world including socialconvention and culture; and adaptation to mental world including psychological motivations andemotions. The discourse identities of spokesman are not fixed in the personal press conferences.In order to achieve the communication purpose, the spokesman adopts some linguistic strategies and violates the Cooperative Principle, and the discourse identities of spokesman will betransformed consciously for adapting to the variables of context.Thirdly, functions of discourse identities have been explored in the present study. Thespokesmen as the public figures in society have two properties: individual and social. Therefore,there are two main functions of discourse identity construction in personal press conferences:setting up a good social image and setting up a good personal image. In addition, the mainpurpose focuses on shaping the social image.The present study can enrich the study corpus of identity construction to some extent;investigate the process of constructing discourse identity; further evidence the explanatory powerto communicative behaviors. Furthermore, it is hoped that the present study can shed some lighton the understanding of public figures’ discourses and thus increase readers’ critical awarenessas well as the skill of communication in real life. |
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