A Study Of Verbal Communicator's Identity Construction From The Perspective Of Impoliteness Theory

Politeness, as an important and indispensable aspect in daily communication, has not only become an important part of pragmatics, but attracted many domestic and foreign scholars to study it since 1970 s and 1980 s. So it has emerged many important scholars to study the politeness theory, such as Levinson(1978, 1987) and Leech(1983). However, compared with the politeness research, the impoliteness research does not receive much attention. Compared with the domestic impoliteness, the western impoliteness research develops fast and forms a stable frame of impoliteness theory, which provides a feasibility study and theoretical support for this thesis.Based on this, the thesis takes the impoliteness theory of Bousfield(2008) and Culpeper(1996) as the theoretical framework. And the author selects eleven episodes from If You Are The One in 2012 which broadcasts on Saturday and Sunday night of each week in Jiangsu satellite TV as the research subject. During the collection, the author makes some proper transcription and conclusion for the corpus, and uses the quantitative and qualitative method to describe and analyze the impolite utterances. In this thesis, the author mainly discusses the following questions: What identities do the communicators want to construct in the conversation by impolite utterances? How do the communicators construct their identities under the impoliteness theory? And why do the communicators construct these identities, ie. the significance for constructing the identity?Through the research, we have the following findings: Firstly, in this show the communicators mainly construct three identities by impolite utterances, that is powerful identity, prominent identity and affective identity. Secondly, there are eight impoliteness strategies used in identity construction, and we can divide them into two categories: positive and negative impoliteness strategies. The positive impoliteness strategies include using inappropriate identity markers, seeking disagreement, criticism, attacking one's weakness, seeking challenges with successive questions; the negative impoliteness strategies include sarcasm, reminding, scorning. And when constructing the powerful identity, most of communicators adopt these positive impoliteness strategies, such as using inappropriate identity markers, seeking disagreement, criticism; and adopt the negative impoliteness strategies, including sarcasm, reminding. When constructing prominent identity, communicators use the impoliteness strategies, such as seeking disagreement, criticism, sarcasm, scorning. While the affective identity construction is realized by criticism, attacking one's weakness, seeking challenges with successive questions and sarcasm, reminding. Thirdly, when communicators construct their identities, they show some reasons. It mainly includes these aspects: character, personal emotional factors, power relations, gender differences.So based on these impolite utterances in the TV show If You Are The One, the research analyzes these types of identity construction during their communication, which can help us understand the communicators dynamically construct their identities, so that it can help people reduce and avoid conflict and disharmony in verbal communication, and improve the communication effect and promote the harmony of interpersonal and social relationship.