A Study Of Pragmatic Identity Construction In Masters' Thesis Defense For English Majors

Recently,studies on pragmatic identity have aroused broad attentions.Pragmatic identity is considered as a kind of specific social identity in language communication and a consequence of choices made by the interlocutors in the field of Pragmatics,which is not static,but dynamic.In masters'thesis defense,discourse plays an important part in the construction of pragmatic identity.Through the analysis of defense language,this thesis demonstrates the relationship between language choices and identity construction in certain academic context.In this thesis,under the theoretical framework of Linguistic Adaptation Theory,377 turns of written conversations are collected,which are transcribed from the recorded data from a masters' thesis defense for English Majors in Xi'dian University,based on the languages of eight students and three judges.Then,linguistic choices for constructing pragmatic identities are analyzed from two aspects:lexical level and syntactic level on the basis of kinds of discursive practices proposed by Chen Xinren.Furthermore,it explores what contextual correlates influence pragmatic identity construction.And it also manifests the functions of pragmatic identity.Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used in this thesis.This study has found that,firstly,judges mainly construct three types of pragmatic identities:expert identity,adviser identity and evaluator identity,which are constructed by using various linguistic choices such as tag questions,hedges,modal verbs.Secondly,three identities including researcher identity,organizer identity,and opinion-holder identity are constructed by students by using various linguistic choices such as person deixis,declarative sentence.Thirdly,different identities are constructed to adapt to different contextual correlates,such as power relation,social distance,positive face,negative face and time.Fourthly,different identities are constructed by judges and students respectively to achieve various communicative needs.Finally,this study illustrates that Linguistic Adaptation Theory has certain instructive significance to pragmatic identity construction.It is hoped to have some implications for the further studies on the academic discourse.