A Study On The Discourse Construction Of Relational Identities In The Moments Of Wechat

This thesis studies relational identities constructed through address forms in the discursive practices of the Moments in the Wechat.Although remarkable studies of identity construction have been carried out in many fields,including network discourse identity construction,the related research in Wechat is still seldom conducted.With the discursive turn of identity study,more and more researchers begin to agree with social constructivism,holding the idea that identity is constructed through discourses.In daily interactions,the produced discourse practices are constructing different identities at any time,in which address forms play an important role.Using proper address forms in proper occasions could make communication go on smoothly,so does in the Wechat and the Moments.Therefore based on the first-hand materials,this study investigates relational identities in the Moments of WeChat and the operation mechanism behind from the perspective of address forms.The thesis adopts qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the data which contains 780 discursive practices of different address forms from the Moments in Wechat.With linguistic and pragmatic knowledge integratedly used,we tried to systematically describe and synthetically analyze the collected address forms and explore the construction of relational identities in the Wechat.The thesis mainly focuses on the following questions: how different address forms are used by Wechat users in the Moments,how many kinds of relational identities the Wechat users construct by the use of different address forms and what are the possible factors which influence the construction pattern.It is found that ten kinds of address forms appear in the Moments of Wechat,including pronoun address forms,kinship address forms,social address forms,relation address forms,title address forms,modest address forms,name address forms,intimacy address forms,banter address forms and other address forms,each of which includes conventional ones and unconventional ones.Based on the ten address forms,three kinds of relational identities are constructed: social relational identity,additional relational identity and close relational identity,in which close relational identity appears frequently.Although address forms provide a new approach for the studies on identity construction,the research is only an attempt based on the observation and analysis of related discursive practices,which is hoped to offer some insights for further studies on identity.