Study On Pragmatic Identity Construction Through Impoliteness In Pride And Prejudice

In recent years,with the domestic and foreign scholars paying more attention to the impoliteness,fruitful research results have been made.Impolite speech not only occurs in daily life,but also widely exists in various institutional discourses and even literary works.People can better express their attitude by using the impolite utterances,and at the same time they can construct different pragmatic identities to meet the needs of communication,and achieve the communication purpose.Identity construction has become the forefront pragmatics research at home and abroad.The development of identity construction and interpersonal pragmatics,especially the overlap study of(im)politeness and face promotes the development of pragmatic identity construction.Based on the theory of conversation analysis theory,impoliteness strategy and linguistic adaptation theory,this study combines the qualitative and quantitative analysis as the research methods to analyze the impoliteness strategies adopted by characters in the novel during their conversation,the process of the pragmatic identity construction through the impolite utterances and the pragmatic orientation of the identity construction in impoliteness.The major findings are:(1)Among the 176 collected corpus,51.7% is on-record impoliteness strategies and 48.3% is off-record impoliteness strategies.Among the ten impoliteness strategies,there are 37 examples belonging to the “using of criticize or aggressive words”,which account for 21.02%;the “using of avoid disagreement” has 33 examples,which account for 18.75%,and these two impoliteness strategies are on-record impoliteness.The on-record impoliteness strategy “shifting topic” and off-record impoliteness strategy “threatening”,each only has five examples and the proportion is2.84%.The reason of the distribution of impoliteness strategy is that it closely related to the background of the novel Pride and Prejudice and the characters' status and gender.(2)The characters in the novel construct powerful identity,weak identity and effective identity in different contexts by using impolite utterances.These three pragmatic identities are dynamic,variable and negotiable.On-record impoliteness strategies are more likely to help people construct power identity than off-record impoliteness strategies.But in somecontexts,off-public impoliteness strategies are more threatening.In addition,the difference in social status and gender could lead to a different use of impoliteness strategy.However,this situation is not absolute,in some contexts,the women in lower class also take a on-record impoliteness strategy to construct a power identity.(3)Three are three pragmatic orientations of identity construction in impoliteness,such as threatening to face,challenging the equal social rights and directive function.