A Narrative Analysis Of Identity Construction In Court Trials From The Perspective Of Sociolinguistics

Identity is a hot issue of research in various disciplines in recent years,which has received certain attention in the fields of philosophy,sociology,narrative,and linguistics.Among them,there are also many scholars who study the relationship between language and identity.Due to the complexity and particularity of identity,research under a single discipline or a single theory is difficult to solve the problem of language and identity construction.Since narrative is a universal human activity,many scholars also study the construction of language and identity from the perspective of narrative.However,traditional narrative studies mostly focus on the narration of literary texts.Studies on oral non-literary narratives are still insufficient.Because identity involves many social factors,court trials,as a kind of social practice,have a very important role in the relevant aspects of a case.This process also involves plenty of language use,and includes many narrative participants.This paper,from the perspective of sociolinguistics,makes a narrative analysis of the issue of identity construction in this institutional context.In the narrative framework,this paper uses Bamberg's(2012)positioning theory model to analyze how the main participants of the trials construct their own individual identities through language on three levels of stories,interaction,and the narrators themselves.Combined with social identity theory,it probes how the main participants of the trials construct their collective identity through language.The research corpus mainly comes from a large number of open court videos.Through textual transcription,typical segments are selected for qualitative analysis in the text.Subsequently,based on the results of typical segment analysis,the text resources collected in this study are marked and statistically analyzed to further confirm the impact of differences in language resource control on identity construction.Finally,based on the above analysis,suggestions are given for this phenomenon: reconstruct the narrative through effective narrative negotiation strategies.That is to say,reinterpret the story in another new context,and get new interpretations that are different from the that of original context,so that proper identities in the context of this particular story can be constructed.This study found that,first,there is inequality in the control of language resources between other participants and judges.The inequality dominates the development of the story.Second,during the trial,the narrator uses different language resource controlling methods to construct different individual identities.Third,social factors such as gender,age,and occupation in the narrative local context can also lead to individual differences in language control,which leads to the fluidity of individual identity construction.Fourth,the collective identities of the participants in the trial are also fluid,which mainly depend on the boundaries between different social groups.