Pragmatic Identity Construction Of Investors In Business Contexts From The Perspective Of Rapport Management

Identity studies have been a hot topic in pragmatics because of the shift in the conception of identity from essentialism to constructivism.Pragmatic identity,in accordance with the view of social constructivism,highlights the communication attributes of identity constructed in immediately current context.The thesis focuses on the pragmatic identity construction of investors in business contexts.The aim of the study is to investigate the types of investors' pragmatic identities and the rapport-management strategies for construction in business contexts,and further interpret the interpersonal functions of pragmatic identities from the perspective of rapport management.This study mainly adopts a qualitative method to analyze the data collected from an American reality television series,Shark Tank.The show features a panel of potential venture capital investors,called "sharks",who consider offers from aspiring entrepreneurs seeking investments for their businesses or products.Twenty episodes of Shark Tank Season 7 are downloaded and transcribed to serve as the research data.Conducted through a conversation analytical approach,the data shows that investors construct six types of pragmatic identities through rapportmanagement strategies,including expert identity,lay person identity,entrepreneur identity,customer identity,partner identity and competitor identity.In business contexts,investors are found to choose thirteen strategies of five rapport-management domains in total to construct those types of pragmatic identities,which can be summarized as follows: making suggestions,overlaps and interruptions,and asking questions frequently for expert identity construction;repetition and expectation for explanation for lay person identity construction;using social deixis and mentioning personal experiences for entrepreneur identityconstruction;situational assumption and making requests for customer identity construction;identity reference and using conditional sentences for partner identity construction;making concessions and comparisons for competitor identity construction.All six types of pragmatic identities perform three interpersonal functions: support of face needs,including self and others' quality face and identity face;support of sociality rights,including self and others' equity rights and association rights;and support of interactional goals.In conclusion,this thesis proves the interpretability of rapport management in identity studies and provides a new approach to explore identity construction in interpersonal pragmatics.The feasibility and applicability of rapport management in business contexts further extend the research fields and directions of identity construction.It's hoped that the findings of the thesis can shed lights on future studies of identity construction.