A Pragmatic Study On Advice Giving And Identity Construction In Meteorological Micro-blogs

Advice giving in the thesis is defined as a speech act,that is,an utterance or utterances that the speaker gives and hopes that the hearer does something or does not do something.In addition,advice giving is a kind of directive speech act.Speakers construct their identities when they communicate with each other.Chen's(2013)pragmatic identity is a kind of dynamic identity in communication based on communicative contexts.The thesis takes advice given by meteorological micro-bloggers as the data and provides both quantitative and qualitative analyses.By analyzing weather forecasts issued by Nanjing Qixiang and Zhongyang Qixiangtai,the thesis studies the linguistic features of advice giving and identity construction of micro-bloggers in social media.To avoid the subjectivity of the analysis,a questionnaire is conducted on the identities identified by the use of advice structures,referring expressions,and emoticons.The final results reveal that:(1)In terms of advice structure,more compound advice are employed by Nanjing Qixiang and explanations and reasons are provided to ease the imposition of advice giving,which constructs Naing Qixiang as the identity of being a friend,while Zhongang Qixiangtai uses relatively simple structure and tends to give advice directly,which constructs the identity of being an authoritative.The syntactic pattern of simple advice online mainly relies on declaratives;the compound advice is mainly represented as "Introductory utterances + Advice(+ Supplementary utterances)" structure.(2)When addressing advice recipients,intimate referring expressions are employed by Nanjing Qixiang,including the first and the second referring expressions,to constructs its friendly identity while the third person referring expressions that distance itself from its readers are mostly used by ZhongyangQixiangtai.What's more,some advice issued by Zhongyang Qixiangtai is given by "experts",which reflects its identity as a professional and authoritative observatory.(3)The nonverbal device,emoticons,is used by both meteorological micro-bloggers,which implies that micro-blog as a new medium has influence on its users.The usage of emoticons shortens the communicative distance between micro-bloggers and their audience.The adoption of emoticons indicates that meteorological micro-bloggerstend to construct an identity close to the common people.