Advertisers' Identity Construction In Microblogs

Identity research has undergone a post-modern turn from the essentialist approach to the constructionist approach.Identity is no longer pre-existent and pre-determined,but fragmented and fluid in the communicative process.In pragmatics,Chen(2013)proposes the notion of pragmatic identity,emphasizing its communicative property,rather than social property.The notion is adopted to explore how advertisers perform their language arts in Internet media in order to better promote their products and services.Although previous research on advertiser identity has been trying to fully understand how discourse practices construct certain identities,many identity concepts are still limited to the macro-level of social classification.In terms of the discourse,specialized research on advertisements in online discourse is absent.Based on Simon's Self-Aspect Model(2004)and Chen's Pragmatic Identity Theory(2013,2014,2018a),the present study uses a self-built corpus of social media advertisements from seven mobile phone brands,adopts multi-modal analysis as its analytic method,and investigates advertisers' identity construction in online discourse.The study finds that advertisers mainly construct two types of identities dynamically: the rational salesperson and the emotional salesperson,including five different self-aspects.Statistical data show that advertisers construct emotional identities about twice as often as rational identities.Advertisers construct the professional self-aspect and the objective selfaspect in their rational identities,while self-aspects in their emotional identities include the affirmative,the consumer-intimate,and the socially aware self-aspects.Advertisers use both macro-and micro-level of discursive practices to construct different self-aspects.On the macro-level,advertisers use the scientific style to construct their rational self-aspects,while they use the informal style to construct emotional ones.On the micro-level,discursive practices of rational self-aspects include evidence resources and paralinguistic features,while those of emotional ones include self-promotion,speech acts,personal deixis and paralinguistic features.Besides,the construction of advertiser identity adapts to two main contextual correlates: the linguistic channel and the social world.In terms of the linguistic channel,the virtuality of the Internet allows advertisers to construct fake identities,while the high interactivity of the Internet requires them to present advertisements as conversations with the target audience.In terms of the social world,the construction of the advertiser identity adapts to social reality,the presumed identities of the audience,and advertisers' social distance with the audience.This study has both theoretical and practical implications.Theoretically speaking,it enriches the analytic framework of discursive practices concerning identity construction,and can help us better understand the Internet discourse and advertising discourse.By addressing the relationship between language and identity in advertisements,this study is also helpful in interdisciplinary development of pragmatics and communication.Practically speaking,it can provide useful suggestions for companies and advertising agencies on content-making of online advertisements,especially those from mobile phone industry.