A Study Of Pragmatic Identity Constructions In Dubliners From The Perspective Of Rapport Management

Identity research has always been a hot topic for scholars in many disciplines,including sociology,social psychology,communication,and anthropology.Identity is considered to be set before communication,its essential attributes are social attributes,and discourse is a reflection of identity.However,with the shift of identity research from essentialism to social constructivism,new viewpoints on identity research have emerged.Identity is dynamically constructed in communication.It not only has social attributes but also communicative attributes.At the same time,it emphasizes discourse to construct identity.Identity research in pragmatics precisely shares the concept of social constructivism.Pragmatics introduces language users into linguistic analysis,explaining the generation of discourse cannot avoid the study of the language users’ identity.Professor Chen Xinren defines the term “pragmatic identity”.He considers that identity research from the perspective of pragmatics cannot ignore the internal relationship between identity,discourse and communication,and highlight its communicative attributes.Starting from communication,identity is selected,presented and constructed by verbal or non-verbal means.The interpersonal rapport management focuses on how discourse manages the social relationship between the both sides in communication.Therefore,it is a new trend to study pragmatic identity construction from the perspective of interpersonal rapport management.Based on this,this thesis explores three issues:1.What are the rapport management strategies and application factors that influence the pragmatic identity construction in the corpus?2.In the process of interactive communication,how do communicators construct pragmatic identities through face management,sociality rights management,and interactional goals? How many pragmatic identities are constructed in the corpus?3.How does the pragmatic identity construction affect the interpersonal relationship between the both sides under the use of strategies,and what communicative effects have been achieved?This thesis excerpts the conversations of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners as the corpus,mainly adopts the literature research method and discourse analysis method to carry out qualitative research on the pragmatic identity construction.This study takes the interpersonal rapport management proposed by Spencer-Oatey(2008)as a theoretical framework,and at the same time relies on the related research of “pragmatic identity” proposed by Professor Chen Xinren(2013).It aims to explore not only the dynamically construction process of “default” identities in the corpus and “deviational” identities in interactions,also explores the strategies use and the interpersonal functions achieved in pragmatic identity constructions under the interpersonal rapport management.It is found that corresponding to the above three research questions,the following conclusions are mainly drawn.1.There are five rapport management strategies,including illocutionary strategy,discourse strategy,stylistic strategy,participation strategy and non-verbal strategy in communication.The restrictive factors that influence the strategies use mainly include rapport orientation and contextual variables.2.Communicative participants choose different discourses for different interactional goals,including non-verbal forms to construct their identities dynamically.The selected novel texts mainly construct thirteen default identities and nine deviational identities under the interpersonal rapport management.3.In specific contexts,characters use multiple strategies to construct their identities,and ultimately maintain,enhance,or deconstruct their interpersonal relationships each other,thereby achieving face management,sociality rights management,and interactional goals.This study attempts to explore the types of pragmatic identities constructed by the characters in the specific communicative contexts of the novel,the application of rapport management strategies,the management of interpersonal relationships and the realization of interpersonal functions in the process of pragmatic identity constructions.It verifies that the interpersonal rapport management strategies have theoretical value and practical significance for the construction of pragmatic identity.Specifically,it provides a new interpretation path for the construction of the characters’ identities and their relationship management in the novel text.It’s hoped that the findings of the thesis can shed lights on related research on Dubliners and pragmatic identity construction.