A Pragmatic Approach To Live Sales Discourse ——A Case Study Of Streamer Li Jiaqi

Live sales discourse（LSD）is produced by the streamer in the context of live streaming sales for commercial purposes and contains rich discursive features.It can be viewed as a pragmatic phenomenon since understanding it requires pragmatic inference in a specific context.Previous studies mainly focus on traditional sales discourse and live streaming.Most of them are conducted from perspectives of sociology,journalism,linguistics and pragmatics.They have pointed out the necessity of exploring the context and identity construction in sales discourse,but have not combined these two factors to probe into the dynamics of identities in context.In live sales videos,the streamer’s identity represented by the discourse often deviates from his default identity.During this process,different identities are reflected and constructed primarily by his discourse.Based on the live streaming context,this study seeks to probe into the mechanism of how the streamer takes advantage of live sales discourse to construct different pragmatic identities and further achieve his communicative purposes.This study takes a qualitative method and selects the streamer Li Jiaqi’s live streaming videos from Taobao Live as the corpus,with the attempt to answer the following questions under the perspective of linguistic adaptation theory and pragmatic identity theory:（1）What types of pragmatic identities are constructed in live sales discourse?（2）How are different pragmatic identities constructed?（3）Why are these pragmatic identities constructed? In order to elucidate the issues above,this study first clarifies the communicative context of live sales discourse and constructs an analytic framework combining linguistic adaptation theory and pragmatic identity theory.Following this framework,this study identifies different pragmatic identities and their realizations in live sales discourse.In addition,this study further explores the contextual correlates that restrict the construction of these identities.The findings are summarized as follows: First,in live sales discourse,the pragmatic identity of the main streamer is dynamic.In addition to the default identity as a salesman,the streamer constructs four deviational identities,a shopping expert,a celebrity,a customer and a friend.Second,different identities are constructed through various linguistic choices.The shopping expert identity is constructed by the frequent use of boosters and exploiting knowledge gaps.The celebrity identity is constructed by the strategic use of self address forms and projecting viewers as fans.The customer identity is realized by the empathetic use of first-person pronouns,mentioning personal experiences and revealing purchase intention,while the construction of the friend identity is mainly realized by the strategic use of altruistic expressions.Third,the construction of different pragmatic identities adapts to the product features,viewers’ psychology and social world.The shopping expert identity is constructed to adapt to product quality and discount,while the celebrity identity is constructed to adapt to product quantity.The customer identity is constructed to adapt to viewers’ unfamiliarity of the products and social distance,while the friend identity is constructed to adapt to viewers’ distrust of the streamer and social norms.Pragmatically,this paper explores the emerging form of live sales discourse,which enriches the research object of pragmatics and provides a new perspective for people to understand and make full use of live sales discourse.