A Study On Parents’ Identity Construction In Life-alienating Communication With Adolescents

Conversational interaction is an important means for parents and adolescents to cooperate in constructing a sense of right and wrong and social orders and it has an important influence on the socialization of adolescents.Nevertheless,it is not uncommon for the communication of needs,especially emotional exchanges,between conversational partners to be alienated.Life-alienating communication refers to specific forms of language use and communication that alienate communicators from their natural state of compassion and contribute to their behaving violently towards each other,and the research on it is still focusing on the analysis of the discourse strategies that are used by parents and adolescents with impolite theory or face theory and the analysis of the structural features of conflicting conversations with discourse analysis research methods.Based on the understanding that conversational partners are subjects which have communicative needs and choose discursive practices by themselves,this study aims to reveal the dynamic identity construction of parents during their life-alienating communication with adolescents and its pragmatic meaning from an interpersonal pragmatics perspective.This study conducts a corpus analysis of parent-adolescent life-alienating communications that occur in natural state using the analytical frameworks of life-alienating communication theory in social psychology and identity construction theory and aims to address the following three questions: 1)What are the pragmatic characteristics of parentadolescent life-alienating communication in Chinese context? 2)What identities do parents construct in their life-alienating communication with adolescents and how do they do this?3)What is the pragmatic meaning of parents’ identity construction in their life-alienating communication with adolescents?A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods is used in this study.Firstly,audio and video recordings of parent-adolescent(10-15 years old)conversations in their natural state are collected and of which 160 valid audio or video corpora are transcribed into text using the transcription method that was developed by Gail Jefferson.Secondly,the annotation and quantification analysis are conducted for the five main discursive practices chosen by parents in their life-alienating communication with adolescents,namely,personreferencing practices,speech acts,paralinguistic features,interaction structures,and language selection.And the qualitative analysis is also conducted for the personal identity construction of parents using these discursive practices.Finally,the data and analysis results of the parents’ personal identity construction are organized.Three major findings are concluded as follow: 1)In addition to the types listed by Rosenberg,establishing rules and threatening are also common forms of parent-adolescent life-alienating communication in Chinese context.Establishing rules that adolescents have violated or not yet practiced is at the root of parent-adolescent life-alienating communication.It is more flexible in its location and can occur at the triggering,developmental,and ending stages of life-alienating communication,or even exist implicitly.At the same time,parents use language adaptability as a means of satisfying their communicative needs by threatening adolescents.2)Through the establishment,supervising,and enforcement of rules in life-alienating communication with adolescents,parents construct three interactive identities,the Rule Establisher,the Rule Supervisor,and the Rule Enforcer,with the frequency of 10.43%,50.80%,38.77%,respectively,which in turn are integrations of parents’ three kinds of personal identity,that are,personality identity(knowledgeable,fair,and abrasive),stance identity(opposing,challenging)and relational identity(authoritative,distant).3)Parents’ constructed identities serve as the illocutionary resource that help them achieve their communicative purpose of ensuring adolescents comply with rules.By mobilizing the pragmatic force of Rule Establisher,the Rule Supervisor and the Rule Enforcer correspondingly,parents dynamically maintain their pragmatic balance.This study taps and unlocks part of the linguistic potential of the life-alienating communication theory in social psychology and provides reference for conflictual communication research in linguistics,in addition to enriching the research objects and contents of identity construction.It also provides reference and inspiration for the better use of language adaptability by adolescent family members for achieving communicative purposes and the management of interpersonal relationships.