| Identity construction is a hot topic of research in several disciplines,including philosophy,sociology,psychology,anthropology,and linguistics.With the continuous development of e-commerce platforms,live shopping has gradually become a quite frequent shopping method in personal daily life.Live shopping projects have also attracted more and more attention from the academic community,but few people have studied how anchors in e-commerce live programs construct their identity.Therefore,this thesis mainly investigates the discursive practices of Kuai short video live anchors from the perspective of pragmatics with the aim of trying to find out how Kuai short video live anchors’ discursive practices reflect,maintain,and build their identities so as to provide more empirical results for the related research on identity construction.This thesis is mainly qualitative on the basis of the data collected from the Kuai short video platform.Eight different anchors’ live shopping programs are selected as a corpus,and it was divided into 50 Chinese segments according to their contents.According to the discursive practices proposed by Tracy & Robles(2013),linguistic devices for constructing different identities have been picked out from lexical,phrasal and sentential,and interaction levels.A more qualitative research methods,combined with the core idea of conformity theory,is used to analyze the identity construction process of anchors in live shopping programs.This study focuses on exploring the following two questions:(1)What linguistic devices are used by these e-commerce anchors to construct different identities? And what are the identities that anchors construct in live commerce programs?(2)What contextual correlates influence identity construction in the context of the live commerce programs?The results of the thesis showed that(1)the anchors constructed four main identities in the live shopping program: expert identity,host identity,seller identity,and customer identity.In constructing these identities,the main language strategies used by the anchors include questioning,topic control,lexical choice,rhetorical devices,address words,and personal indicators.The thesis also pointed out that the process of constructing identities by the anchors is dynamic.During the live broadcast,anchors use different language devices to change their identities according to different contexts.(2)The contextual correlates that influence anchors to construct different identities in live shopping programs is to conform to a specific social environment,a special virtual environment,and the psychological world of customers in order to achieve successful communication.Although it is a preliminary exploration of identity as a persuasive resource in live shopping programs,this study has some theoretical and practical implications.Theoretically,this study enriches the pragmatics of identity construction to a certain extent and provides some insights into the discourse study of other e-commerce platform.Practically,this thesis explores how anchors can increase sales and create economic value through identity construction.However,the study only conducts a qualitative analysis,not a quantitative one.It is hoped that further research will summarize identity types more comprehensively and conduct data statistics to improve the depth and breadth of the study. |
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