2.1　Identity and Identity Construction

Identity has ‘‘attained a remarkable centrality within the human and social sciences’’ (Du Gay et al., 2000, p. 1) and it has been “a topic of a wide variety of logical, philosophical, psychological (in both social and developmental senses), sociological, political and other discussions for quite some time” (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 10). From different perspectives and adopting different approaches, researchers from different fields have explored this issue by theorizing identity or providing models for analyzing identity. Among these, the influential ones are: Identity Theory (Stryker, 1980,1987), which adopts a sociological approach; Social Identity Theory (Stets &Burke, 2000; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Self-Categorization Theory (Tajfel,1982; Turner,1982; Turner et al., 1987), which both take a psychological approach; Communication Theory of Identity (Hecht, 1993), which takes a social communicative approach; Self-aspect Model of Identity (Simon, 2004),which adopts a socio-psychological approach; an integrated Five Principles for the study of identity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), which takes a socio-cultural linguistic approach; Sociolinguistics of identity (Labov, 1966; Omoniyi & White,2006), Systemic Functional Linguistic approach to identity construction(Achugar, 2009; Ho, 2010a, 2010b; McCabe, 2004; Patrona, 2005) and the pragmatic approach to identity and identity construction (Chen, 2004a; Yuan,2011a).

In the following subsections, a brief review is given to the previous studies on identity and its construction, by focusing on definitions of identity,classifications of identity and a pragmatic approach to identity and identity construction. Meanwhile, from the definitions in the previous studies, identity and its construction are then defined for the purpose of this study.