3.2.2 Identity construction as a process of making...
Interlocutors are at the core of any interaction and they always participate in interactions with certain identities. Identity construction is a task that interlocutors must do and cannot avoid in any verbal communication because speaking is doing identity-work.
Identity construction as a process of making choices in verbal communication involves two interrelated aspects: one is that identity construction itself is a process of making choices; the other is that the basic tools of identity construction in verbal communication involve a process of making choices.
It has been generally accepted in the literature concerning identity and identity construction that an individual may have different identities and can display different aspects of the same identity (e.g., Benwell & Stokoe, 2006;Georgakopoulou, 2006; Ho, 2010a, 2010b; Simon, 2004; Tracy, 2002;Zimmerman, 1998; and many others). This is known as the multiplicity of identity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Hecht, 1993; Omoniyi, 2006; Tracy, 2002). The multiplicity of identity makes it possible to construct various identities in verbal communication, both pre-assumed and newly emerged.
Once communication starts, interlocutors are under an obligation to do identity-work and they are required to construct certain identities to satisfy current communicative needs by making choices from a wide range of possible identities and possible aspects of the same identity. For instance, it has been found that the members of the committee may construct various identities for themselves in Chinese PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings, some of which are expected while others may be less expected. Moreover, the potential choices of identities to construct are not made equivalently. Some identities are preferred ones in certain contexts. For example, to be a knowledgeable expert is more preferred than to be a less knowledgeable expert in academic interaction. Moreover, one identity becomes more salient than others at a given moment.
In addition, to choose to construct certain identities also requires certain pragmatic strategies such as hedging, mitigating and intensifying. Not all identities are constructed with the same level of consciousness in verbal communication. Some identities are constructed automatically, while some others are constructed with a very high degree of consciousness, indicated by using various pragmatic strategies. A similar claim is also made by Bucholtz and Hall (2005, p. 606) in their partialness principle, which states that “any given construction of identity may be in part deliberate and intentional, in part habitual and hence often less than fully conscious.”
If one identity is opted to be constructed by the speaker for the current communication, it means that other identities are made less salient. The options for constructing preferred identities and for the identities constructed with a higher degree of salience clearly involve the optimality of identity,which can be considered as one of the characteristics of identity construction.
However, despite the identities being constructed with various degrees of consciousness, they finally convey pragmatic information in interaction. In other words, the interlocutors’ identities constructed in the interaction will always play a role in interpreting their utterances. The choices to construct identity are made not only in discourse production, but also in the process of interpretation. That is, the hearer can also choose an identity to interpret what the speaker has conveyed. The interlocutors’ identity construction in both utterance production and interpretation directly influences the realization of communicative intention. Perhaps one of the reasons why misunderstandings and conflicts occur in verbal communication lies in the fact that there is a mismatch between the identities constructed by the speaker to convey her intention and the identities constructed by the hearer to interpret what has been communicated by the speaker[2]. In addition, the speaker chooses to construct not only her own identities, but also her counterpart’s identities. At the same time, the hearer also chooses to construct an identity for himself and an identity for the speaker in the process of discourse interpretation. Thus, identities are reciprocally constructed in interaction (He,1993; Van De Mieroop, 2008).
The fact that identity construction is a process of making choices also means that various linguistic resources provide the speaker with a wide range of possibilities to construct a variety of identities. It is argued here that the process of making linguistic choices is also the process of identity construction since language is the most important way used to construct identities in verbal communication. In verbal communication, linguistic choices made by the speaker fundamentally reflect her identity construction and meanwhile the identities that the speaker aims to construct finally determine what linguistic choices she will make in the current communication. On the other hand, any particular utterance may be analyzed as contributing to the construction of more than one aspect of an individual’s identity, whether institutional (e.g.,their professional identity as a manager), social (e.g., their gender identity as a woman) or personal (e.g., their wish to be considered friendly or well-informed) (Holmes et al.,1999, p. 353).
To sum up, the discussion in this section is concerned with the variability of identities and the variability of linguistic choices for constructing identities.A wide range of possible identities can be chosen by an interlocutor to construct and a wide range of possible linguistic choices can be made to construct the possible identities. As Omoniyi (2006, p. 20) claims, in verbal interaction, “language choice presupposes the existence of alternatives of identity,” and “one identity isn’t simply chosen from an array of possibilities over the others which are discarded; there is on the contrary a cluster of co-present identities but with varying degrees of salience.” The possible identities chosen to construct and the linguistic choices made to construct these identities aim to satisfy certain communicative needs in the current context of interaction.