3.3　Summary

This chapter has sketched the theoretical background within which the present study is carried out. The Community of Practice provides a basic criterion for the present study to classify the default identities and the deviational identities in institutional interactions, which will be examined in detail in Chapters Four and Five. The relationship between speech acts and identities proposed by Tracy (2002), though having some deficiencies, provides some theoretical implications for the present study to discuss the interrelationship between advising, constructing identities and making linguistic choices. However, the Linguistic Adaptation Theory provides the major theoretical framework for the present study.

Based on the Linguistic Adaptation Theory and previous discussions on identity and its construction, the present study has worked out an analytical framework by presenting four dimensions of analysis, with illustrations:identity construction is a means of satisfying communicative needs; identity construction is a process of making choices, identity construction is a dynamic process and identity construction is a result of adaptation to various contextual correlates.

The first dimension relates to motivations for identity construction. The second corresponds to categories of identity and linguistic choices made to construct these identities, which will be scrutinized in Chapter Five. The third one is concerned with the dynamics of identity construction, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter Six. The fourth dimension concerns contextual correlates of identity construction. The first and the fourth dimensions will be examined in Chapter Seven to provide an interpretation for identity construction. Chapters Five and Six are descriptive, whereas Chapter Seven is interpretive.

【注释】

[1]This perspective view taken by the Linguistic Adaptation Theory and this theory itself represent the European tradition of doing pragmatics. For some latest discussions of this approach to pragmatics, please see Mao (2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2012) and Zhu and Zheng(2010).

[2]To make things easier, following the tradition of distinguishing speaker and hearer in the Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), this study use she to refer to the speaker and he to refer to the hearer for the moment.