4.2.4 Contextual correlates of identity constructi...
As claimed in Section 3.2, identity construction is constrained by various contextual correlates of an interaction. This section will work out the contextual correlates involved in identity construction in academic advising interaction.
As academic advising interaction is a type of institutional interaction, its institutionality should be taken into consideration. Verschueren (1999, p. 91 )points out that institutionality decides the power relation of the two parties in an institutional interaction. According to Weizman (2006, p. 158), in institutional discourse “power relations are unequally distributed.” The asymmetrical power relations intrinsically exit in institutional interactions.Power relation is thus one of the salient contextual correlates to be considered.
Vehviläinen (2009, p. 189) points out that “institutional interactions are always situated within particular languages, cultural contexts, and organizational arrangement.” The academic advising interaction to be examined by the present study takes place in a Chinese context, so some basic socio-cultural norms in the Chinese context will definitely play a role. Modesty is one of the most salient factors. According to the Politeness Principle (Leech,1983, p. 136), the Modesty Maxim is to “minimize praise of self; maximize dispraise of self;” and the Approbation Maxim is to “minimize dispraise of other; maximize praise of other.” These two maxims are closely related to modesty. At the same time, Leech (2005, p. 9) argues that interlocutors have some illocutionary goals, which are primary to achieve in verbal communication and they also have some social goals, for example, to maintain good communicative relations through showing politeness or modesty. Modesty can therefore be considered as a socio-cultural parameter, which constrains the advice-givers’ identity construction in their advising sequences.
Thus, the major ingredients in the social world, which constrain the advice-givers’ identity construction in academic advising interaction, are the academic community of practice, power relation, social distance and modesty.
As the ingredients in the mental world are considered, the identities constructed by advice-givers mainly adapt to emotion and face want. Emotion is closely related to pragmatic empathy, which motivates advice-givers to construct certain deviational identities in their advising sequences. Face is“the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself” (Brown& Levinson, 1987, p. 61), and face is personal want or desire and can consist of two related aspects: negative face and positive face. Negative face refers to“the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction —i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition” (ibid.), while positive face refers to “the positive consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of)claimed by interactants” (ibid.). Therefore, face is to a great extent a“desire,” a kind of psychological appeal, and it is “something that is emotionally invested” (ibid.), and it can thus be considered as one of the ingredients in the mental world[4]. On the other hand, advising is a face threatening act (Brown & Levinson, 1978/1987) since “the speaker is in some way intruding into the hearer’s world by performing an act that concerns what the latter should do” (Martínez-Flor, 2010, p. 258) and it needs to be mitigated in some way. To construct certain identities is one of the ways to mitigate this face threatening act. As Liu (2008, p. 33) points out, an individual’s identity,status and role can be “basic ways to achieve face wants.”
As the ingredients in the physical world are considered, the audience becomes the most salient one in Chinese PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings. Cerain identities are constructed to adapt to this correlate.
Figure 4.3 Contextual correlates involved in identity construction in academic advising interaction
The contextual correlates of identity construction in academic advising interaction can be summarized in Figure 4.3, based on the above discussion and the analytical framework established in Chapter Three.