Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T01:08:44.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

15 - Analysing Identity

from Part II - Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

By
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich  and
Alex Georgakopoulou
Edited by
Michael Haugh ,
Dániel Z. Kádár  and
Marina Terkourafi
Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Marina Terkourafi
Affiliation:
Leiden University
Get access

Summary

Despite the centrality of the notion of identity to human communication and within discourse studies and sociolinguistics, a critical mass of identity-related work within different sub-fields of pragmatics is still lagging behind. As a result, this chapter is partly a review of existing work and partly programmatic. We specifically argue that the notion of identity is crucial to the postulates of some of the major approaches that have constituted the bases of sociopragmatics, namely speech act and politeness theories as well as some of their most common applications, interlanguage and inter/cross-cultural pragmatics and, more recently, the pragmatics of social media. However, as these theories and their applications have developed mostly in a top-down fashion (i.e. based on categorizations and taxonomies) and as they have largely been non-discursive (utterance based) in orientation, identity has more often than not been treated as a given, as structurally pre-allocated properties rather than as co-constructed and discursively achieved.As sociopragmatics is embracing discursive and interactional perspectives on its mainstay concerns (esp. politeness), we show the need for identity construction -- always at the heart of discourse(s) -- to take centre stage along with associated processes of agency in the study of situated practices.

Keywords

identitydiscursiveagency(im)politenessspeech acts
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 293 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ajtony, Z. (2013). Various facets of the English stereotype in Downton Abbey – A pragmatic approach. Topics in Linguistics, 12, 5–14.Google Scholar
Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. (eds.). (1998). Identities in Talk. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Anton, C. and Peterson, V. (2003). Who said what: Subject positions, rhetorical strategies and good faith. Communication Studies, 54, 403–19.Google Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2005). Pragmatics, conversational implicature, and conversation. In Fitch, K. L. and Sanders, R. E., eds., Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 41–63.Google Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2006). Face as relational and interactional: A communication framework for research on face, facework and politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 2(2), 193–216.Google Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2009). Face as emergent in interpersonal communication: An alternative to Goffman. In Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and Haugh, M., eds., Face, Communication and Social Interaction. London: Equinox, pp. 33–54.Google Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework, and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(8), 2078–2105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2013a). Face, relating, and dialectics: A response to Spencer-Oatey. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 138–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2013b). Face as a research focus in interpersonal pragmatics: Relational and emic perspectives. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 108–20.Google Scholar
Bamberg, M. (1997) Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 335–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bamberg, M. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text and Talk, 28, 377–96.Google Scholar
Barke, A. (2010). Manipulating honorifics in the construction of social identities in Japanese television drama. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14(4), 456–76.Google Scholar
Basturkmen, H. (2010). Developing Courses in English for Specific Purposes. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Benwell, B. and Stokoe, E. (2006). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Blommaert, J. and De Fina, A. (2017). Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. In De Fina, A., Ikizoglu, D. and Wegner, J., eds., Diversity and Super-diversity. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 1–14.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, S. and Hamo, M. (2011). Discourse pragmatics. In van Dijk, T., ed., Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage, pp. 143–65.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J. and Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. New York: Ablex.Google Scholar
Bousfield, D. (2008). Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Bousfield, D. (2013). Face in conflict. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1(1), 37.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1978). Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In Goody, E. N., ed., Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56–289.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, R. and Cooper, F. (2000). Beyond “identity”. Theory and Society, 29(1), 1–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A socio-cultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4/5), 585–614.Google Scholar
Chaemsaithong, K. (2019). Person reference, identity, and linguistic violence in capital trials. Journal of Pragmatics, 142, 90–104.Google Scholar
Cheng-Tuan, L. and Yong-Ping, R. (2016). Self-professional identity construction through other-identity deconstruction in Chinese televised debating discourse.  Journal of Pragmatics, 94, 47–63.Google Scholar
Clark, B. (2016). Flight attendant identity construction in inflight incident reports. Pragmatics and Society, 7(1), 8–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comstock, L. B. (2015). Facilitating active engagement in intercultural teleconferences: A pragmalinguistic study of Russian and Irish participation frameworks. Intercultural Pragmatics, 12(4), 481–514.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
de Fina, A. and Perrino, S. (2013). Transnational identities. Applied Linguistics, 34(5), 509–15.Google Scholar
Dings, A. (2012). Native speaker/nonnative speaker interaction and orientation to novice/expert identity. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(11), 1503–18.Google Scholar
Dobs, A. M. (2014). Identities in conflict: Examining the co-construction of impoliteness and identity in classroom interaction. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2(1), 36–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donaghue, H. (2018). Relational work and identity negotiation in critical post observation teacher feedback. Journal of Pragmatics, 135, 101–16.Google Scholar
Edwards, J. (2009). Language and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eelen, G. (2001). A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
File, K. A. and Schnurr, S. (2018). That match was “a bit like losing your virginity”: Failed humour, face and identity construction in TV interviews with professional athletes and coaches. Journal of Pragmatics, 152, 132–44.Google Scholar
Finnis, K. (2013). Creating a “new space”: Code-switching among British-born Greek-Cypriots in London. Pragmatics and Society, 4(2), 137–57.Google Scholar
Flowerdew, J. and Leong, S. (2010). Presumed knowledge in the discursive construction of socio-political and cultural identity. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(8), 2240–52.Google Scholar
Fukushima, S. and Sifianou, M. (2017). Conceptualizing politeness in Japanese and Greek. Intercultural Pragmatics, 14(4), 525–55.Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2009). Impoliteness and identity in the American news media: The Culture Wars. Journal of Politeness Research, 5, 273–304.Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2010). A genre approach to the study of im-politeness. International Review of Pragmatics, 2, 46–94.Google Scholar
Garcés-Coneos Blitvich, P. (ed.). (2013). Special issue: Face, identity, and impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research, 9(1).Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2013). Face, identity, and im/politeness: Looking backwards, moving forward – From Goffman to Practice Theory. Journal of Politeness Research, 9(1), 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2018). Globalization, transnational identities, and conflict talk: The complexity of the Latino identity. Journal of Pragmatics, 134, 120–33.Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. and Sifianou, M. (2017). Im/politeness and identity. In Culpeper, J., Haugh, M. and Kádár, D., eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 227–56.Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Bou-Franch, P. and Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2010). A genre-approach to im-politeness in a Spanish TV talk show: Evidence from corpus-based analysis, questionnaires and focus groups. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 689–723.Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Bou-Franch, P. and Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2013). Identity and impoliteness: The expert in the talent show Idol. Journal of Politeness Research, 9(1), 97–121.Google Scholar
Garcia-Bedolla, L. (2003). The identity paradox: Latino language, politics and selective dissociation. Latino Studies, 1, 264–83.Google Scholar
Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis Theory and Method. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). “On MSN with buff boys”: Self‐and other‐identity claims in the context of small stories 1. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(5), 597–626.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, A. (2013a). Building iterativity into positioning analysis: A practice-based approach to small stories and self. Special Issue on Positioning. Narrative Inquiry, 23, 89–110.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, A. (2013b). Small stories and identities analysis as a framework for the study of im/politeness-in-interaction. Journal of Politeness Research, 9(1), 55–74.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, A. (2017). Sharing the moment as small stories: The interplay between practices and affordances in the social media-curation of lives. Narrative Inquiry, 27, 311–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Georgakopoulou, A. (2019). Designing stories on social media: A corpus-assisted critical perspective on the mismatches of story-curation. Linguistics and Education.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, A. and Vasilaki, M. (2018). The personal and/as the political. Internet Pragmatics, 1(2), 215–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grainger, K. (2011). “First order” and “second order” politeness: Institutional and intercultural contexts. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group, ed., Discursive Approaches to Politeness. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 167–88.Google Scholar
Goffman, E. ([1955] 1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
González-Cruz, M. (2014). Request patterns by EFL Canarian Spanish students: Contrasting data by languages and research methods. Intercultural Pragmatics, 11(4), 547–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1967). Logic and conversation. William James Lectures.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, S. and Du Gay, P. (eds.). (1996). Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2007). The discursive challenge to politeness research: An interactional alternative. Journal of Politeness Research, 3(2), 295–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, M. (2013). Disentangling face, facework and im/politeness. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 1(1), 46–73.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2015). Im/politeness Implicatures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. and Culpeper, J. (2017). Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory. In Ilie, C. and Norrick, N., eds., Pragmatics and Its Interfaces. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 213–39.Google Scholar
Haugh, M., Chang, Wei-Lin M. and Kádár, D. (2015) ‘Doing deference’: Identities and relational practices in Chinese online discussion boards. Pragmatics, 25, 73–98.Google Scholar
Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Hlavac, J., Xu, Z. and  Yong, D. X. (2015). Intercultural pragmatics at work: (Self)perceptions of intercultural behavior of Chinese and English speakers and interpreters in healthcare interactions. Intercultural Pragmatics,  12(1), 91–118.Google Scholar
Ige, B. (2010). Identity and language choice: ‘We equals I’. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(11), 3047–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, A. (ed.). (2009). Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Stance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, R. (forthcoming). Discourse analysis and digital surveillance. In de Fina, A. and Georgakopoulou, A., eds., Handbook of Discourse Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 708–31.Google Scholar
Joseph, J. (2004). Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Joseph, J. (2010). Identity. In Llamas, C. and Watt, D., eds., Language and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 9–17.Google Scholar
Joseph, J. (2013). Identity work and face work across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Journal of Politeness Research, 9(1), 35–54.Google Scholar
Kádár, D. Z. and Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kádár, D., Haugh, M. and Chang, W. M. (2013). Aggression and perceived national face threats in mainland Chinese and Taiwanese CMC discussion boards. Multilingua, 32(3), 343–72.Google Scholar
Karachaliou, R. and Argiris, A. (2015). Identity construction patterns via swearing: Evidence from Greek teenage storytelling. Pragmatics and Society, 6(3), 421–43.Google Scholar
Kasper, G. (2006). Speech acts in interaction: Towards discursive pragmatics. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 11, 281–314.Google Scholar
Kasper, G. and Blum-Kulka, S. (eds.). (1993). Interlanguage Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kiesling, S. (2013). Constructing identity. In Chambers, J. and Schilling, N., eds., The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Willey, pp. 448–67.Google Scholar
Koenig, K. and Zhu, Q. (2017). Communicative constructions of space in epistemic asymmetry: The case of German-Chinese university placement interviews. Intercultural Pragmatics, 14(2), 239–76.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word, 19(3), 273–309.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. T. (1975). Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. Harlow, UK: Longman.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Locher, M. A. (2008). Relational work, politeness and identity construction. In Antos, G. and Ventola, E., eds., Handbooks of Applied Linguistics. Issue 2: Interpersonal Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 509–40.Google Scholar
Locher, M. A. (ed.). (2010). Politeness and computer-mediated communication. Special Issue. Journal of Politeness Research, 6(1).Google Scholar
Locher, M. A. and Graham, S. L. (eds.). (2010). Interpersonal Pragmatics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Locher, M. A. and Watts, R. J. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 9–33.Google Scholar
Marquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Language and identity. In Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, P. and Schilling-Estes, N., eds., The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 475–99.Google Scholar
Mey, J. L. (1993). Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Miller, E. (2013). Positioning selves, doing relational work and constructing identities in interview talk, Journal of Politeness Research, 9(1), 75–95.Google Scholar
Mills, S. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mouffe, C. (2005). For an agonistic public sphere. In Tønder, L. and Thomassen, L., eds., Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, pp. 123–32.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In Duranti, A. and Goodwinm, C., eds., Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335–58.Google Scholar
O’Driscoll, J. (2011). Some issues with the concept of face: When, what, how and how much? In Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and Kádár, D., eds., Politeness across Cultures. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 17–41.Google Scholar
Perelmutter, R. (2018). Globalization, conflict discourse, and Jewish identity in an Israeli Russian-speaking online community. Journal of Pragmatics, 134, 134–48.Google Scholar
Placencia, M. E. (2008). Pragmatic variation in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and Coastal Spanish. In Schneider, K. P. and Barron, A., eds., Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 307–32.Google Scholar
Ponton, D. M. The female political leader: A study of gender-identity in the case of Margaret Thatcher. Journal of Language and Politics, 9(2), 195–218.Google Scholar
Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practice. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–63.Google Scholar
Rees, C. E. and Monrouxe, L. V. (2010). “I should be lucky ha ha ha ha”: The construction of power, identity and gender through laughter within medical workplace learning encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(12), 3384–99.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A. (1997). Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society, 8(2), 165–87.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. P. and Barron, A. (eds.). (2014). Pragmatics of Discourse. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2007). Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics, 29(4), 639–56.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2009). Face, identity and interactional goals. In Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and Haugh, M., eds., Face, Communication and Social Interaction. London: Equinox, pp. 137–54.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (2016). Mock politeness and culture: Perceptions and practice in UK and Italian data. Intercultural Pragmatics, 13(4), 463–98.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(2), 237–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2013). Re-assessing the speech act schema: Twenty-first century reflections International Review of Pragmatics, 5, 197–216.Google Scholar
van Dijk, T. (1998). Opinions and ideologies in the press. In Bell, A. and Garrett, P., eds., Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 21–63.Google Scholar
Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Vöge, M. (2010). Local identity processes in business meetings displayed through laughter in complaint sequences. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(6), 1556–76.Google Scholar
Wetherell, M. (1998). Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue. Discourse and Society, 9(3), 387–412.Google Scholar
Wolfers, S., File, K. and Schnurr, S. (2017). “Just because he’s black”: Identity construction and racial humour in a German U-19 football team. Journal of Pragmatics, 112, 83–96.Google Scholar
Wortham, S. (2010). Learning Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Zienkowski, J., Östman, J. and Verschueren, J. (eds.). (2011). Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, D. H. (1998). Identity, context and interaction. In Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S., eds., Identities in Talk. London: Sage, pp. 87–106.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×