This article investigates the conflictive construction of identities in Chinese interactions. We examine the way in which people build up their own identities as “experts” and negate others’ similar identities in Chinese televised debates with complex participation structure. Our datasets are collected from 120 Chinese televised debates. Using indexicality (Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: a socio-cultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7[4/5]. 585–614) and Membership Categorization (Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on conversation, vols I and II, edited by G. Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell) as analytic notions to capture the interactional co-construction of identities, we examine the ways in which identity co-construction in such conflict scenarios takes place, as interactants attempt to construct their own identities as experts, and negate the expert identities of others. This exploration fills an important knowledge gap: little research has been done on Chinese conflict talk, in particular from the perspective of the co-construction of identities. Our research models identity construction in conflict by identifying various routes or “strategies” through which identities can be worked out in conflict scenarios. Our focus is on revealing how interlocutors construct or promote their identity by making their membership category conform to their category-bound activity/attribute, and negate others’ identity by revealing others’ violation of category-bound activity/attribute.
Based on a medical corpus, this study attempts to capture how doctors manage their emotions and construct their professional identity in treatment discussions. Using the Emotion Model and the Model of Epistemics and Deontics Gradient, I find that (1) when their professional expertise is questioned or doubted, doctors highlight their epistemic rights and displays negative emotions; (2) when their professional role is negated, doctors give the deontic rights to their patients and discharge negative emotions; and (3) when their professional ethics is challenged, doctors project their professional morality, reinforce their deontic rights and give vent to negative emotions. This study, by integrating the Confucian System of Moral Virtues (see) with Emotion Model, establishes a theoretical framework for examining the association between emotion management and identity construction in Chinese medical discourse.
This study attempts to examine how, in X-change, a Chinese televised documentary programme, fathers and sons practise their relational rituals, display their emotions and (de)construct their relational identities. Based on data analysis and the Confucian ritual theory five Luns, it finds that in family talk, ritual practices change, switching from negative or deviant ones to positive and normative ones, and the affectivity involved also changes from negative emotion to positive emotion. At the beginning of the programme, due to violation of one of the Confucian Luns – loving father and filial son (fucizixiao) – the father and the son conduct the destructive relational ritual practices, deconstruct their relational identities, and release their negative affect. As the programme progresses, both the father and the son commence to conform to Lun, and hence constructive relational ritual practices occur, and relational identities are reconstructed and normalised in terms of Lun; eventually their affect becomes positive, and their interpersonal rapport is enhanced.
Previous studies on common ground (CG, for short) have mainly focused on its definition and functions in various daily interactions. Few studies explore the linguistic manipulations of CG in cross-cultural business interactions. This paper aims to fill in this gap by examining how sellers and buyers manipulate linguistic actions of activating, seeking and creating CG to make a deal. This study instantiates and develops Kecskes’ (2013) CG model. Based on qualitative analysis of data collected from email interactions between Chinese sellers and Australian buyers, I find that (1) Interlocutors often activate their core CG through manipulating frequency markers such as “again”, and epistemic markers such as “I knew”, “you know”, “might”; (2) Interlocutors seek core CG and emergent CG by manipulating epistemic markers such as “I’m sure”; (3) Interlocutors often bring the third party or element into the communication to create emergent CG by using question markers such as “you see?”, imperative markers such as “Do you understand!”, and narrative markers like “I tell you” and “once” or “before”; (4) The interpersonal manipulations of CG construction contribute to business integrity and reliability because the more efforts interlocutors make to activate, seek, and create CG, the more clarified and acceptable their business relations become in business communication. For the purpose of validating what I have found, I conduct a quantitative study of linguistic means of constructing CG in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE), and summarize the typical linguistic means of activating, seeking, and creating CG in various settings.
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