热点聚焦 | 语用身份建构研究前沿

身份建构的研究业已成为社会科学研究的焦点问题和语用学研究的前沿课题。相关研究已经超越本质论与建构论之争的窠臼，而是深入到动态的交际过程中挖掘交际者的不同身份是如何得以与当下的话语相关联，以及在会话的序列和话轮转换中身份与会话结构呈现什么样的互动关系。“小故事”（small stories）研究范式的提出或许也反映了身份建构的这样一种研究趋势。“语用身份论”的提出则直接体现了这一研究进展，它由陈新仁教授在其相关讲座及2008年新世纪优秀人才支持计划项目中首次提出。语用身份指的是语境化的语言使用者有意或无意选择的自我或对方身份，以及说话人或作者在其话语中提及的社会个体或群体的他者身份（陈新仁 2013：27）。其指导的相关系列研究可参见语言学之家网站研究团队栏目。本期我们邀请相关专家就身份建构的前沿问题与大家分享经验和看法。

参考文献

陈新仁，语用身份：动态选择与话语建构[J]，《外语研究》，2013（4）：27-32。

袁周敏，语用身份建构的动态顺应性分析[J]，《外语教学》，2014（5）：30-34。

袁周敏，身份建构的应用研究述评[J]，《山东外语教学》，2013（2）：38-43。

Dorien

Identity construction

The study of identity has become one of the most important foci of investigation in the social sciences. It has been discussed from many different angles and in many different fields, ranging from psychology to anthropology and from sociology to linguistics. Consequently, studies relating to issues of identity are extremely diverse and they are, as Bamberg et al. (2007: 1) note, a long way from providing a unified and harmonious field of study. Yet, despite this diversity, it has been observed that social constructionism provides a unifying thread that runs through current research on identity (De Fina et al. 2006: 2). From such a social constructionist perspective, and to paraphrase Hall (2000: 17), identities are never unified, rather they are fragmented, fractured and multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. Thus, instead of looking for a stable core of the self, identity should be viewed as indexical and occasioned (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 3) and research into identity should therefore focus on the way that it is locally and discursively constructed and how its fluidity is negotiated between interlocutors within a particular social practice. The process of the social construction of identity, thus, results in the construction of ‘a number of contextual selves’ (Wetherell and Maybin 1996: 223), which following Zimmerman (1998), exist both at proximal (i.e., turn-by-turn orientation to sequences of talk) and distal (i.e., oriented-to extra-situational concerns achieved through sequences of talk) levels. Consequently, discursive identities, such as speaker and listener, which are contingent on the proximal turn-by-turn context, reflexively make relevant to the interaction situated identities. These are related to specific settings (Zimmerman 1988: 426) and include, inter alia, such professional identities as teacher, manager, police officer. Furthermore, alignment between oriented-to discursive and situated identities is necessary for the participants to perform actions such as ‘doing’ a lesson, an emergency call, or business meeting. Zimmerman (1998: 90) adds a third level of analysis, that of transportable identities – or ‘categorical’ identities (Zimmerman 1992) – such as gender, age, ethnicity, which ‘tag along’ and can become interactionally relevant at any point in the interaction. It is crucial however, to underline the importance of the modal can: transportable identities should not be regarded as omnipresent, since they are often not oriented to and are thus often irrelevant for any given interaction. Furthermore, even if transportable identities are made relevant to the interaction, the result is not monolithic either, since ‘we may act more or less middle-class, more or less female, and so on, depending on what we are doing and with whom’ (Schiffrin 1996: 199). Of course, the same holds true for situated identities which are not continuously relevant in professional interaction either (Zimmerman and Boden 1991: 13). For example, side sequences may make relevant alternative identities and, even within the most formal setting, professional identities are constantly being negotiated. In sum, as Bucholtz (1999: 209) notes: ‘Individuals engage in multiple identity practices simultaneously, and they are able to move from one identity to another.’

Extract taken from: Van De Mieroop, D., Clifton, J. (2012). The interplay between professional identities and age, gender and ethnicity; Introduction. Pragmatics, 22 (2) 193-201.

Another introduction to identity and collective identities can be found in: Van De Mieroop, D. (2015). Social Identity Theory and the Discursive Analysis of Collective Identities in Narratives. In: De Fina A., Georgakopoulou A. (Eds.). The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, Chapt. 21. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 408-428.

Please also look out for my forthcoming introductory chapter on ‘Identity and membership’ in the new ‘Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics’ edited by Anne Barron, Gu Yueguo and Gerard Steen.

Alexandra Georgakopoulou

Small stories research: A paradigm for narrative & identities analysis for everyday life storytelling

I originally developed small stories research for the study of narrative conversational practices of female adolescent peer-groups (Georgakopoulou 2006, 2007). In the early stages of this research, I also collaborated with Michael Bamberg who has been championing small stories too (e.g. Bamberg 2006; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008). Small stories research at first was put forth as a counter-move to dominant models of narrative studies that: a) defined narrative restrictively and on the basis of textual criteria; b) privileged a specific type of narrative, in particular the long, relatively uninterrupted, teller-led accounts of past events or of one’s life story, typically elicited in research interview situations.

Small stories research has thus made a case for including in conventional narrative analysis:

a gamut of under-represented and ‘a-typical’ narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell

(Georgakopoulou 2006: 130)

The broader context of small stories research is to be found in anti-essentialist views of self, society and culture, which stress the multiplicity, fragmentation, context-specificity and performativity of our communication practices. Sociolinguistics has played a key role in documenting these processes by opening up the study of everyday communication, including storytelling, in diverse contexts: from friends’ conversations, family dinnertime, school runs, to classroom settings, asylum application and job interviews, etc.

Small stories research draws on a synthesis of frameworks from a range of disciplinary traditions, including sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology and narrative-biographical studies. The main heuristic I have developed from forging creative alliances between different analytical and methodological modes involves exploring the connections of three separable but interrelated levels of analysis: ways of telling-sites-tellers. This allows me to have a contextually sensitive analysis that nonetheless uncovers conventional associations between social spaces, narrative genres and specific subjectivities. So I can ultimately attest to the processes through which certain stories become more legitimate and valued in certain contexts, foregrounding and privileging certain aspects of selves and identities and making them over time more available than others.

Small stories research has been drawn upon by both sociolinguists and social scientists: despite any differences in the analytical modes employed in these applications, one common thread is the aim to challenge dominant idioms about the self and the life story that are supported by (interview) narrative research. In this respect, we can claim that small stories research has been taken up as a critical framework for narrative and identities analysis. This partly involves small stories research being in the service of approaches that (further) interrogate essentialist links between stories & identities. In doing so, small stories research has been effective in bringing to the fore silenced, untold, devalued and discarded stories in numerous institutional or research-regulated (e.g. interviews) contexts. Small stories then frequently emerge as the counter-stories, the stories that are not encouraged or allowed in specific environments, that do not fit expectations of who the tellers should be and what stories they tell. Small stories in these cases introduce contradictions, dilemmas and tensions on the part of the tellers. In turn, small stories research becomes more than an analytical toolkit: it becomes an ideological standpoint for the analyst who seeks to ‘listen’ to such counter-stories and render them hearable.

Small stories research for social media analysis

Small stories research pre-figured the social media engendered visibility of ‘non-canonical’ and under-represented-certainly, in interview narrative studies-narration forms: i.e. open-ended, multi-authored, transportable, snappy, with emphasis on the mundane, etc. In recent work (2012, 2013a, b, 2014a), I have begun to document what I have called ‘breaking news’ as an increasingly salient small story genre of great consequence in ordinary people’s technologically mediated everyday life, intimately linked with social media affordances (e.g. ability to share lived experience as it is happening and to update as often as necessary) and media convergence. The normativity and even requirement for ‘happening now’ stories pose new questions and challenges for narrative analysis and call for a scrutiny of certain mainstay concepts on the one hand and the development of a new analytical vocabulary on the other. This is more so in the context of the canonical assumption within autobiographical research that telling/writing the self necessitates a measure of time distance from the events and a process of reflection that is simply unavailable in the immediacy of the moment.

I am currently exploring the ways in which small stories research can be further systematized for the analysis of social media in the project Life-writing of the moment: The sharing and updating self on social media. The project is part of the ERC Advanced Grant (2014-2019) Ego-media. The impact of new media on forms and practices of self-presentation http://www.ego-media.org/projects

References
Bamberg, M. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Special Issue of Text & Talk 28: 377-396.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative – State of the Art. Special Issue of Narrative Inquiry 16: 129-137. [Reprinted in Bamberg, M. (ed.), Narrative – State of the Art. Current Topics 6. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 145-154].
Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). “On MSN with buff boys”: Self- and other-identity claims in the context of small stories. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 597-626.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2009). Reflection and self-disclosure from the small stories perspective: A study of identity claims in interview and conversational data. In Schiffrin, D., De Fina, A., & Nylund, A. (eds.). Telling Stories. Building Bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society and Culture. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 226-247.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2013a). Storytelling on the go: Breaking news stories as a travelling narrative genre. In M. Hatavara, L.C. Hydén & M. Hyvärinen (eds.). The Travelling Concepts of Narrative. Amsterdam: Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2013b). Small stories research and social media practices: Narrative stancetaking and circulation in a Greek news story. Sociolinguistica 27: 87-100.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2014a). ‘Girlpower or girl (in) trouble?’: Identities and discourses in the media engagements of adolescents’ school-based interaction. In J. Androutsopoulos (ed.). The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Mouton de Gruyter.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2014b). Small stories transposition & social media: A micro-perspective on the ‘Greek crisis’. Special Issue. Discourse & Society 25: 519-539.

Karen Tracy

Identity Construction

Antaki and Widdicombe (1998, p. 1, italics in original) assert that “identity is something that is used in talk: something that is part and parcel of the routines of everyday life, brought off in the fine detail of everyday interaction”; and Lemke (2008, p 21) argues, “identity gives us a way to link the phenomenological domain of lived, moment-by-moment experience and the semiotic domain of enduring cultural systems of belief, values and meaning-making practices. Identity refers to who people are; it is a spacious concept that includes contrary truths. On the one hand, identities pre-exist in a web of institutional realities that constrain moments of interaction. On the other, identities are built through communicative action, change over time, and in the process change the institutions of which they are a part. It is the concept’s ability to manage tensions between structure and agency that makes the term “identity” so powerful (Grad & Rojo, 2008). Although frequently referred to in the singular, identity is best conceived as necessarily plural, a bundle of features that are complexly related to each other. Ways to define and categorize identities are as varied as the scholars who write about them. For some, identities are tightly connected to notions of face (Spencer-Oatey, 2007), albeit including more facets of personhood; other scholars distinguish identities by the contexts in which they are displayed (Benwell & Stoke, 2006)

I distinguish three main categories of identity: (1) master identities, which refer to relatively stable facets of personhood, such as age, race, gender, sexual orientation; (2) interactional identities, which point to the situated roles and activities of communicators; and (3) personal identities, which include a person’s attitudinal stances, perceived character, and what we often refer to as “personality”. My typology, developed in Tracy and Robles (2013), is similar to that of conversation analyst, Don Zimmerman’s (1998) three-category system. His typology distinguished (1) discourse identities, the moment-to-moment conversational actions in which parties engage (e.g., questioner and answerer) from (2) institutional identities, professional role identities such as appellate court judge and petitioning attorney, from (3) transportable identities, personhood features such as sex, age, and race that are visible and are carried by a person from context to context. The main difference between my system and his is that I treat his notion of discourse identities as discourse strategies used to enact the other kinds of identities, and I give attention to the personal facet of self that he downplays. I foreground the notion of personal identities because I regard the attitudinal and moral dimensions of self as especially important.

"Identity-work”, a concept rooted in Goffman’s (1967, 1974) notion of facework and shaped by Ochs’ (1993) language socialization perspective, puts the emphasis on how talk does the constructing, maintaining, and challenging of identities. Identity-work operates in two directions. A person’s talk presents the kind of person a speaker is, or, to state it more accurately, is claiming to be. At the same time, talk altercasts the conversational partner. One person’s talk implies a view of the other, including assessments of the character, moral, and attitudinal qualities of the spoken-to party, as well as the speaker’s understood relationship to the party being addressed.
Almost every facet of talk, including person-referencing practices, speech acts, prosodic and gestural features, turn-taking procedures, the language selected, narrative, genres and style and stance relct identities and are used to build them.

Note: This explication of identity is adapted from the opening chapter in Tracy (forthcoming)

References
Antaki, C., & Widdicombe, S. (1998). Identities in Talk. London: Sage.
Benwell, B., & Stokoe, E. (2006). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row.
Grad, H., & Rojo, L. M. (2008). Identities in discourse: An integrative view. In R. Dolón & J. Todoli (Eds.). Analysing Identities in Discourse (pp. 3-28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ochs, E. (1993). Constructing social identity: A language socialization perspective. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26, 287-306.
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2007). Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics 39(4), 639-656.
Tracy, K., & Robles, J. S. (2013). Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford.
Tracy, K. (forthcoming). Discourse, Identity, and Social Change in the Marriage Equality Debates. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, D. H. (1998). Identity, context and interaction. In C. Antaki & S. Widdicombe (Eds.). Identities in Talk (pp. 87-106). London: Sage.