汉语新闻语篇中老人形象的话语建构(3)
As a special platform, the newspaper media plays a special role in constructing images. Plenty of research is concerned with this special role-The press is increasingly responsible for supplying the information and images through which we understand our lives (Hall, 1977). "For any social movement, the media play a crucial role in shaping public consciousness and public policy" (Gitlin, 1980, p. 7). "Journalists' standard framing devices of selection, exclusion, emphasis, and tone can profoundly affect cultural perceptions" (Gerbner, 1978, p. 16). "All too often, the press achieves 'balance' by presenting extreme positions on both sides of a complicated question" (Deborah, 1995, p. 701). These media deficiencies not only emerged exteriorly, but also interiorly. Xie (2013) has pointed out three defects in newspaper reports-trivialization, entertainment and homogenization, along with the solutions that the media of people's livelihood should pay attention to their responsibilities and lead the direction of public opinion correctly.
However, these analyses are not completely perfect. Most essays about aging identities from linguistics aspect appear in the field of literature, while few in news reports. Tang (2012) studies the positive discourse on the identity representation of the vulnerable group. In Dai's (2014) study mentions the post heroization concluded by analyzing the metaphors, selective narrative, metonymy narrative, the third person narrative perspective and visual symbols. Except for the lack of linguistics analyses in news reports, researches pay little attention to the different problems confronted with by old males and females. Those mention the current living conditions and problems of females are only in the field of demography, such as Liu's (2000) "The Current Condition of Females in Advanced Age and Our Responsibilities", and Wang's (2005) "Research on Problems of City Women in Advanced Age and the Reflection".
2.2 Studies on Discourse Construction of Identities
From the aspect of definition, Blake and Fred (1995) pointed out that "social identity" is a convention belonging to a group of people and originated from the classification of inpiduals, the characteristics and prestige of the group, the features of the outgroup and other elements associated with group identity constructing. "Social identity" can cause a series of activities accordingly, support the institution containing identities, bring the results of others' typical attitudes and the formation of the group, and strengthen the former identity construction. This opinion is applied to organizational socialization, the role conflict and the inner relations of the group. Jenkins (1996) thinks that "social identity" existed in the power relations through which it presented itself. Qian (2000) regards the "identity" as the connection between people and the cultural world they live. Xiang (2009) defines "identity", "social identity" and "identity construction" in her essay. "Identity" is the construction of people's self experiences and social status in cultural contexts. "Social identity" is the member's identity in the social group he or she belongs to. "Identity construction" is a continuous process of self defining and self correcting and language has the function of identity construction. Besides, Wang (2009) concludes the development of the word "identity" and focused on the related research on social identity theories.
From the classification of the researches, the perspectives of identity constructing researches are: (1) dialogue, narrative, speeches, media discourses and political discourses assorted by the forms of identity construction; (2) sexual identity, racial and national identity, inter ethnic identity, social identity, cultural identity, inpidual identity and identity crisis assorted by types of identities constructed; (3) the interdisciplinary research among philosophy, sociology, linguistics assorted by different focuses; (4) the view of culture, social culture, socialized language, critical discourse analysis assorted by different research angles (Xiang, 2009). Besides the four categories, from the theoretical perspective, there are six detailed classification: (1) in linguistics, the behaviors in the contexts and the context itself are emphasized and identity is considered as a result of acting properly conforming to the conventions in different contexts; (2) in psycholinguistics, the psychological cause of the formation of aspect is the recognition and rejection of the identity; (3) in communicative social linguistics, language is constructing the social identity at every second in concrete communicative activities; (4) in communities of practice mode, people adjust their verbal behavior, consult and construct their social identities in language practice; (5) in developmental psychology, people construct, maintain and alter their identities on each of the life stages; (6) in critical discourse analyses, it reveals the dialectic relationship of language and identity, and people can conform to or violate the regulations of discourses and choose the aspect to construct identity consciously (Gu & Li, 2007).