2。3 Identity Construction in Academic Verbal Interaction

Academic verbal interaction refers to seminars, lectures, teacher-student interactions, and many other genres, but there is relatively a lack of studies on identity construction in academic verbal interaction。 Two typical research papers concerning this aspect are chosen。 According to identity conception based on dialogue and social constructivism, Oliveira, et al。 (2007) pided experts’ pragmatic identities in teacher-student interaction into two categories: authoritative identity and professional identity。 Scientific instructors should systematically utilize the pragmatic function of language, in order to encourage students to recognize their authority。 Dr。 Ren Yuxin (2013) collected data from doctoral thesis proposal reports and demonstrated five identities in academic verbal interaction, including experts, teachers, advice recipients, researchers and laymen。 It was found that verbal communication was a dynamic process and also a strategy for interlocutors to  meet various communicative needs and adapt to perse contextual factors。文献综述

2。4 Other Researches on Academic Verbal Interaction

While studies on identity construction in academic verbal interaction is in minority, a majority of other researches on academic verbal interaction are available, such as Metadiscourse in Academic Lectures (Hu, 2007a, 2007b) from the perspective of discourse analysis, Implementation of Interlocutors’ Faces in Thesis Defense (Don & Izadi, 2011) from the perspective of speech act, etc。 

A conclusion can be drawn from the above literature review that the study and application of identity theory have yielded fruitful results。 There is a wide recognition that identity construction in verbal interaction is dynamic。 However, research of identity construction in academic verbal interaction is relatively limited in number and in scope。 This paper thus is expected to take advantage of corpus from the tenth Jiangsu university foreign language major’s postgraduate academic forum, aiming at enriching relative studies and hopefully providing some new perspectives and explanations。 

3 Research Methodology

3。1 Research Questions

The emphasis of this study is put on advice-givers’ identity construction in a certain context, so the following research questions are proposed:

(1) In the academic verbal interaction, which identities do experts mainly construct? (2) In the academic verbal interaction, which linguistic and pragmatic strategies do experts employ to construct these identities? (3) In the academic verbal interaction, what are the major pragmatic motivations for constructing identities?

3。2 Corpus Collection

From Nov。 21st to Nov。 22nd, the tenth Jiangsu university foreign language major’s postgraduate academic forum was held in Hohai University。 In the event, postgraduates were supposed to give reports in PPT about their researches before professors were expected to give advice on postgraduates’ research findings。 Some interactions between advice-givers and post-graduate students were recorded。 These ten video clips were transcribed into words, which form the corpus of this study。 Almost all words spoken by advice-givers and postgraduates are recorded in the text, except some non-verbal factors such as intonations and so forth, which will not make much difference to the results of this research。 To make it easier to analyze, certain specific transcription remarks are employed, for example, the experts’ name are substituted by T(n), like T1, T2, etc。 (See the details in Appendix A)。

4 Corpus Analysis

The default identity (Richards, 2006) of the expert is a professional and knowledgeable one although each expert may have different command of knowledge。 But sometimes, the identity will differ a lot from the expected one。 Experts choose to construct different pragmatic identities, which are to affect the chosen words (Chen Xinren, Li Mengxin, 2016)。 All these identities are several “selves” related to particular situations proposed by Tajfel and Turner’s (1986) social identity theory。 On account of academic context in this study, advice-givers’ identities could be pided into five types。