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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
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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
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The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 293 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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