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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 8, No. 7
Publication Date: July 25, 2021
DOI:10.14738/assrj.87.10612. Li, Y. (2021). A Discourse Analysis of Zuckerberg’s Pragmatic Identities’ Construction Based on Adaptation Theory. Advances in
Social Sciences Research Journal, 8(7). 369-380.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
A Discourse Analysis of Zuckerberg’s Pragmatic Identities’
Construction Based on Adaptation Theory
Yuxin Li
School of English for International Business
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China
ABSTRACT
People construct different pragmatic identities in everyday talk and the process of
building identities usually adapts to the context. To be specific, entrepreneurs
represents himself and the company when uttering to the outside society and the
construction of entrepreneur’s identity is related to the company’s image. They are
inclined to use intertextuality resources to build connection with the potential
audience. Therefore, in this research, the author analyzed an entrepreneur’s speech
discourse to describe what pragmatic identities are constructed and how does the
construction adapt to the speaking context. To answer these questions, the author
conducted a discourse analysis to illustrate relationship between the language use
and physical, social and mental world based on Adaptation Theory. The results
presented that the entrepreneur builds various master identities, interpersonal
identities, and personal identities with intertextuality language resources to adjust
to the speaking context. This study suggested that entrepreneurs are supposed to
improve the skill of manipulating their discourse strategies to build close
connection with potential listener.
Key words: pragmatic identities; Adaptation Theory; intertextuality; graduation speech
INTRODUCTION
Identity plays a vital part in our communication. As a research area, it gains much attention
from philosophy, sociology, social psychology, culture studies and literary criticism (Yuan,
2008). In the past, from the perspective of the traditional essentialism, researchers tend to refer
people’s identity as fixed and presupposed. Social constructionism holds a rather more popular
statement that identity is dynamic and could be constructed, negotiated, managed and
communicated (Chen, 2013). Just as other disciplines, pragmatics linguists conducted
researches on identity based on social constructionism. Those studies focus on the
representation, practice and even make-up of social identities in the context of language
communication, which presupposes that participants in the conversation may construct one or
more different identities from their original identities considering their owns needs. To
distinguish with the original identity and highlight the process or effect of construction,
identities created or just mentioned by both speakers and listeners in some certain context are
referred to “pragmatic identity” or “identity in use” (Chen, 2013). In the studies of identities
construction, several types of discourses are highly preferred respectively as daily
conversation, organizational discourse and corporate discourse (Yuan, 2013).
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Adaptation Theory (Verschueren, 1999) considers the process of language use as making
choices (He, 2007). Three key notions are included in the process of making choices: variability,
negotiation and adaptability. Verschueren (1999: 68) noted that the dynamics of adaptability
is no doubt the central task of most specific pragmatic investigation. Dynamics concerns the
nature and development over time of the relationship between context and structure.
Therefore, language and its pragmatic function are not clearly corelated and the process of
realizing pragmatic functions becomes negotiable because of the varied context.
In this article, the author will apply the Adaptation Theory to illustrate how the pragmatic
identities are constructed in Zuckerberg’s public speech at Harvard’s graduation ceremony.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Pragmatic identities
Until the beginning of the 21th century, researches on pragmatic identities have rarely been
seen at home. Articles about identity construction mainly focus on the final construction of
certain identities rather than the variability and negotiability of identities. Therefore, the
salience and characteristics of pragmatic perspective couldn’t be exhaustively shown. In 2011,
the definition of pragmatic identity was proposed and had a huge influence on lots of
researchers (Yuan, 2011). Since then, many scholars make attempts to explore the construction
of speakers’ pragmatic identities in various kinds of discourses such as daily conversation,
organizational discourse, media discourse, business discourse and academic discourse. Firstly,
academic discourses are relatively popular, researchers analyzed the identity construction
from pragmatic perspective and collected data from academic conversation or interactions
with tutors, lectures in universities, abstracts of Master thesis, acknowledgement of Doctor
thesis, and MC (master of ceremony) scripts of academic meetings and forums etc. (Sun, 2015,
Xu & Chen, 2015, Chen, 2016, Li, 2016, Ren, 2016, Li & Jing, 2019). Secondly, analysis of daily
conversations also gained a lot of attention. For instance, Yuan ang Chen (2013) explores the
medical consulting discourse to see how the consultants construct their pragmatic identities.
Besides, some researchers analyzed business discourse such as business consulting
conversation (Yuan, 2013) and commercials (Wang, 2015) to describe speakers’ identities. The
literature above proves that speakers interacting with the other party often construct various
pragmatic identities based on different context. However, entrepreneurial discourse, whose
audience or listeners are different stakeholders, is always used as a tool to build close
relationship with potential customers, seem to be neglected in the research area.
Years passed after the definition of pragmatic identity was given, researchers couldn’t
consolidate their ideas and researches didn’t showcase the pragmatic characteristics. Thus,
there is no significant difference with other disciplines that also pay attention to identity
construction, which is not good for the growth of pragmatics. To better highlight the features
of pragmatics, Chen (2014) concluded five research approaches. Among those approaches, the
key role of context was mentioned. Adaptation theory, as a basic framework in Pragmatics,
argues that the process of language use is making choices and underline the influence of
context. Therefore, adaptation theory could be persuasively applied to the construction of
pragmatic identities.
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Li, Y. (2021). A Discourse Analysis of Zuckerberg’s Pragmatic Identities’ Construction Based on Adaptation Theory. Advances in Social Sciences
Research Journal, 8(7). 369-380.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.87.10612
Entrepreneurial discourse
There are varied categories in entrepreneurial discourse such as letters to shareholders in CSR
reports or annual reports and public speeches. Compared to written discourse, spoken
discourse like speeches are more interactive with the audience. For example, there is trend that
universities prefer to invite entrepreneurs to give graduation speeches. Actually, graduation
speeches have been a research hit in the past decade. Previous studies on graduation speeches
at home could be broadly divided into several parts given its research perspective, such as
cognitive linguistics, systemic functional linguistics (SFL), pragmatic linguistics and stylistics.
From cognitive point of view, metaphor in those speeches are analyzed to see how does it work
(Yang, 2018). For SFL, there are studies that tend to analyze the interpersonal functions of
graduation speeches (Li & Yang, 2011, Zhang, 2018, Liang, 2019), investigate grammatical
metaphors which plays a key role in structure the text (He, 2018) and evaluate language
resources from graduation speeches with appraisal system (Li, 2017; Zhang, 2017). For
pragmatics, researchers tried to explain how the speaker uses metadiscourse to boost the
understanding of audience and realize appealing function (Chen, 2014). Also, some researchers
study the writing style, appeals and structure from the aspect of stylistics (Hou, 2012; Mei,
2013).
Entrepreneurial identity
The word “entrepreneur” origins from French and it refers to the operator or organizer of a
certain venture. One French economist Shire Kantilon defined entrepreneur as someone who
could exploit the potential business opportunity and make achievements in the market. Identity
is an expression of self and is how individuals define and locate themselves within individual,
relational and organizational contexts (Newbery et al., 2018). Thus, an entrepreneurial identity
may be regarded as when individuals “see and talk of themselves as entrepreneurs” (Down &
Reveley, 2004: 234).
The researches of entrepreneurial identities could be conducted from many perspectives such
as macro-economics, organization theory, management, social constructionism and linguistics
and sometimes the researches intend to combine two of the theoretical perspectives. For the
entrepreneurial identity studies abroad, there is a tendency from the predominately
quantitative and psychologically based studies that have tried to pin down “what leadership is”
to a discursive approach to leadership that focuses on “how leadership is achieved as practice”
(Fairhurst & Uhl-Bien, 2012). For instance, many scholars took an interest on the influence of
narrative or stories on the construction of entrepreneurial identities (Watson, 2009; Anderson,
2011; Clifton & Jonathan, 2014). Furthermore, Clarke and Holt (2017) made an attempt to
analyze the how entrepreneurs use visual metaphor to make sense of their entrepreneurial
identity by the drawing methodology. However, studies at home mainly focus on the effect of
entrepreneurial identity on economic growth and corporate performance (Gao, 2011; Dai,
2020) and there is very limited literature at home represents the contribution of linguistic
perspective to the study of entrepreneurial identities.
To conclude, the amount of literature that scrutinize the construction of pragmatic identities in
entrepreneurial discourse is limited. Therefore, in this article, the author will make an analysis
of Zuckerberg’s graduation speech in Harvard University to examine constructed identities
based on adaptation theory. To be specific, three questions will be answered after the analysis:
(1) What pragmatic identities are constructed in Zuckerberg’s graduation speech?
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(2) How does the language device of intertextuality be used?
(3) How does the property of adaptation work to construct Zuckerberg’s pragmatic identity?
METHODOLOGY
In this section, the author will make a specific description on how the research was conducted
in terms of data collection and data analysis.
Data collection procedure
This article intends to scrutinize how does Zuckerberg construct his pragmatic identities in
public speeches. Although he has given lots of speeches in different scenarios, here only one of
them is chosen as the research subject. The researcher finds that the graduation speech of
Zuckerberg in Harvard University is worth of more attention. As known to all, a group of top
talents in different disciplines floods into Harvard every year, which means that the operation
of Harvard is connected with the development of American society. Thus, the graduation
speeches of this school usually get much attention from society. In 2017, Zuckerberg was
invited to Harvard and made a public research and the whole speech could be divided into two
parts. In the first half, he guided everyone to recall those wonderful memories that they made
in Harvard. And then Mark persuaded graduates of 2017 the importance of “purpose” from
three aspects.
To better conduct the research, the author downloaded the video of Zuckerberg’s speech in
Harvard University and then transcribed it into text. The whole text contains 3927 words and
the author locates 28 vertical intertextuality resources.
Data analysis procedure
This research adopts a discourse analysis to explore how does Zuckerberg construct his
pragmatic identities in his public speech. From the micro perspective, among all the language
resources that are used in the discourse, the researcher will focus on the resources of
intertextuality because it is very common and effective for the speaker to refer other discourse
to evoke the audience existing knowledge so that the interaction between them could be well- established. From the meso perspective, the author is going to apply the Adaptation Theory to
illustrate how does these intertextuality resources adapt to the context of physical, social and
mental world. From the macro perspective, this article tries to scrutinize what pragmatic
identities does Zuckerberg construct by using those language resources based on the Tracy’s
(2013) categorization of identities.
Adaptation Theory
The reason for choosing Adaptation Theory as the link between the language resources and the
context is that it considers pragmatic problem from a different aspect compared to the
traditional views. Verschueren argues that pragmatics is "a general cognitive, social, and
cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior ".
Verschueren (1999:55-57) believes that the use of language is a process of continuous making
of choices, consciously or unconsciously. Those choices could be located at many levels of
linguistic form: phonetic/phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and semantic.
Participants make those choices among various language resources to satisfy their own
communication needs in specific context. Speakers are allowed to make all those choices or
selections is language’s variability, negotiability and adaptability. Firstly, variability is the
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Li, Y. (2021). A Discourse Analysis of Zuckerberg’s Pragmatic Identities’ Construction Based on Adaptation Theory. Advances in Social Sciences
Research Journal, 8(7). 369-380.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.87.10612
property of language which defines the range of possibilities from which choices can be made
(Verschueren, 1999: 59). Hymes also stressed that “in the study of language as a mode of action,
variation is a clue and key” (1974: 75). Then it comes to the negotiability, according to
Verschueren (1999: 59), negotiability is the property of language responsible for the fact that
choices are not made mechanically or according to strict rules and fixed form-function
relationships, but rather on the basis of highly flexible principles and strategies, which means
that the negotiation of those language choices is based eminently on flexibility of conventions
and propositions. Adaptability, in Verschueren (1999:61)’s words, is the property of language
which enables human beings to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range of
possibilities in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs.
In communications, speakers make choices of their language to construct pragmatic identities
and those choices are supposed to adapt to the communicative context. If the Adaptability
Theory is put forward to explain speaker’s intention and purpose in communicative context,
then questions like “what exactly does those choices adapt to?” should be answered.
Verschueren (1999: 75) made a sketch of the ingredients of communicative context showing
the factors involved. After viewing the sketch of general picture of what are involved,
ingredients of the communicative context could be summarized as language users, physical
world, mental world and social world. To be specific, language users refer to the utter(U) and
interpreter(I). Physical world consists of elements such as temporal reference, spatial reference
and utter and interpreter in the physical world, as well as the gesture, physical appearance and
biological property. The social world is composed of power, distance, rights and obligation,
social setting and culture, also, some other parts such as religion, level of education, gender or
social class. For mental world, aspects like personality, emotions, beliefs, desire and wishes are
covered. Apart from those, there is another contextual objects of adaptability and it deserves
some attention. Linguistic context make allusions of choice making of communicated forms and
it pointed out the effect of contextual cohesion, intertextuality and sequencing.
The analytical framework
Discourse analysis attached importance to social, cultural and historic context towards
discourse structure and strategies, which points out communication couldn’t work well without
the consideration of context. The author think that the construction of pragmatic identities also
couldn’t live without context. Thus, the author conducts a discourse analysis by using
Adaptation Theory as the meso level analysis and the analytical framework of this study is
shown as follows: