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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:
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Figure 1: The analytical framework
RESULTS
This section presents the results of the analysis and the first two research questions will be
answered. It begins with scanning the distribution of intertextual resources in the data, and
then proceeds to summarize what pragmatic identities are constructed. Due to space
constraints, the presentation of intertextual resources will focus on the most crucial ones.
General distribution of intertextual resources
The first research question is about the distribution of intertextual resources. After scanning
the whole speech, 28 intertextual resources are located and here some significant examples are
presented. The speaker adopts various intertextual language resources during the graduation
speech, such as quotation, presupposition, reference etc. Some examples of intertextuality are
given as follows:
a) I'm honored to be with you today because, let's face it, you accomplished something I
never could. If I get through this speech, it'll be the first time I actually finish something
at Harvard.
b) That movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t.
c) Oh, you know what else movies get wrong about innovation? No one writes math
formulas on glass. Okay? All right. Okay?
d) How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of
people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases
and getting people involved by asking volunteers to track their health data and share
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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
their genomes? You know, today our society spend more than 50 times as much treating
people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place.
It makes no sense. We can fix this. How about modernizing democracy so everyone can
vote online, and how about personalizing education so everyone can learn?
e) J.K. Rowling got rejected 12 times before publishing Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to
make hundreds of songs to get Halo.
f) I am reminded of a prayer, MiShebeirach, that I say whenever I face a challenge, that I
sing to my daughter thinking about her future when I tuck her at night.
The above examples are chosen because they represent intertextuality in interdiscursive
dimension. Interdiscursivity refers to those text resources exists interdiscursively such as
different types of genres, discourses, and styles. In speech, the application of interdiscursivity
could help to build connection with the common knowledge that the speaker and audience
share.
Types of pragmatic identities constructed in Zuckerberg’s speech
The second research question is about the pragmatic identities of Zuckerberg. In Tracy’s (2013)
categorization, people’s identities are composed of master identity, interactional identity and
personal identity.
Master identities refer to aspects of personhood that are presumed to be relatively stable and
unchanging: gender, ethnicity, age, national and regional origins. Interactional identities refers
to specific roles that people take on in a communicative context with regard to specific other
people (Tracy 2002). Personal identities include features of self that are treated as relatively
stable, even though they may vary from situation to situation. Also, People’s relationship with
others are classified into personal personal identities too, such as warm or hostile; equal,
superior, or subordinate; close or distant. According to this categorization approach, the
pragmatic identities Zuckerberg constructed are shown in table 1:
Table 1. Pragmatic identities constructed during the speech
Types of pragmatic
identities
The specific identities
1 Master identity Male, white, American, 33-year-old (in 2017), born in Judaism
2 Interactional identity Harvard student, entrepreneur, philanthropist, millennials
3 Personal identity Personality: humorous, loving, friendly, easy-going
Relational identities: equal, close
This table indicates that the construction of people’s identity could be both dynamic and static.
Master identities are more fixed but interactional and personal identities are always varied
based on specific situation or context.
DISCUSSION
From the last chapter, the author makes an investigation about the pragmatic identities that
Mark constructed in this public graduation speech and stresses the application of one language
devices——intertextuality. In the following section, the second and third research questions
will be answered. How does the language device of intertextuality be used? How does the
property of adaptation work to construct Zuckerberg’s pragmatic identity?
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Intertextuality contribution
In this part, the author will analyze those 6 instances listed in last section and make an
illustration about how the speaker use intertextuality to build connection with the audience.
In (a), the audience burst into laughter after Mark says “you accomplished something I never
could”, which might be a confusing scenario for those who know nothing about Mark’s legend
as a Harvard student. Apparently, on one hand, graduates of 2017 have a knowledge that Mark
dropped out from this university before getting the bachelor’s degree in order to pull himself
into his career in Facebook. Thus, the present all achieve something that Mark could not:
graduating from Harvard. On the other hand, this sentence also implies Mark’s remarkable
performance on social network but Mark himself is too humble to describe his life to be perfect
or defectless just because he establishes Facebook.
Sentence (b) and (c) both mention a movie which seems to be acknowledged by everyone for
Mark even doesn’t need to speak its name. As a matter of fact, the name of this movie is called
“Social Network” and it tells the story of Zuckerberg setting up Facebook just like an
autobiography. Although this creation does win several prizes as a movie, it obtains many
criticisms from the society for its adaptation to the original story. In this public speech, Mark
itself even bashes it for being to ideal like portraying him to be someone who writes formulas
on glass.
Sentence (d) takes this public speech to a climax even his wife Priscilla gives a big hand to him
with tears in her eyes. By using a parallel of interrogative sentences, Mark enumerates a list of
challenges that the whole world are confronted with such as global climate change, incurable
diseases and unequal education and calls for some actions or contributions from the graduates
of the greatest university in the world. The reason why the audience have such a big reaction is
that the mentioned problems are exactly those obstacles that prevent our society from being a
better world.
In sentence (e), Mark points out two leading figures who are both very well-know and
successful in the area of literature and music, which is a exemplification to persuade all the
students to face their own failures with courage.
Sentence (f) might be a difficult point of view to be understood by people believing in other
religions. MiShebeirach is a prayer for healing said during a Torah service in Judaism. A “mi
sheberach” is a public prayer or blessing for an individual or group, most often recited in
synagogue when the Torah is being read. Because it is not an officially mandated prayer, there
is a lot of room for creativity regarding whom to bless or how they can be blessed. Thus, there
are MiShebeirach for just about any person in need of some divine goodness—most notably
those requiring healing. In this speech, Mark uses this prayer as a blessing to everyone present
and wish them find the courage to make their lives a blessing.
Pragmatic identity construction
In the last section, the author lists the constructed pragmatic identities of Zuckerberg in the
speech: mater identity, interactional identity, and personal identity. In this part, an explanation
will be given to illustrate how does Adaptation Theory work in the process of construction.
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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
Identity construction
Though there are many pragmatic identities being constructed in the speech, the author only
takes the interactional identities into consideration because this kind of identities change
dynamically adapting to the communication context.
(1) Harvard student
As a dropout from Harvard University, Mark’s identity as a student is constructed in the first
half of the speech. To build the connection with the audience, Mark brings back every Harvard
students the memories they made there by asking two questions: “How many of you remember
exactly what you were doing when you got that email telling you that you got into Harvard?
How many of you remember your first lecture at Harvard?” Two simple investigations make
the present students feel grateful and proud to Harvard University. Most importantly, the title
of “graduates of the greatest university in the world” wins a huge applause from the audience,
which reminds those graduates of their intelligence and ability, and lays a good foundation for
Mark’s latter speech of their responsibility to the whole world.
(2) Millennial
Millennial, roughly refers to young people who grow up in this new age. This group of people is
given great responsibility considering all the challenges they are confronted with in this fast- moving society. In Mark’s speech, he highly stresses the common role of millennial that he and
the audience share and some requirements are made to do some variations to the world and
make it a better place. To start with, they are accountable to create new purpose for the society.
For instance, more and more jobs and positions are taken by the technology of Artificial
Intelligence and the generation where people could be safe with one stable work in their whole
life has gone. Thus, the human being faces a risk of losing loads of values and millennials are
supposed to help create new purpose not for themselves but for everyone. What’s more, it’s of
great importance for millennials to redefine the definition of equality. “Previous generations
fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. ” A new social
contract should be signed to adapt to the new condition of the society. Last but not least, one of
the common sense reached by millennials is that they are accustomed to call themselves
“citizen of the world”. Millennial’s horizon should not be limited to some specific countries or
religions given that the globe share a great part of benefits and also face plenty of same
problems, such as global climate, incurable diseases and the inequality of education. As a
millennial, with the enormous resources from this information society, responsibility should be
taken over to make some changes.
(3) Entrepreneur
As it is known to everyone that Zuckerberg is recognized for his creation of social network
platform——Facebook. Thus, faced with such a group of talents who are very likely to change
the U.S. and even the world. Zuckerberg constructed his pragmatic identity as a entrepreneur.
During his speech, three points are given to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit of those
graduates. First and foremost, by telling his own stories, he reminds people of the uncertainty
of success. At the very beginning, Mark just intended to create a community where college
students or friends could be gathered around and Facebook represents something bigger or
some higher purpose. He says in the speech, “If I had to know everything about connecting
people before I got started, I never would have built Facebook.” Secondly, entrepreneurs have
the freedom to lose. Before establishing Facebook, Mark went through much failure such as the
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attempt of building chat systems, games, study tools and music players. Finally, he criticizes the
social system of not providing protective backups for those who may fail in the process of
starting up business and afterwards he calls for support for entrepreneurs from the society.
(4) Philanthropist
Except being a successful entrepreneur, Mark takes another important role, which is also
constructed during this public speech——philanthropist. His protection and assistance
towards the society mainly focus on two groups: entrepreneurs and teenagers who are not
permitted to receive equal education. For the former, the author mentioned before that young
and inexperienced entrepreneurs are supposed to obtain financial support from the society and
of course those service is by no means to be free. Just as Mark says, “People like me should pay
for it.” For the latter, this action is closely connected to Mark and his wife’s program: Chan
Zukerberg Initiative. Being greatly influenced by his wife, Priscilla, Mark makes two hours of
his time every week to teach teenagers about product development and marketing. By the time
of this speech, those kids have been the first generation in their families to be allowed to enter
universities.
Adaptation
(1) Adaptation to the physical world
Given that the target audience of this speech are millennials, Mark accentuates the
responsibility that this specific era has taken to them. Millennials refer to the group people who
become 18 at the beginning of 21 century and their growth basically complies with the
advancement of Internet or computer science. Born from 1984 to 1995, those people are
regarded as one generation who are capable of operating several different work at the same
time, whose mind are flexible enough to make full use of the technology to extend their strength.
Hence, Mark reminds those graduates of their virtues and obligations as a millennial and
encourages them to explore their own potentials, which adapts to the physical world of this era.
(2) Adaptation to the social world
The graduation speech is the last lesson that students take during their stay in university. In
this kind of significant moment, Mark is invited to give this lecture and helps those graduates
be ready for getting into society and the competitive world outside. During this speech, except
from recalling memories which are made in Harvard, Mark gives an account of the essentials of
getting everyone a sense of purpose by enumerating the approaches: by taking on big
meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue
purpose, and by building community all across the world. Mark’s speaking subject closely
adapts to the social world.
(3) Adaptation to the mental world
After listening to Mark’s speech, the audience could feel that this young and successful
entrepreneur is not arrogant or serious at all but humorous, loving and friendly, which leaves
a deep impression on the audience. Also, by observing his interactions with Priscilla on Internet,
it is easy to conclude that he is a caring husband and loving father. Hence, this graduation
speech transfers a light of humanity and warmth to the audience, which adapts to Mark’s mental
world.
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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
Summary
From the above discussion, it could be concluded that the construction of pragmatic identities
adapts to physical, social and mental world, which also indicates that the process of identity
construction is dynamic and context-dependent.
CONCLUSION
This research investigates the construction of pragmatic identities by studying the language
device of intertextuality from the perspective of Adaptation Theory in Zuckerberg’s speech by
discourse analysis. After the exploration, the author makes the following observations.
First and foremost, during the speech, Zuckerberg constructed several varied pragmatic
identities such as master identity, interactional identity, and personal identity. Among all of
those, interactional identity such as Harvard student, entrepreneur, philanthropist, millennials
and personal identity such as humorous, loving, friendly, easy-going, equal, close are
constructed adapting to the outside world. Secondly, to build a connection with the audience,
Mark wields the language device of intertextuality, which indicates that his speech discourse is
combined with many other discourses from different genres and styles. In the end, according
to Adaptation Theory, people’s speech acts are tightly related to the communicative
environment and Mark’s speech content is indeed adapting to the existing physical, social, and
mental world.
The significance of this study lies in that it analyzed entrepreneur’s identity from a dynamic
perspective based on adaptation theory in a written discourse. It also reminds speaker of the
value of intertextuality when building connection with the potential listener. However, the
author must admit the limitation of this research. Only one entrepreneur’s speech was explored
to illustrate his construction of pragmatic identities, which may lead to a more personal result.
In the future, a quantitative method such as corpus analysis could be applied to assist this
research by enlarging the database and makes it more objective.
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