Pragmatic Identity Construction from the Perspective of Adaptation Theory --- A Case Study of Hillary Clinton in the First TV Debate of the 2016 US Presidential Election

The identity of the communicator could get involved in the process of speech acts, and the identity changes with the dynamics of the context during the communication process. The communicator has a dynamic identity, i.e., his or her discursive identity. The article takes the Adaptation Theory as a theoretical framework, and the corpus is selected from the first televised debate of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to explore what kind of discursive identity Hillary constructed in that debate. Hillary constructs dynamic discursive identities such as politician, presidential candidate, and debater by conforming to physical, psychological, and social contexts. Hillary, as a communicator, consciously chose her words to participate in the debate, highlighting different discursive identities and reflecting different communicative purposes.