The Online Identity Construction of the Elderly Women— Take Chinese Discourse Marker “Ah” as an Example

Abstract

Recently, the registration of the elder user in cyberspace roses repeatedly. More and more old people prefer to realize self-expression through the Internet, among which the elderly woman is the majority. Based on self-constructed corpus, this paper examines the pragmatic functions of the Chinese discourse marker “Ah”, and discusses what kinds of pragmatic identity has been constructed. This paper discovers that, on the one hand, discourse marker “Ah” realizes topic organization function and interpersonal function; on the other hand, “ah” assists the elderly in constructing female identity, expert identity, elder identity and peer identity, and sometimes a compound identity of real and virtual identities so as to narrow the psychological distance with the audience and achieve the communicative purpose.