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.
Index Terms—Cyber discourse, elderly women, identity
construction, discourse markers, Ah
Dan Cui is with the School of International Cooperation and Education,
Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China.
Yaxuan Zhao is with the Department of Foreign Languages, Harbin
Engineering University, Harbin, China.
*Correspondence: zhaoyaxuan99@163.com (Y.Z.)
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Cite:Dan Cui and Yaxuan Zhao, "The Online Identity Construction of the Elderly Women— Take Chinese Discourse Marker “Ah” as an Example," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 242-247, 2023.