“I love red hair. My wife has strawberry” : Discursive strategies and social identity in the workplace

Coworkers are group members of the workplace community. They build their social identities through their verbal and nonverbal behaviors in everyday workplace practice. During small talk interactions, coworkers engage in specific discourses that serve to tell, and therefore, offer a self-definition of their behaviors within other groups, beyond the workplace. In other words, by telling their experiences as members of other groups, the speakers draw for the interlocutors the self-concept they want to (re)present within the workplace community. In order to convey this self-concept, speakers use determined, recursive linguistic patterns. In this chapter, two specific linguistic strategies are analyzed: my-relative strategy and I-feel-you strategy (Di Ferrante, Small talk at work: A corpus based discourse analysis of AAC and Non-AAC device users, 2013), which fulfill respectively the functions of validating statements—principle of authenticity—and displaying understanding—principle of sympathy. Using a discourse analysis approach within a social psychology framework, linguistic patterns are examined and shown to be exploited as tools used by speakers to build their social identities and affirm their positive image as members of the workplace community.