Strategically Constructed Identities: Hybridity of Self-Presentation and Changes in Belonging within One Speech Event

In this paper I argue for the dynamic nature of hybrid identities not only across changing situations and speakers but within the same speakers in the same speech event. My study is based on identification patterns emerging in the language use of seventeen Brussels based civil servant and lobbyist in similar types of semi-structured interviews. While this target group was rather homogenous in terms of racial and educational backgrounds, variation could be found across the backgrounds of the members in terms of national, supra-national, regional, political, institutional, linguistic, (broader) gender and ethnic belonging. The interview data was analyzed by means of corpus-driven systemic functional linguistics focusing of pronominal deixis and verbal semantics (Transitivity) and the findings indicate that various kinds of self-presentations and types of belonging were represented by the interviewees at different points of the interview situation. Furthermore, it seems that both the dynamism and hybridity of these constructions were strategically driven by the actual communicative goals of the speakers.