Image Construction and Interactive Strategies in Social Live Broadcast from the Perspective of Transitivity—Taking a Dialogue Between IShowSpeed and a Shaoxing Girl as an Example

Abstract

Creators attract the audience with their unique narrative perspective and become “Internet celebrities” in we-media era. Influencers construct narratives through language, thus affecting the audience. IShowSpeed is a mega influencer with more than 37 million followers on YouTube. This study analyzes a conversation between IShowspeed and a Shaoxing girl in his China trip live-streaming. Transitivity system in systemic functional grammar is the analytical framework to explore the distribution of the transitivity processes and discuss images established by two speakers. Then interactive strategies used by IShowSpeed in the live broadcast are summarized. The study found that transitivity processes contained in the dialogue from most to least are relational process, mental process, verbal process, material process, and behavioral process. IShowSpeed and that Shaoxing girl showed their positive images to the audience through transitivity processes. IShowSpeed uses interactive strategies such as reshaping identity, mental empathy, verbal citation, diverting attention and objective statements to guide Shaoxing girl to make correct attribution and reflect the emotional governance function of live-streaming language. The transitivity processes help the girl to re-understand herself and also reconstruct the group’s understanding of childlike voice, reflecting the reconstruction of personal identity and group relationships by live-streaming interaction in we-media era.