A Critical Pragmatic Perspective on Identity Construction through Non-Verbal Evidentiality in Cyber Rumors

Abstract

In the era of wide use of social media , cyber rumors often construct false “chains of evidence” by strategically employing non-verbal symbols such as images, audio, and video, making them significantly more deceptive than text-only versions. Integrating Critical Pragmatics and Pragmatic Identity Theory, this study examines how cyber rumors strategically manipulate non-verbal evidential resources to co-construct fabricated “evidential chains” and corresponding “credible identities”. The research finds that cyber rumors extensively utilize multimodal resources, such as image modality to create an illusion of empirical evidence, format/layout symbols to appropriate institutional authority, video modality for spatio-temporal manipulation, and fabricated follower counts as quantitative “social proof”. These strategies falsely construct identities such as pseudo-authoritative institutions, pseudo-eyewitnesses, pseudo-victim advocates, pseudo-scientific experts, and pseudo-internal informants. Fundamentally, these identity constructions violate the maxims of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and subvert the identity appropriateness and sincerity conditions of speech acts. By creating an “illusion of empirical evidence” through multimodal synergy, they erode the public’s ability to judge the authenticity of symbols. This study is expected to expand the multimodal dimension of evidentiality theory, deepen the linguistic explanation of cyber rumor dissemination mechanisms, and provide novel analytical perspectives for rumor identification and governance.