Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy

This article illuminates the social nature of bureaucratic practice. Analyzing the everyday speech of bureaucrats in a polyglossic society reveals both their intensely interactive conduct and their recognition that the government they comprise is itself a participant in a social world of institutions and values. My ethnography shows how Taipei city government administrators mobilize ideologies associated with Taiwan’s two primary languages, and stereotypes associated with bureaucracy, to undermine both. Instead, they present themselves as a post-ethnonational and post-bureaucratic avant garde of their new democracy. In doing so, they draw on local values and tropes of legitimation, which place a premium on the personalistic relations and social imbrications of government actors — relations that democracy, for all its potential to spawn dangerous chaos, is seen to facilitate. They represent their government employer not by claiming a superordinate status for it, but by situating it as one participant within a complex of institutions, networks, and values. In illuminating both the internally and the externally social nature of government bureaucracy, I highlight the creative and progressive possibilities hidden within the drab government office

Chinese Male Homosexual Identity Construction on Yaba(丫吧)

Jianshangdejiaoyaba (肩上的脚丫吧), also known as Yaba (丫吧), is a forum on the Chinese website Baidu Tieba (百度贴吧) containing stories and questions from users that focus on homosexual experience and identity in China. The members of the forum communicate using Linyu (淋语), a form of Chinese Internet Language (CIL). This thesis seeks to understand why and how Yaba (丫吧) users use the word ji (鸡: chicken) and female kinship terms, two prominent features of Linyu (淋语). The research uses methodologies in virtual ethnography to conceptualize Yaba (丫吧) as a research site. To better understand the research site and the experience of the research subjects, information on the Chinese homosexual experience is provided. In addition, Linyu (淋语) is placed within the greater context of CIL. Posts from the forum are analyzed to understand why users are using ji (鸡) and female kinship terms. The research revealed that users use these expressions to shorten social distance and construct a group homosexual identity on Yaba (丫吧)

Verbal attacks in Taiwan's political talk shows

[[abstract]]The phenomenon of political talk show is a hotly discussed, debated, and often criticized issue. Previous studies have pointed out that entertainment and confrontation are two main features of the political talk show. However, these studies did not probe into how entertainment or confrontation is achieved by linguistic devices in discourse. This present paper is a data-driven study of how the participants in political talk shows employ verbal attack to degrade others and create entertaining effects. We chose three political talk shows in Taiwan as our databank: 2100 People All Talk (2100 全民開講), News Night Club (新聞夜總會), and News Google (新聞孤狗). The linguistic tokens for verbal aggression in the three programs are collected and then analyzed. The result showed that verbal attack tokens covered almost all levels of linguistics, including phonology, morphology, lexicology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. These diversified verbal attacks not only enable the host and guests to denigrate their opponents’ ability and personality but also build conversational humor and reinforce in-group solidarity. In terms of the frequency of verbal attack, the three talk shows did not show salient difference, but they were different when it comes to the quality and style of the verbal vilification. In general, News Night Club was found to be more humorous, more diversified and less formal in language use, while the verbal attacks in 2100 People All Talk were more direct. Additionally, the atmosphere in 2100 People All Talk was more formal and conflicting. For example, the same linguistic strategy made by the same speaker in News Night Club created collected laughter while the effect of humor did not show up in 2100 People All Talk. We also found out that talk shows which have similar political bias do not necessarily reveal similar styles of rhetorical devices. Although News Night Club and 2100 People All Talk are both anti-DPP talk shows, their styles in terms of verbal attack were not the same. At last, the quality and quantity of verbal attack in News Google are usually between News Night Club and 2100 People All Talk.

Second generation internal immigrants' bilingual practices and identity construction in Guangzhou, China

Since China’s Economic Reform in 1978, there has been huge internal population mobility. The setting of this research, Guangzhou, is one of the cities that host the largest number of immigrants, and the dominant local speech, Cantonese, is unintelligible to immigrants who speak other language varieties, including China’s official language Putonghua. Since 2010 debates have arisen on the relationship between the state language policy of Putonghua Promotion which has been launched and implemented for sixty years and the narrower space for Cantonese use. A major discourse employed in the debates is concerned with immigrants associated with a Putonghua identity as a threat to Cantonese. There is little research on how the interaction between local language beliefs and the state language ideologies underlying Putonghua Promotion may influence immigrants’ life experiences and identities. This study investigates second generation immigrants’ bilingual practices and identity construction in individual and small-group interviews conducted in restaurants or cafes. I drew on critical discourse studies (Reisigl and Wodak, 2016) to examine participants’ use of discursive strategies in narratives of language-use-related life stories to construct social identities. I also use a framework integrating a sequential approach to conversation analysis (Auer, 1995) and membership categorisation analysis (Sacks, 1986b) to explore the role of code choices in accomplishing linguistic identities in interview conversations and naturally occurring service encounters. Adopting Jenkins’s (2008) notion of internal-external dialectics of identification, I found that immigrant participants’ identities can be understood as constantly negotiating categories imposed or assigned by others and managing diverse self-identifications in interactions. They resisted, challenged or re-defined an imposed derogatory category, laau, which was connected to their use of Putonghua in schools, workplaces, and other situations and to discrimination against them. They claimed their competence in using Cantonese for the negotiation of the categorization. They aligned with hybrid and complex social groups, and celebrated the seemingly contradictory but unique self-identifications. Meanwhile, they used Cantonese to align themselves with Cantonese speakers and distanced themselves from Putonghua speakers in group interview conversations, while in individual interviews they used Putonghua to highlight the most important information and Cantonese was used for less important topics. And in service encounters they used code-switching for ‘doing being’ Cantonese speakers or bilinguals. The discourse analysis and conversation analysis show the consistency in their assigning value to Cantonese as well as acknowledging the prestigious status and the practicality of Putonghua. In summary, this thesis is a contribution to studies of bilingualism and de facto language policies in urban China. It reveals that individuals and social groups of a language community can negotiate the Putonghua Policy through imposing the use of Cantonese and Cantonese-related categories to others in mundane talk and institutional interactions. It also contributes to studies of China’s internal immigrants in terms of exploring how immigrants’ life experiences are affected by conflicting language ideologies, and how immigrants can employ bilingual repertoires to negotiate problematic but taken-for-granted discrimination and manage to be at ease with their unique self-identifications