Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T14:55:14.819Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘The words has been immigrate’: Chronotopes in context-shaping narrative co-construction about Taiwanese loanwords with Taiwanese Americans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2020

Ping-Hsuan Wang Open the ORCID record for Ping-Hsuan Wang [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 73 - 94
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I thank Dr. Richard Buttny for his comments on an earlier draft of this article and the audience for their feedback at the 69th Annual International Communication Association Conference in Washington, DC, 2019. I am particularly grateful for the valuable suggestions provided by the two anonymous reviewers.

References

Agha, Asif (2007a). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif (2007b). Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. Language and Communication 27(3):320–35. Online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard (1992). Contextualization, tradition, and the dialogue of genres: Icelandic legends of the kraftaskáld. In Duranti, Alessandro & Goodwin, Charles (eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 125–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard, & Briggs, Charles L. (1990). Poetics and performances as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19(1):59–88. Online: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.000423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baynham, Mike (2003). Narratives in space and time: Beyond backdrop accounts of narrative orientation. Narrative Inquiry 13(2):347–66. Online: https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.13.2.07bay.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Alton L. (1995). Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.10.3998/mpub.13805CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. The Annual Review of Anthropology 44:105–16.10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014035CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2018). Are chronotopes helpful? Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, Paper 243.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan, & De Fina, Anna (2017). Chronotopic identities: On the spacetime organization of who we are. In Fina, Anna De, Ikizoglu, Didem, & Wegner, Jeremy (eds.), Diversity and superdiversity: Sociocultural linguistic perspectives, 1–15. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Bridgeman, Teresa (2007). Time and space. In David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge companion to narrative, 52–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CCOL0521856965.004CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Raymond, & Renshaw, Peter (2006). Positioning students as actors and authors: A chronotopic analysis of collaborative learning activities. Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal 13(3):247–56.10.1207/s15327884mca1303_6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buttny, Richard (1998). Putting prior talk into context: Reported speech and the reporting context. Research on Language & Social Interaction 31(1):45–58. Online: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi3101_3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Deanna (2007). East spaces in west times: Deictic reference and political self-positioning in a post-socialist East German chronotope. Language and Communication 27(3):212–26. Online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Fina, Anna, & Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2008). Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices. Text & Talk – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language Discourse Communication Studies 28(3):275–81. Online: https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2008.013.Google Scholar
Demoen, Kristoffel; Borghart, Pieter; Bemong, Nele; De Dobbeleer, Michel; De Temmerman, Koen; & Keunen, Bart (2010). Bakhtin's theory of the literary chronotope: Reflections, applications, perspectives. Gent: Ginko, Academia Press.Google Scholar
Dick, Hilary (2010). Imagined lives and modernist chronotopes in Mexican nonmigrant discourse. American Ethnologist 37(2):275–90. Online: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01255.x.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Divita, David (2019). Recalling the bidonvilles of Paris: Historicity and authority among transnational migrants in later life. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 29(1):50–68. Online: https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro, & Goodwin, Charles (1992). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2003). Plotting the right place and the right time: Place and time as interactional resources in narrative. Narrative Inquiry 13(2):413–32. Online: https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.13.2.10geo.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gumperz, John J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511611834CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heylen, Ann (2010). The transnational in Taiwan history: A preliminary exploration. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36(1):9–33.Google Scholar
Heylen, Ann (2012) Taiwan's historical relations with Europe: Perspectives on the past and the present. In Damm, Jens & Lim, Paul (eds.), European perspectives on Taiwan, 27–45. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.10.1007/978-3-531-94303-9_2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad (2020). Metapragmatics of normalcy: Mobility, context, and language choice. Language and Communication 70:107–18. Online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.02.001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad, & Catedral, Lydia (2018). ‘No, we don't mix languages’: Ideological power and the chronotopic organization of ethnolinguistic identities. Language in Society 47(1):89–113.10.1017/S0047404517000781CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, & Waletzky, Joshua (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In June Helm (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts, 12–44. Seattle, WA: American Ethnological Society.Google Scholar
Lempert, Michael, & Perrino, Sabina (2007). Entextualization and the ends of temporality. Language and Communication 27(3):205–11. Online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morson, Gary Saul, & Emerson, Caryl (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul (2017). Transnationalism as interdiscursivity: Korean managers of multinational corporations talking about mobility. Language in Society 46(1):23–38. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000853.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina (2007). Cross-chronotope alignment in Senegalese oral narrative. Language and Communication 27(3):227–44. Online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina (2015). Chronotopes: Time and space in oral narrative. In Fina, Anna De & Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis, 140–59. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (2009). Crossing boundaries: The nexus of time, space, person, and place in narrative. Language in Society 38(4):421–45.10.1017/S0047404509990212CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2005). Axes of evals. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):6–22. Online: https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, Hongyu (2009). The chronotopes of encounter and emergence. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 25(1):1–5.Google Scholar
Wang, Ping-Hsuan (2021). ‘When I came to the US’: Constructing migration in gay Indian immigrants’ coming-out narratives. Narrative Inquiry, to appear. Online: https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19088.wan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina (2016). The living, the dead, and the immanent: Dialogue across chronotopes. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1):343–69. Online: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn (2013). Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances toward Catalan language and identity. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16(2):210–24. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2012.720670.CrossRefGoogle Scholar