Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

Through examining queer men’s labeling practices, this paper illuminates the competing system of constructing and communicating queer identities in China. My research demonstrates that, in addition to relying on the term tongzhi, Chinese queer men have deployed three labeling tactics to make sense of distinct male homosexualities, using a wide range of slang terms. I argue that these tactics reveal the internal division and hierarchization on the basis of generation, class, self-acceptance, and affective presentation, among other distinctions. Queer men deploy certain labels to draw symbolic boundaries of separation from other queer men and to construct ideal or superior sexual selfhood. Examining the labeling practices of queer men helps us better understand how queer communities both resist external categorization and create internal marginalization.

This paper investigates how subtitling and dubbing of foreign language media can be interpreted as cases of semiotic disruption, and how this interpretive frame comes to index a cosmopolitan identity among Argentine fans of Anglophone pop culture. The naturalization of voice/body/language assemblages allows fans to frame preferences for subtitles as an obvious consequence of “authentic” fan identity. Discourses of liberal inclusivity and literacy allow them to simultaneously explain others’ preferences for dubbing as consequences of class, education, and maturity. I argue that these stance-taking strategies are ways of mitigating the economic precarity of being Argentinean in a global/izing world.

In traditional Korean medicine (TKM) clinics in South Korea, acupuncture is a popular therapeutic practice to remove physical discomforts. This paper examines the cultural-semiotic rendering of an abstract, kinesthetic quality called “shiwŏnham” into medical efficacy through acupuncture treatments, observed through ethnographic fieldwork in a TKM clinic. By employing the conceptual framework of qualia, I argue that shiwŏnham in TKM clinic is the sign of efficacy expressed through the body, both in linguistic and synesthetic forms. The analysis of shiwŏnham also reveals the semiotics of change: the qualitative dynamics of changes-of-state and the cultural change across generations in Korean society.

I examine an extended interaction observed in a TKM clinic, during which a young patient learns to experience and interpret the senses and sounds of shiwŏnham as a sign of efficacy through conversations with an older family member and the doctor. This interaction illustrates how participants attempt to bridge their intergenerational, interpretative gaps about the relevant qualia and the conventional qualisign of shiwŏnham. Together through this semiotic analysis of shiwŏnham, I show how central shiwŏnham is to the expressive evidence for TKM, that is, culturally legible evidence of efficacy reflecting modes of awareness, expression, and the value of a sensation.

It is now some decades since the study of “linguistic ideology” was first proposed (Silverstein 1979), and the time is ripe for taking stock. This article considers some developments in this field as it has emerged and, in some respects, become normalized. Yet, normalized can mean backgrounded, taken for granted—perhaps obscuring important theoretical issues and methodological challenges. I revisit what is entailed by “ideology”; the debate between explicit and implicit sources of evidence (and why this binary is itself problematic); issues of ideological multiplicity and dominance; and questions such as: Must ideology be internally consistent? Why turn to semiotics, and should “language ideology” then be re-labeled “semiotic ideology”? Are ideologies big programs, distinct from local metapragmatic activity? I address these questions while making methodological recommendations about research sites, contrasts and boundaries, attention to flows and connections, and a “centerpiece” method for tracing ideological work. An extended example concerning sociolinguistic variation in Maryland illustrates the discussion.

After decades of denigration and targeting by the state, Singlish—or Singaporean Colloquial English—has come into its own as a “uniquely Singaporean” phenomenon (Wee 2018), both a source and site of projects of raciolinguistic value-creation (Rosa and Flores 2017). Today, Singlish is often presented as emblematic of broader “racial harmony” among Singapore’s four official races, yet it has also become an arena for articulating and rejecting critiques of racialized Chinese-Singaporean majoritarian privilege. This paper analyzes interviews with literary producers, public presentations by artists, and published mediatized texts in which Singlish comes into being as a site of ideological contestation. It describes two contrastive figures and the discourse registers through which they are materialized: first, postracial policing, voiced as an insistence that Singlish is sui generis, and second, “Mother Tongue” sourcing, voiced as an insistence on adherence, in spelling and pronunciation, to the racialized “Mother Tongue” varieties (and their racialized speakers) from which Singlish items are sourced. I argue that these two figures and enregistered positions co-participate in the production of an image of standard: a felt sense of standard-likeness that emerges as an effect of aesthetic textuality (Nakassis 2019), even in the absence of overt standardization projects.

This article draws on Judith T. Irvine’s theorizing of the semiotic processes of differentiation to investigate how Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims configure similarity and difference in multimodal social media interactions. I analyze Facebook discussions around memes of Tamil-language blunders in trilingual public signs, which are widely taken to represent the incomplete implementation of Tamil as a co-official language. Insider status in groups is not contingent on code use, but on expressing particular alignments toward the memes as tokens of a type. By virtue of their metapragmatic ambiguity, emojis are powerful in enabling participants to create shared affective stances around the memes, but they are also useful in demarcating difference between Tamil speakers and Sinhalas. I contribute to studies of social media communication by examining how different linguistic and non-linguistic forms of expression are used to delineate transnational Tamil digital publics.

This article takes Judith T. Irvine’s insights about the indeterminacy of participant roles and interpretive frameworks to explore how the increased use of social media in journalism leads to new quandaries for political actors. The dialogics of distributing or amalgamating participant roles provide for a particularly tricky domain of maneuver for journalists in India and Israel, where rightwing leaders seek to control news that disseminates rapidly on the currents of social media. Journalists have long sought to avoid becoming the story themselves, as part of claiming liberal positions that distinguish the reported events from their representation. It considers the current attempt to clamp-down on social media use by journalists as a securitization of communication, where the very journalistic utterance is used by ruling politicians to make the journalist, or potentially the news media more generally, into a threat to public security. However, even such policing can be too slow. This article thus also considers how outraged publics become an important aspect of policing social media.