Constructing a Gay Persona:
A Sociophonetic Case Study of an LGBT Talk Show in Taiwan
Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the
Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Junquan Pan, BA
Graduate Program in East Asian Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University
2018
Thesis Committee
Marjorie K.M. Chan, Advisor
Zhiguo Xie
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Copyrighted by
Junquan Pan
2018
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Abstract
The thesis draws upon both quantitative and qualitative approaches to linguistic variation. Specifically, for the quantitative study, the thesis conducts a sociophonetic case study of an LGBT talk show in Taiwan, with a focus on one gay speaker’s variation in pitch range. In this quantitative approach, statistically significant differences are found across the subject’s various speaking situations. The subject, HY, exhibits a considerable cross-situational variation: When HY participates in the talk show¾both as a guest and as a host¾his average maximum f0 is higher than as an applicant. More crucially, when
HY is attending the talk show as a guest, his f0 pitch range is significantly wider than as an applicant and a host. To explain the phonetic variation, the thesis proposes that the sociophonetic variation in pitch range is motivated by interactional personas that are subject to specific speaking situations. However, the sociophonetic variation observed in the talk show is just part of the story of HY’s stylistic performance.
In order to tell the entire story, the study also includes a qualitative study via the analysis of discourse to examine two conversational excerpts where HY participates in the talk show as a guest. HY uses some linguistic and gestural features that have been ideologically associated with Chinese women, such as the female term of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) “old woman” or a typical feminine gesture, such as tucking hair behind the ears. In this thesis, I seek an explanation for the relationship between these semiotic features observed in the talk show and HY’s gay identity.
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Adopting the social constructionist paradigm, the study demonstrates that the form-meaning relationship is not a one-to-one mapping, but is mediated through stance- taking. According to the notion of indexicality, the linguistic and gestural features take on their semiotic value through HY’s stance in the LGBT talk show and these interactional stances are ideologically re-associated with, and reinterpreted as his gay identity.
Throughout the online talk show, HY develops his persona and his own personal style through interactions on a micro level, which help him to construct his gay identity.
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Dedication
Dedicated to my beloved parents for their unconditional love
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Acknowledgments
When I started my graduate studies at OSU, I did not think too much of what exactly I want to do. I was also not intellectually confident about myself. While looking back right now, being a graduate student at OSU turns out to be a life-changing journey for my growth to be a better person. I am truly grateful to DEALL for cultivating an environment where I can come to the realization of my academic profession.
My advisor, Marjorie Chan, has, thoughtfully and patiently, walked me through over the past two years. Without her encouragement, I would not have been confident enough to submit my first conference abstract to the 29th North American Conference on
Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-29) and present it at Rutgers University; Without her guidance, I would not have been able to learn so much of how to organize NACCL-30, an international, well-established conference on Chinese Linguistics; Without her intellectual and spiritual support, I would not have been able to finish my thesis about language and sexuality in Chinese linguistics. I thank her not only for her intellectual commitment to Chinese linguistics, but also for her wholeheartedness to her advisees.
Her humor, laughter, and caring have been a daily source of joy to me and constantly remind me of how important it is to be a happy person. Ma Laoshi, thank you for being a wonderful part of my journey at OSU and being a role model whom I am able to live up to in the future.
I also owe my gratitude to Dr. Xie for his guidance and advice on my thesis. His life story about linguistics has inspired me to think about what it takes to be a linguist and v how important it is to follow your heart no matter what happens. Xie Laoshi, thank you for being so supportive and helpful to the completion of my MA thesis.
While my journey at OSU mostly alternates between studying and working, I also want to thank my friends and mentors at OSU for their company and support. They have supplied me with constant caring, inspiration, and joy: Debbie Knicely, Zhini Zeng,
Jessie Jia, Trey Rainey, Jake Kursinskis, Jarod Leggett, Alice Chi, International
Exploration Group (IE), Jennifer Nunes, and my cohorts and students at DEALL.
Special thanks are given to my go-to friends who have been deeply rooting for my vulnerability during my time at OSU: Qingxia, my dear friend since the college, thank you for bearing with my uncertainties and anxieties; Karen, my supportive friend while I was working in EF, thank you for being my emotional support whom I can share everything with; Sheng Yi, my lovely ‘driver’ at OSU, thank you for being a wholehearted person to me as you always are; Hunter and Jingdi, my most go-to friends at the end of the semester, thanks to both of you for giving me so much support and inspiration of how important to be who you truly are.
Lastly, I thank myself for being the man in the arena, who will strive valiantly, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
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Vita
1992 ...... Born, Guangzhou, China
2011-2015 ...... B.A. Teaching Chinese as a Second Language,
Nanfang College, Sun Yat-Sen University
2017-2018 ...... Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of East
Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State
University
Fields of Study
Major Field: East Asian Languages and Literatures
Concentration: Chinese Linguistics (Sociolinguistics)
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Vita ...... vii Table of Contents ...... viii List of Tables ...... x List of Figures ...... xi Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Introduction ...... 1 1.2 Literature Review ...... 3 1.2.1 Previous Research on Language and Sexuality ...... 3 1.2.2 Previous Research on Chinese Language and Sexuality ...... 7 1.3 Topics, Motivations, and Research Questions ...... 10 1.3.1 Research Topics ...... 10 1.3.2 Research Motivations ...... 13 1.3.3 Research Questions ...... 14 1.4 Outline of the Chapters ...... 15 Chapter 2. Stylistic Variation, Indexicality, and Identity ...... 2 2.1 The Definition of Style ...... 2 2.1.1 Stylistic Variation as Attention Paid to Speech ...... 4 2.1.2 Stylistic Variation as Audience Design ...... 5 2.1.3 Stylistic Variation as Speaker Design ...... 8 2.2 Case Studies of Speaker Design ...... 11 2.2.1 Style shifting in Political Discourse ...... 12 2.2.2 Style shifting in Media Interaction ...... 14
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2.2.3 Style Shifting in Day-to-Day Interaction ...... 16 2.3 Indexicality and Style in Sociolinguistics ...... 19 2.4 Stance, Persona, and Identity ...... 23 2.5 Summary ...... 26 Chapter 3. Methodology ...... 28 3.1 Introduction ...... 28 3.2 LGBT in Taiwan ...... 28 3.3 The LGBT Talk Show: TA 們說 ...... 29 3.5 Taiwan Mandarin ...... 35 3.6 Some Constraints on Data Collection ...... 39 3.7 Linguistic Measurements ...... 40 3.8 Statistical Analysis ...... 43 Chapter 4. Data Presentation and Discussion ...... 45 4.1 Introduction ...... 45 4.2 Sociophonetic Variation Patterns ...... 45 4.2.1 Variation Patterns of Maximum Mean Pitch ...... 45 4.2.2 Variation Patterns of Pitch Range ...... 48 4.2.3 Interpreting Variation Patterns ...... 50 4.3 Social Meaning as a Cluster of Features ...... 52 4.3.1 The Stylistic Use of Female Terms of Reference ...... 54 4.3.2 Conversational Analysis ...... 56 4.3.3 The Form-Meaning Relationship ...... 67 4.4 Persona-based Stylistic Differences ...... 68 4.5 Summary ...... 71 Chapter 5. Conclusions ...... 73 5.1 Introduction ...... 73 5.2 The Significance of the Current Study ...... 74 5.3 The Limitations of the Current Study ...... 75 5.4 Future Directions ...... 76 5.5 Concluding Remark ...... 78 References ...... 79 Appendix A Chinese, English, and Pinyin Transcriptions for the Two Excerpts ...... 86
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List of Tables
Table 3.1 LGBT-related topics in talk show I with subject as guest ...... 31
Table 3.2 LGBT-related topics in talk show II with subject as host ...... 33
Table 3.3 Three different roles in various situations ...... 35
Table 3.4 The four tones in Taiwan Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin ...... 37
Table 3.5 Acoustic measures and method of calculation ...... 42
Table 3.6 The number of utterances for making the measurements ...... 42
Table 3.7 The number of T3 and T4 syllables for making the measurements ...... 42
Table 4.1 Maximum mean pitch of T4 syllables in three situations ...... 46
Table 4.2 The one-way analysis of variance for differences between situations ...... 47
Table 4.3 Comparison of situational differences on the maximum mean pitch level ...... 47
Table 4.4 Mean fmax of T4 syllables and fmin of T3 syllable in the three situations ...... 48
Table 4.5 HY’s conversational except one in the talk show as a guest ...... 56
Table 4.6 HY’s conversational except two in the talk show as a guest ...... 62
Table 4.7 The linguistic and paralinguistic features used by HY as a guest ...... 71
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List of Figures
Figure 2.1 Indexical relations between linguistic forms and social meanings ...... 21
Figure 4.1 The average level of maximum f0 (Hz) ...... 46
Figure 4.2 The variation in pitch range (Hz) across three speaking situations ...... 49
Figure 4.3 HY’s gestural feature: tucking the short hair behind his ear ...... 59
Figure 4.4 fmax and fmin average variations while taking on different personas ...... 69
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Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Introduction
The intersection of language and gender has been one of the most intriguing subfields in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, for gender is not a biological concept that encodes physiological differences between men and women in nature, but a social construct to socialize how men and women perform in certain ways and such differences can be examined through linguistic behaviors of individuals. The study of such differences between men and women with respect to their language use hereby has far-reaching and profound implications for power relation and gender politics.
However, inquiry into the dynamic relation between language and gender is by no means the only pursuit in the field of sociolinguistics. With the backdrop of LGBT social movements, as well as ever-increasing appeals for same-sex marriage across the globe, a more recent addition to the study of language and gender is sexuality. For humans, sexuality is not something we do, but something we present and express to the social world. In this process, language plays a crucial role in shaping our sexuality and in mediating various expressions that index our sexual identity. The distinction between
“heterosexual” and “homosexual” is marked not necessarily only by outward appearance, such as clothing expression, but also by behavior and gender performance, including how
1 we talk. Language provides a form for sexuality and makes it possible to make identity expression audible. It is self-evident that sex is a universal human phenomenon, but our understanding of it varies across cultures and throughout history. For most cultures, sex is a taboo topic that should not be discussed openly; for others, it is accorded social significance. The sociolinguistic understanding of language is that “language-using is an
‘act of identity’: speakers use the resources of linguistic variation to signal their identification with one social group and their difference from other groups” (Cameron &
Kulick, 2006, p.11). If sexuality is part of our identity, then people also have that inclination to converge with or diverge from different sexual groups and the linguistic act of our sexual identity becomes a means of our expression to, and negotiation with, the social world. More specifically, language may play a significant role in constituting certain speech acts, negotiating relationships, or defining certain situations as sexual.
Therefore, it is suggested that sexuality can offer implications as profound as other more commonly known variables, such as gender, age, and ethnicity.
Moreover, it should be pointed out that the word “identity” has been an overloaded term, universally used on a macro level and abstracted from one theory to the other. How do we understand an individual identity on a micro level? To this end, the study draws on the concept of style as a starting point, a term that has been central in interactional sociolinguistics. The study of sociolinguistic style attends to those established principles that govern how particular linguistic choices are made by individuals as well as social groups in their daily use of language. Style shifting from one
2 situation to another might hint at how individuals negotiate their social positions and achieve their social ends through their use of language in interactions.
With this in mind, the present study suggests that examining one’s style allows us to investigate how an individual negotiates and constructs his or her persona and style in interactional contexts. To be specific, the study takes an initial step of how one’s gay persona and style in the Chinese context are interactionally constructed and performed through the multimodal use of linguistic and symbolic resources, and hopes to demonstrate how the form-meaning relationship is established and mediated via stance- taking. But in order to have a better understanding of the study, what follows explores previous research on this topic in general and focuses on specific work in relation to
Chinese language and sexuality.
1.2 Literature Review
1.2.1 Previous Research on Language and Sexuality
The addition of sexuality to the study of language and gender seems to be a recent development; however, the beginning of studying homosexual language can be traced back to the 1920s. Research on this topic was mainly concerned with describing and documenting homosexual argots. The early investigation of language use of English gay men was conducted by William Leap (1996). Since then, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have paid increasing attention to the research on language and sexuality.
Many studies concerned with such topics were conducted at different linguistic levels.
3 The early investigations of language and sexuality were about lexical issues. There were many lexical choices in the domain of sexual orientation for categorical purposes. Many were also publicly contested within the sexual minorities involving such terms as
“homosexual” versus “gay,” “lesbian” versus “dyke” or “butch.” It is reasonable to infer that the inquiry into lexical issues is the easiest one for exploring the language use of sexual minorities. These naming practices render LGBT community social recognition, they are also categorical practices that distinguish sexual minorities from the heterosexuals. In this regard, a lexical choice of one term over another might indicate the speaker’s ideological orientation. Beyond lexical issues, other linguistic characteristics of sexual minorities also merit our attention. In the work of Leap (1996), he suggests to consider gay English conversations and narratives as instances of cooperative discourse.
Turn-taking, the use of descriptive imagery and metaphor, and inference strategies are linguistic techniques that are operated in the cooperative discourse. Within conversational exchanges, speakers share their knowledge and experience building on gay-centered cultural themes, such as dressing up and special costumes (1996, p.21). Elements in these gay themes were discovered, such as persistent sexual and erotic messages. Leap contends that it is these shared elements in the discourse that constitute an authentic gay image of speakers involving the conversations.
In addition to research on lexical and discourse issues, sociolinguists are also interested in exploring speech characteristics of sexual minorities. In Gaudio’s (1994) research on ‘sounding-gay’ speech, participants were invited to evaluate various characteristics of eight male speakers (including gay-sounding and straight-sounding
4 stimuli). Based on reading the same passage, participants turned out to be good at distinguishing gay men from straight men. Subsequently, Gaudio went on to measure the pitch properties of the gay speakers as compared to those of the straight men. His results showed that not all phonetic characteristics identified allowed judges to distinguish the speech of gay men from that of straight men, even though there were some suggestive differences. Moonwomon’s (1985) study also showed similar results. Two lesbian and two straight females were paired for their pitch comparison, it was found that there were suggestive differences, with lesbians inclining to have lower-pitched voices and a narrower pitch range, but these findings could not reach a level of statistical significance.
Moonwomon proposed that there was a likelihood that the differences between lesbians and straight women might lie more in discourse-level speech rather than in their prosodic features.
Although there is no indexical link between prosodic characteristics and one’s sexual orientation, it is important to suggest that the assumption for establishing a direct relation between these linguistic features and social forms is problematic. It makes no sense to say that certain linguistic features defined as gay or lesbian language is solely because gays or lesbians use these linguistic features. As Cameron and Kulick (2003, p.88) point out: “the fact that gays do X does not make X gay.” Their suggestion sheds new light on the notion of women’s language proposed by Lakoff (1975). She impressionistically noted that women used more tag questions than men in English.
However, follow-up empirical studies have argued that although a tag question indicates a lack of confidence that is usually associated with femininity, a tag question in fact takes
5 on multiple pragmatic functions. Holmes (1982, 1984, &1995) was the first sociolinguist to pay close attention to the multiple pragmatic functions of tag question. She divided tag questions into epistemic modal tags and affective tags. For epistemic modal tags, it is defined as an act of asking for information about which the speaker is genuinely uncertain; For affective tags, it is used to facilitate a conversation, e.g., It’s pretty hot today, isn’t it? or softening, e.g., That was a bit dumb, wasn’t it. In the analysis of her corpus, she has shown that women were inclined to use more facilitative affect tags than men, while men used more epistemic modal tags and softening affect tags. Her studies support that tag question has multiple pragmatic functions that are used differently by men and women in English. In this case, it might be problematic to say that tag question is one kind of women’s language.
In addition, attempts to directly associate specific linguistic features with groups of people will be an uneasy act for those who have faith in large-scale sociolinguistic surveys. It is true that the quantitative approach can allow us to track down linguistic patterns in a systematic and observable way, yet it is tempting for us to map those identified linguistic patterns onto the social groups without looking deeper into the contexts in which those linguistic patterns surface. For example, how does one’s gender/sexuality emerge as s/he interacts in varying contexts?
In what follows, the study goes further to explore this research topic in the
Chinese context, with a focus on demonstrating an increasing need for Chinese sociolinguists to investigate this potential field of research.
6 1.2.2 Previous Research on Chinese Language and Sexuality
Perhaps the earliest work delving into the language use of the Chinese LGBT community is the study in Andrew Wong and Qing Zhang’s (2000) “The Linguistic
Construction of Tóngzhì Community.” In their study, they examined language use in a trendy magazine in gay and lesbian communities. Terminologies from four groups of linguistic resources were investigated: (1) gay and lesbian cultures in the West, (2) the women’s movement, (3) Chinese revolutionist discourse, and (4) the Chinese kinship system. They argued that these resources, though having their own history and indexical meanings, have been reworked by the producers and editors of the magazine so as to represent their ideology for the equality of the Chinese LGBT communities. It is the editorial practice that carves out a social space for the gay and lesbian communities in
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas. Subsequently, Wong (2005) continued his research by focusing on the use of tóngzhì (同志) ‘comrade’ in Hong Kong. He found that the positive connotation of the term tóngzhì (同志) has been challenged by the parodic use of journalists. Specifically, the term of tóngzhì (同志) was found in association with socially disapproved behaviors, where the sexuality of the victim was accentuated in the newspaper headline. Wong argued that the parodic use of tóngzhì (同志) by the editors and journals established a direct link between the term tóngzhì (同志) and hateful contexts. As a result, the readers of the magazine who were not exposed to the term before might consider the term tóngzhì (同志) as another pejorative term to label the
Chinese LGBT people.
7 For the research on language and communication, Shiau (2015) investigated how
Taiwanese gay men in Taiwan localized their language use through three stylized linguistic features: (1) kinship soap opera, (2) geisha memoir, and (3) celebrity stardom.
As Shiau suggested, these three linguistic features were used as a means of resistance to heterosexual norms defined in Chinese culture. For example, the female kinship term, jiějie (姊姊) ‘elder sister,’ is used by Taiwanese gay men to denote sisterhood, which enables them to dissociate the term from heterosexuality. Although this female kinship term signifies female identity, it is appropriated for a different usage within the gay community. As the author proposes, jiějie (姊姊) and other female kinship terms are not used by Taiwanese gay men to conceptualize the effeminate characteristics of Taiwanese gay men; rather, these terms are chosen to resist any stigmatized labels on them, such as niáng niáng qiāng (娘娘腔) ‘sissy boy’.
In both his acoustic and perception research, Hau Chi-kuk’s (2007) research is the first study investigating gay male speech in Cantonese. Hau followed previous scholarship and examined some segmental and prosodic features that were reported to be characteristics of gay male speech: the duration of the sibilant /s/, the duration of vowels:
/i/, /ɛ/, /a/, and /ɔ/, fundamental frequency (f0), and f0 range. In addition to the acoustic analysis of the speech production, he also conducted a perception study to see if judges could identify speakers’ sexual orientation based on his hypothesized variables. The results showed that the duration of sibilant /s/ produced by gay men was longer than that of straight men and listeners were able to identify speakers’ sexual orientation based on that variable.
8 However, it should be pointed out that there are two research problems in his study. First, the previous research on which he relied were consistently conducted in
English-speaking communities; that is to say, it is still uncertain about whether the longer duration of sibilant /s/, though significantly suggestive, is a reliable indicator for identifying one’s sexual orientation in Cantonese. Second, he further concluded that, based on what he had found, gay lisping could be a global speech feature of gay men. Yet, his conclusion was still built upon the premise that “gay doing X would make X gay” and the relation between linguistic forms and social groups, as the study mentioned before, is not one-to-one mapping.
After the exploration of previous work, it was found that there is not only limited research on language and sexuality in the Chinese context, but also are limitations on this line of research: first, the scope of the research has still revolved around lexical issues, focusing on how Chinese homosexual men make their lexical choice for their sexuality expression; second, previous studies of gay-male speech have still directly associated particular phonetic characteristics identified from a small pool of gay men with the gay community. This attempt actually is problematic, as researchers did not realize the diversity of the gay community and tried to map certain linguistic features onto the entire gay community; third, these studies only focus on particular linguistic features without considering other interactional features (facial expression and bodily movement) that are potentially conducive to the construction of one’s gay identity; lastly, previous research did not answer the question of how the form-meaning relationship is established in the
Chinese context. In other words, how particular linguistic features are linked to one’s gay
9 identity. Thus far, research on Chinese language and sexuality is still in its embryonic stage. Much more research is needed in Chinese sociolinguistics and other disciplines in the future.
1.3 Topics, Motivations, and Research Questions
1.3.1 Research Topics
‘Style’ has been an oft-cited term used in various contexts, such as arts and entertainment, literature, linguistics, and rhetoric. In the realm of sociolinguistics, style has been one of the primary entries into our society in a way that plays a pivotal role in between linguistic and social variation (see Eckert & Rickford, 2000). The stylistic way we present ourselves in a specific context is a means through which we express who we are and with whom we wish to associate or disassociate. Specifically, for the present study, the thesis is interested in exploring how one’s gay style is linguistically constructed and performed in the Chinese context. To this end, the study examines linguistic behaviors of an individual while he performs his gay style in a Taiwanese
LGBT talk show.
In addition, given that the study also deals with sociolinguistic issues of gay- sounding speech, it would be also tempting to explore phonetic dimensions of such way of speaking in Mandarin Chinese. In fact, research on gay-sounding speech has been carried out in western countries and we know little about how Chinese gay men talk in relation to their phonetic properties. As discussed in the previous section, early
10 sociolinguistic studies have concentrated on identifying linguistic features that are employed by homosexuals and hence mapping certain linguistic features onto their gay identity. However, such an attempt has proved unfruitful in that it presupposes there is a monolithic speech variety that homogenizes the richness of the gay communities
(Podesva, Roberts, & Campbell-Kibler, 2002). In contrast, what people usually have in mind about gay ways of speaking is the holistic representation of how a homosexual man performs in relation to his linguistic choice, clothing, facial expression, gesture, and bodily movement (Voigt et al., 2016). In this sense, one’s sexuality can be examined through looking at the use of a clustering of linguistic and paralinguistic resources at hand in an interactional, local context.
Another important topic of the present study is to understand the relation between form and meaning. Previous sociolinguistic studies (Eckert, 2000; Zhang, 2005) have demonstrated that linguistic variation is a resource in constituting meaning in the social world. The indexical meaning of a linguistic variant is not completely fixed but variable synchronically and diachronically. For example, Zhang (2001 & 2005) examined four phonological variables used among two groups of professionals who work in foreign- owned companies versus state-owned companies. She found that those professionals working in foreign-owned companies used the full-tone variable more frequently than those in state-owned companies. Zhang argued that the frequent use of full tone by the professionals was not to picture themselves as a Hong Kong or Taiwan wannabe, but to index their professionalism while doing businesses in foreign-owned sectors. Therefore, in order to understand the indexical relation between linguistic form and one’s sexual
11 identity, the current study conducts a sociophonetic case study for examining how the gay speaker’s pitch variation is ideologically linked to, and reinterpreted as, his gay identity in the talk show.
As far as the topics are concerned, the current study takes style as a starting point to understand the language use of gay people in Taiwan. First, the thesis conducts a sociophonetic case study in a Taiwanese LGBT talk show, focusing on the phonetic variation in pitch range. However, examining intraspeaker variation requires us to set up different speaking situations to find out variation patterns via comparisons. With this in mind, the study looks into three different speaking situations in total, where the speaker takes on different personas to perform his personal styles accordingly (three specific speaking situations are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3).
Second, based on the sociophonetic findings, the study goes on to explore how the speaker linguistically performs his style in collaboration with other interactional features, such as facial expression and bodily movement, to eventually construct his gay identity.
Last not but least, this study is also concerned with the relationship between form and meaning. The form-meaning relationship has been one of the central topics in sociolinguistics and such a topic leads us to answer the question of how this relational process takes place and what mechanism makes it a more enduring, stable association over time.
12 1.3.2 Research Motivations
The primary motivation of this study is that there is an increasing need for
Chinese sociolinguists to recognize the growing importance of sexuality in sociolinguistics. As Bucholtz and Hall (2004) mentioned, before the 1990s, most relevant research on language and gender has taken sexuality, understood almost exclusively in heterosexuality, as an indispensable complement to gender studies; sexuality was rarely the main focus of analysis. Moreover, because of the close relationship between gender and sexuality, many gender studies have also covertly relied on implications of sexuality to understand gendered linguistic behaviors. But until recently, the value of sexuality has come to be acknowledged and considered as equal as other sociocultural dimensions of studies like race, class, and gender. This general trend might also call our attention to research on language and sexuality in Chinese sociolinguistics. As previously noted, very little work on language and sexuality has been conducted in Chinese sociolinguistics; this thesis thus is motivated to fill this gap and to explore more linguistic phenomena related to Chinese sexuality.
Additionally, the current study hopes to demonstrate how linguistic and symbolic features are stylized as a resource in constituting a specific persona and style, and how these stylized features takes on their new semiotic values that become ideologically associated with the speaker’s sexual identity. To achieve this is to consider intraspeaker variation as a window into how an individual linguistically constructs and performs his or her style in interactions. Therefore, the study concentrates on a case study to demonstrate such possibility.
13 Lastly, this study is also motivated to use the sociophonetic approach to stylistic variation. Methodologically, research on variationist sociolinguistics has paid close attention to the correlation between phonological variation and social categories, but it also runs the risk of ignoring the significant phonetic details within categories (Podesva,
2006). The investigation of phonetic properties can be a valuable addition to sociolinguistic variation and helps us to further derive the social meaning from a specific linguistic variable in particular ways.
In brief, the current thesis is mainly motivated by the fact that there is a deficit of research on language and sexuality in Chinese sociolinguistics. In addition, the study is also interested in exploring how one’s gay style comes into being via an examination of his linguistic and symbolic behaviors in the Chinese context. This is believed to shed new light on the relationship between the form and meaning (Podesva, 2006; Campbell-Kibler,
2011). Finally, the study is also motivated by sociophonentic methods employed in variationist studies, for it can tell us more phonetic details in interactions and thus get at the social meaning more specifically.
1.3.3 Research Questions
The purpose of this thesis is to answer three research questions. First, what is the social motivation for the gay speaker to undergo style shifting from one situation to another? In other words, in the context of this study where the gay speaker exhibits a cross-situational phonetic variation, what causes such linguistic variation? Second, what kinds of linguistic and symbolic features in the Chinese context are precisely employed
14 by the speaker for constructing his sexual identity? And lastly, how is the relationship between form and meaning established? Specifically, we need to understand how particular linguistic features are ideologically linked to the speaker’s gay identity. To this end, we first need to seek a better perspective to understand identity on an interactional, local level.
Therefore, in the following chapter, the study further lays out theoretical frameworks that are relevant to the study, as these frameworks are powerful explanatory tools for interpretations of the research results in subsequent chapters.
1.4 Outline of the Chapters
The thesis consists of five chapters. The remaining four chapters discuss specific issues relevant to the thesis.
Chapter 2 provides the definition of style in the present study and discusses different variationist approaches to linguistic variation. Specifically, the study mainly discusses the Speaker Design approach and the theory of indexicality to understand the relationship between form and meaning.
Chapter 3 explains the methodology in the study and discusses linguistic and non- linguistic constraints on the data collection.
Chapter 4 presents the statistical results of the sociophonentic case study and answers the research questions discussed in section 1.3.3.
Chapter 5 summarizes the findings and points out potential directions for future studies in Chinese sociolinguistics.
15 Chapter 2. Stylistic Variation, Indexicality, and Identity
2.1 The Definition of Style
In taking a holistic perspective to understand style, it is important to point out that style itself has disparate denotations in variationist studies — most commonly known are
Attention Paid to Speech (Labov, 1972), Audience Design (Bell, 1984), and Speaker
Design (as discussed in Schilling-Estes 2002). In this thesis, I adopt the definition of style proposed by Campbell-Kibler, Eckert, Mendoza-Denton, & Moore (2006) and view it as
“a socially meaningful clustering of features, within and across linguistic levels and modalities” (‘what is style and why we should care about it’ section, para.5). If language-using is an act of our identity, then linguistic variation is one of the symbolic practices that constitutes one’s style in a specific context. Broadly speaking, the symbolic practices in which speakers engage ranges from clothing, makeup, movement, and institution orientation to linguistic choice of one term over another, one of which, if separated, cannot hold for the complete representation of one’s style.
Stylizing these linguistic and symbolic features is a process of ‘bricolage’ proposed by Levi-Strauss (1966). According to Levi-Strauss, a ‘bricoleur’ is someone
“primitive” (1966, p.16) who “works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman” (1966, p.17). Specifically, this is a cognitive process through which an individual forms a new solution to problems by drawing on previously unrelated
2 knowledge that is already existent. The ‘bricoleur’ has to make do with “whatever is at hand” (Levi-Strauss, 1966, p.17). Two characteristics of this process as ‘bricolage’ are worth paying attention to:
1) The collection and creative use of pre-existing materials
2) Selection from a limited set of elements constrained by their history
The concept of ‘bricolage’ was initially adopted by British cultural scholars in the
1970s to study subculture styles. Roberts (1976) theorizes the construction of subculture styles and group identities. There are various objects employed by members of Punks,
Skinheads, or Teddy boys, and the practices in which they engage seem senseless and/or ridiculous when in isolation, but when combined together, they form a systematic ensemble that renders the subculture and its group identity with specific social meanings.
Drawing on this theoretical framework in variationist sociolinguistics, stylistic variation in particular, it has been a powerful explanatory tool to understand how one’s self- expression is constituted through the use of a set of preexisting and limited symbolic materials. Rather than creating something new, humans are inclined to take what is at hand to perform their identity (Hall et al., 1976; Hebdige, 1996; cited in Zhang (2005)).
Such a process recognizes linguistic practice as one element of a whole set of symbolic practices for constructing one’s identity, and the existing meanings of these symbolic practices are blended to constitute the social meaning of one’s new style.
3 2.1.1 Stylistic Variation as Attention Paid to Speech
The study of stylistic variation differs in a number of ways from one approach to the other. In the variationist tradition, style shifting (intraspeaker variation) is viewed as a response to external changes, which can be captured by the situational use of phonological and morphosyntactic variables. The view of stylistic variation subjected to the formality of situation is typically based on the vernacular-standard continuum across different situations. The first sociolinguistic investigation of stylistic variation was carried out by William Labov (1972). He conducted the first sociolinguistic interview, aiming at eliciting a wide variety of speech styles ranging from the informal or casual to the highly formal. As a result, it appears that the vernacular-standard continuum is a
‘universal principle’ to account for style shifting in interactions. In other words, the reason why people shift their personal styles is due to the formality of the situation. The more formal the situation is, the more standard language people tend to use. The distinction between formal and informal speech is delimited by whether it takes place in a formal setting. Furthermore, Labov also proposed that researchers could identify casual speech through looking at some paralinguistic channel cues such as pitch, volume, and breathing rate in speakers’ speech. These paralinguistic cues could also be helpful to distinguish the formal from the casual.
Overall, Labov’s belief in stylistic variation is that style shifting is primarily triggered by how much attention people pay to their speech as they converse with their interlocutors from one situation to the next. When the speech is below self-consciousness, for instance, a speaker is hanging out with their close friends, the setting will be
4 considered more “casual” or closer to “vernacular.” In contrast, when reading a list of words or giving a public speech, the speaker has to be more careful and conscious about their speech, closer to the standard variety. Although many insights have been drawn from the Attention to Speech approach, this approach has its limitations. For instance, there is a single dimension for understanding stylistic variation, as the model does not consider other sociolinguistic factors, such as power relations and topics that potentially affect how people talk in their social spheres.
Besides, the criticism to Labovian approach is that the model considers speakers as being merely responsive to their surroundings—that they must make their linguistic choice in response to external changes. Such a view perhaps implies the early assumption of variationists that language use is a static reflection of social structure and stratification.
However, recent sociolinguistic studies in stylistic variation point out that linguistic variation is not merely a reflection of the social ordering that stratifies different social groups but a proactive act for constructing one’s persona, style or/and identity.
2.1.2 Stylistic Variation as Audience Design
To develop a refined theoretical model to account for stylistic variation, Bell
(1984) considered style-shifting as audience design that emphasizes the audience effect.
This model is primarily based on the Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT). The
Audience Design model considers speakers designing their style for their addressees in order to gain social approvals or to create social distance. It suggests that the audience is seen as the dominant factor that determines whether one should shift his or her style.
5 Converging with target member groups to receive social recognition and diverging from addressees’ speech for distancing themselves are two forms of social motivation that stimulates style shifting. That is to say, speakers make their linguistic choice as their strategic means to engineer their interpersonal relations with interlocutors. Researchers can track subjects’ psychological orientations in their use of language and other paralinguistic indicators to show their interpersonal manipulations, such as speech rate, pausing, and accent. These indicators are empirical evidence underpinning the Audience
Design model. The model proposes that to regulate self-speech is to respond to social characteristics of the audience. Therefore, people shift their style, not merely in reaction to how formal they evaluate their interaction with their audience, but also in reaction to the presence of their interlocutors. As a result, there is a derivational relation between intra- and inter-speaker variation, which is called “style axiom.”
Bell and Johnson (1997) further modified the Audience Design framework and suggested that there are two dimensions of style shifting—responsive and initiative style shifting. For responsive style shifting, Bell and Johnson proposes that style shifting that takes place out of topics or setting derives its meaning from its underlying association with typical audience members with that topics or in that setting; for initiative style shifting, Bell and Johnson also calls it as “referee design.” They suggest that initiative style shifting is resulted from its underlying association with types of referred groups.
Those referred groups are third persons who are not physically present, but so important that a speaker will adjust his or her linguistic behaviors in accordance with that referred group style.
6 In Bell and John’s view, group identity is conceptualized as a foundation for social and linguistic differentiation. The evaluation that relates social attitudes to language use of different groups is a part of identity construction. Compared with the
Attention to Speech model, the Audience Design model can better account for stylistic variation in the following ways: First, in addition to eliciting speech styles in sociolinguistic interviews, this approach encourages sociolinguists to look beyond laboratory settings where they have full control for statistical comparisons. Second, the model establishes a link between intra- and inter-speaker variations, as intraspeaker variation is a manifestation of interspeaker variation. To put it another way, a single speaker makes his or her linguistic choice in convergence with or divergence from his or her audience who takes on a specific group style. In this regard, sociolinguists can get at the so-called ‘big picture’ relation between linguistic variation and social categories, such as gender, ethnicity, and class. Last but not least, the model also includes the concept of speaker agency for explaining stylistic variation. In the modified version, Bell and
Johnson classified style shifting into two subcategories: responsive and initiative style shifting. The former highlights the audience’s impact on style shifting. The latter refers to speakers who are making linguistic choice in response to their audience, who are so important that even though they are not present, they still could influence speakers’ speech (Bell & Johnson, 1997).
This model provides us with insight into how intraspeaker variation is triggered by, and linked to, interspeaker variation. What is left unanswered is the question of what characteristics about the audience speakers are being responsive to. As Bell suggests,
7 three specific possibilities are relevant to what qualities of the audience speakers are assessing: (1) speakers may look at personal characteristics of their interlocutors to design whether to shift their style; (2) speakers also evaluate the overall style of their addressees, such as their clothing, makeup, facial expression, and movement; (3) speakers evaluate their addressees through looking at very specific linguistic features, such as their use of terms of address. However, he did not go on to explain how to evaluate and distinguish these social characteristics of the addressees.
Another criticism concerning the Audience Design model is that the model can explain some cases of stylistic variation, but the model is too unidimensional because not all stylistic variations can be explained away by the audience effect. Hence, the Audience
Design model is insufficient to capture the sophisticated complexity of style shifting in interactions.
2.1.3 Stylistic Variation as Speaker Design
Subsequently, variationists are inclined to incorporate social constructionist approaches into style shifting, for which they highlight speaker agency in shaping and reshaping how people talk in interactions. Through incorporating the constructionist approach to sociolinguistic research, variationists view linguistic variation as a resource in constructing and performing speakers’ style and identity. In this sense, style shifting is a proactive act, instead of being responsive to the audience. Speakers are able to perform their multiple selves across situations or do multifaceted identity work (Coupland, 2007).
8 In Coupland’s (1985 & 2001) studies, he observed that a Cardiff radio announcer employed different stylistic resources to achieve different purposes. Specifically, the announcer used his Cardiff dialect to encourage an affiliation with Cardiff-related topics in contrast to the standard speech that was used for official work in his program.
Coupland’s findings in the language use of a Cardiff radio announcer exemplified the importance of speaker’s agency in linguistic variation. In addition, sociolinguists are increasingly attending to a wider range of sociolinguistic variables in the constitution of one’s style, such as lexicon, discourse markers, and other paralinguistic features, such as intonation and affective embodiments; moreover, researchers are also interested in how multimodal variables co-occur in discourse and interact with each other in particular ways to constitute a style.
Generally speaking, style shifting represents our social capacity to negotiate our multiple selves through the employment of a set of symbolic resources. As Hernandez-
Campoy and Cutillas-Espinosa (2010, p.6) put it, “styling is a powerful device for linguistic performance, rhetorical stance-taking and identity projection.”
In her sociolinguistic study in Beijing, China, Zhang (2005) found that a group of
Chinese professionals (henceforth, Chinese yuppies), who were born in Beijing but worked in foreign companies, made use of a combination of linguistic features from both
Beijing Mandarin and non-mainland Mandarin to project a competent and professional image when participating in international businesses. At the same time, these subjects were not intending to fully imitate speaking styles from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Therefore, this cosmopolitan Mandarin variety is a new hybrid of local and nonlocal linguistic
9 elements that constitute the Chinese yuppies’ professional style. These Chinese yuppies further take advantage of these linguistic features as social capital to exchange for higher incomes and prestigious status in foreign companies. The professional style performed by
Chinese yuppies for their public image in foreign companies is a prime example of stylization. Both local and non-local linguistic features are stylized into a package, a package for Chinese yuppies to do with their businesses in foreign companies.
In addition, Eckert’s (2000) ethnographic study shows that the relation between the identities of jocks and burnouts (two social types of schoolgirls in Belten High,
Detroit) is established and mediated through a wide range of symbolic resources. The linguistic variation is part of these symbolic practices that constitute their institutional ideologies. Eckert (2000) found that these two types of school girls maintain their opposing institutional ideologies through a wide variety of symbolic resources: clothing, facial expression, makeup, hair, bodily movement, territory, and institution orientation.
The different stylistic practices between jocks and burnouts in turns constitute two different character types in which their social meanings are embedded.
Here, Eckert’s (2005) proposal that stylistic practice is the key to the construction of social meaning is crucial. As she suggests, style is not only a token of how an individual makes his or her linguistic choice situationally, but also of how individuals use a combination of linguistic and semiotic features in creating their distinctive ways of speaking. These ways of speaking are essential for those teenage girls in high schools, because the image they deliver to the public allows them to establish social status in their high schools.
10 Such conceptualization of linguistic variation is called the Speaker Design model, a model that allows us to view linguistic variation multidimensionally. Although this proactive style shifting is not predictable, it is interpretable. As Coupland (1980) points out: “such shifts are only interpretable when we analyze a wide range of factors, including not only audience-related, but also attention-related factors” (p.11). The second issue raised by the approach is whether stylistic variation can be generalized and applied to explaining linguistic variation in a larger community. Yet, Schilling-Estes (2002) comments that these studies of stylistic variation, with the focus on speaker agency, are usually complemented by qualitative sociolinguistic research, such as large-scale ethnographic surveys, because it is difficult to understand speaker’s style shifting without a thorough ethnographic study of the speakers’ language use in a community. After all, stylistic variation does not take place in a social vacuum but in social interactions.
As sociolinguistic variationists continue to focus on the study of stylistic variation using different approaches, it should be pointed out that the Speaker Design model is not intended as a substitute for previous sociolinguistic models but as one of the perspectives from which we can understand and explain stylistic variation.
2.2 Case Studies of Speaker Design
Taking stylistic variation as Speaker Design suggests that linguistic variation is not always a reflection of internal language change over time, but rather a creative, strategic, and self-motivated act in displaying one’s identity and achieving social ends in a social context. A full picture of stylistic variation as Speaker Design involves various
11 venues in which stylistic variation takes place. Previous studies focusing on Speaker
Design have demonstrated that speakers as proactive agents could shift their style not only in response to their audience or the formality of a situation, but also for their self- expression.
Therefore, the following section discusses three specific case studies where speakers make their strategic linguistic choices in constituting their various styles.
2.2.1 Style shifting in Political Discourse
The focus of stylistic performance in political discourse implies that even though speakers are limited by highly constrained situations (such as, a public political speech or mass media communication), people shape and reshape their styles to indicate their social positions as well as to construct their personas on a local level. Podesva et al. (2012) investigated the speech performance by former U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in a public speaking engagement. The selection of Rice’s speech for their acoustic study is built upon an assumption that Rice simultaneously has multiple social identities: A famous African American female politician, who was brought up in the South and spent her adulthood on the West Coast, could be an excellent subject for displaying multifaceted identities. They examined a set of phonological and phonetic features correlated with her multifaceted identities.
The data under analysis are an audio recording of a public speech with
Commonwealth Club, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and educational organization. Rice’s speech takes up the majority of the recording, amounting to over 60 minutes of speech.
12 After the speech, Rice was invited to participate in a Q&A session, which is a somewhat more spontaneous and conversational form of speech. The authors then drew limited comparisons between the speech and the Q&A period, under the assumption that more vernacular variants occur more frequently in the Q&A section than in the relatively more careful speech that precedes it. As a result, for the vowel production, the only Southerner vowel feature Rice produced was the fronting of the back vowels common in a number of dialectal regions in the United States. In addition, there was more evidence to show that
Rice used west-coast features more frequently, such as the backing of BAT before obstruents. Given that the Q&A session reflects a less monitored style than the speech context, it is possible that Rice’s backing of BAT is an instance of her accommodation to her Californian audience.
Moreover, the authors also found that there were two features used by Rice as indexical of a standard speech style or high degree of education: the release of word-final voiceless obstruents and the glottalized /-d/, and vocalized /-r/. Although these features can index several social meanings at once, the authors interpreted these features as robustness in African American varieties of English (Thomas, 2001; Labov et al., 2006;
Koops & Niedzielski, 2009; cited in Podesva et al., (2012)). More crucially, these phonetic features are also components of Standard African American English, as further discussed by Rahman (2008) and Fasold (1981). Thus, the authors argued that Rice’s speech exhibited the linguistic elements of Standard African American English, which enabled Rice to project a public persona who was a well-educated African American.
13 2.2.2 Style shifting in Media Interaction
In addition to the study of stylistic variation in political discourse, stylistic variation in media interaction also deserves our attention, because sociolinguists can examine how speakers regulate their linguistic behaviors while facing the camera.
Particularly relevant to the study is the innovation of linguistic choices in a Chinese channel program. Zhang (2012) drew on the incorporational approach to linguistic variation as an indispensable tool to understand the socioeconomic system in China.
Specifically, she examined the data that were collected from a weekly Mandarin Chinese lifestyle-shopping program on the City Channel of Tianjin Television Station, widely broadcasted in the city of Tianjin. Zhang found that the hosts of the channel program used a set of conventional linguistic expressions in the area of fashion and trendiness to construct their modern-life styles. In addition to the frequent use of fashion and trendy expressions, they also employed a wide variety of linguistic features to present a persona in the program of one who is modern, trendy, and cosmopolitan. For instance, one type of lexical items often used are new terms or expressions that are translated into Chinese to fill lexical gaps in the Chinese language; these include huábǎn (滑板) ‘skateboard’, jīng yóu (精油) ‘essential oil’, mókǎ hú (摩卡壶) ‘moka pot’, and zhuōbù (桌布) ‘table runner.’
Moreover, the hosts’ speech is interspersed with English expressions, such as
“DIY”, “SPA”, “Email”, and “Hip hop.” These expressions all have their Mandarin equivalents that are all Chinese lexical innovations. Zhang noticed that the frequent use of these expressions has been gaining currency in the Mainland consumer market.
14 Furthermore, Zhang also found that there were two innovative uses of sound features by the hosts in the program: (1) the rare use of the rhotacization of the syllable rhyme and (2) the frequent use of full tone where a neutral tone is expected. It is well known to Chinese linguists that the rhotacized syllable rhyme and neutral tone are two distinctive features of Mainland Standard Mandarin. The former is the addition of a subsyllabic retroflex [ɹ] to the final syllable, causing the syllable rhyme to be rhotacized. Similar to the rhotacization, neutral tone is also commonly used in the northern varieties of Mandarin, including Beijing and Tianjin Mandarin varieties. Every stressed syllable has a full tone with a fixed tone value. When a syllable is weakly stressed, it causes the final syllable to be less phonetically strong.
The use of neutral tone is very common in northern China (Norman, 1993), but there is limited use in the south. The frequent use of the neutral tone is also one of the linguistic distinction1 between Mainland Mandarin and non-Mainland Mandarin, such as
Taiwan Mandarin. In the frequency use of the rhotacization, the hosts’ use of rhotacization is at a very low rate of 13.7% across the recorded episodes. Zhang argued that the low frequency use of rhotacization and the use of full tone in an otherwise neutral-tone environment in the program stood against the speech norms of Mandarin
Standard Mandarin. In other words, both linguistic features are not advocated by the hosts as indexical of fashion and trendiness. She further explained that these motivated acts were out of speaker agency in constituting their trendy and cosmopolitan personas.
1 Note that it is not that Taiwan-Mandarin speakers does not use neutral tone at all. It is used in suffixes as well as sentence-final particles, but the point here is that Taiwan-Mandarin speakers might use full tone in a conventionally neutral-tone environment.
15 Through the use of these innovative vocabulary items and speech features, the two hosts managed to construct a professional persona different from the ‘old’, the ‘traditional’, and the ‘local’. Their professional personas were made explicit through the deployment of innovative linguistic features and other symbolic means, such as their clothing and makeup. Ultimately, the combined use of innovative linguistic forms, de-rhotacization and full tone in the program successfully serve to project a stylish and cosmopolitan image.
2.2.3 Style Shifting in Day-to-Day Interaction
Style shifting not only takes place in public, but also in day-to-day interactions— an interaction that is less socially conditioned as compared to that of the public speech or media programs. Therefore, it should be expected that speakers exhibit considerable cross-situational variations. Relevant to the present study is Podesva’s (2006) study of the stylistic variation of an individual gay professional. Specifically, he investigated the variation in the voice quality of a gay medical student by focusing on the stylistic use of falsetto phonation type. Podesva then used discourse analysis to contextualize the occurrence of falsetto in the subject’s speech, proposing that this phonation type could convey expressive connotations. The subject, Heath, is openly gay and feels very comfortable about his sexuality even in his professional domain. In the study, Heath was taught to record himself in a wide range of environments, but the author only selected those contexts in which Heath and his interlocutors interact comfortably. The author also
16 was absent for the recording in order to yield more natural data for the study. He picked up three representative situations from which he could draw significant comparisons in terms of the use of falsetto.
The first situation is Heath’s interaction with his close friends who know Heath’s sexual orientation. Heath and his friends get together as a very close-kit group and spend time together very often. Therefore, the barbecue setting is very casual and informal, and the topics of conversation are mainly concerned with how to prepare for the barbecue.
The second situation is also an informal and casual conversation with his father over the phone. On this occasion, Heath has already come out to his father, but the topics concerning Heath’s sexuality is rarely mentioned in their conversation. The last situation is Heath’s regular meeting with his patient who is an older white male with Parkinson’s disease. Heath performs a physical check on his patient and tests his reflexes and short- term memory. By examining the three different speaking situations, it is shown that
Heath uses falsetto most frequently with his close friends at the barbecue setting while the least frequently in the meeting with his patient. The subject used 9.07 percent of falsetto in his utterance, more frequently than the phone conversation and meeting with his patient.
In addition to the examination of the use of falsetto, Podesva further observed
Heath’s frequent use of “creaky voice” (vocal fry) produced through bunching the vocal folds with slow vibration. It was found that the stylistic use of falsetto often co-occurred with the use of creaky voice, increasing the variability of Heath’s voice quality. Podesva hypothesized that the use of creaky voice was in concert with falsetto to expand the pitch
17 range. Heath used two different phonation types to expand his full f0 range.
As noted from the above, the co-occurrence of falsetto and creaky voice in
Heath’s speech provides us with linguistic evidence for style shifting across three different speaking situations. The frequent use of both phonation types in a barbecue setting also leads to the question of why the subject exhibits a significant cross-situational variation in that setting. Podesva explains that using falsetto and creaky voice to expand his physical extremes is to produce an expressive connation that carries social meaning.
Specifically, He states that the use of falsetto can serve to fulfill different pragmatic purposes. For example, people could use falsetto to yell at someone, to express their surprise and excitement, or to offer evaluative commentaries. Though having various pragmatic functions, these pragmatic functions all are bounded by the core pragmatic meaning—the connotation of expressiveness. He points out that the ‘expressive’ meaning of falsetto is rather vague, but he contends that in order to fully appreciate the connotation of expressiveness, it is important to contextualize the connotation of expressiveness through an analysis of discourse in which social and linguistic components are organized together for constructing a specific persona—a ‘diva’ persona in his study.
The above discussion focuses on three case studies which take stylistic variation as Speaker Design. They demonstrate that the traditional views of conceptualizing stylistic variation as Attention Paid to Speech or Audience Design are not adequate to explain all kinds of stylistic variation; rather, these studies show that their subjects are purposefully and strategically designing their speech to project a desirable image that
18 explicitly connotes their specific personas.
Considering stylistic variation as Speaker Design demonstrates a shift from a deterministic to more social constructionist view of sociolinguistic variation. The latter emphasizes the significance of speaker agency in linguistic variation in a way that speakers can assemble different linguistic and symbolic features to project their private or public images. The paradigm shifting, however, poses a new question to us: “What is the relation between these linguistic and symbolic features and their desirable images?” This can be further boiled down into the most basic question: “What is the relation between form and meaning2?” In order to understand such a relation, the present study draws on the notion of indexicality by Ochs (1992) to tease out this relational complexity. In the following section, the thesis discusses this in greater detail and thus provides a theoretical foundation for subsequent discussion on my own research.
2.3 Indexicality and Style in Sociolinguistics
The most articulate discussion of how indexicality is used to understand the relation between form and meaning is found in the work of Elinor Ochs (1992). Although she focuses the indexicality theory on language socialization, her work is also influential within sociolinguistic studies. Ochs theorizes the relation between linguistic forms and social meanings as embedded in two different relational levels: exclusive and non- exclusive relations. For exclusive relation, she suggests that there are few linguistic
2 “Form” here refers to linguistic structures, including phonetics, phonology, syntax, and so on; “meaning” here refers to social meanings, such as social characteristics or social identity.
19 features that can directly index local concepts of men and women. For instance, the use of gender terms like male and female in English is the prime example of how such exclusive relation is theorized. When using the gender term ‘male’, a hearer is able to know that the person being referred to is a man.
Yet, most linguistic features do not require such a strict relation between linguistic forms and social meanings, which is called non-exclusive. In other words, one single linguistic feature can be used to have multiple indexical meanings. Such use of a linguistic feature cannot claim its autonomy as the word ‘male’ does and thus represent its direct indexical relation with a specific social category. In addition, such a semiotic view presupposes that there is an indirect relation between linguistic forms and social meanings; that is to say, there is no one-to-one mapping between linguistic forms and social meanings. One linguistic variable can index multiple social meanings depending on its use in a specific context. For instance, the frequent use of tag questions in English is not to index a woman directly, but to take on a specific stance that is ideologically correlated with gender differentiation (Moore & Podesva, 2009). At the level of indirect indexicality, some linguistic features become linked to specific social types through a wide variety of pragmatic works like stances, speech acts, as well as other semiotic activities. Such correlational complexity is diagrammed in Figure 2.1.
20
Linguistic features
Lexicon Morphology Syntax Phonology Dialect
Acts/Activitie s
Styles Stances
Chinese yuppies Affective Valley girl Clothing Make-up Evaluative Burnouts Epistemic Jocks Postures Sports, etc. (Du Bois, 2007) Diva, etc.
Figure 2.1 Indexical relations between linguistic forms and social meanings
Ochs further contends that only taking a holistically semiotic perspective on the connection between language and gender can we account for the complication of such a relation. For example, as mentioned before, tag questions carry a mitigated interactional stance that is ideologically linked to women who have been socialized into being more elegant, thoughtful, and respectful, hence linguistic forms that connote such interactional stance may come to be seen as indexical of “femininity”. In this regard, the indirect indexicality suggests that there is no direct mapping between linguistic forms and social meanings; both entities are connected and mediated through a set of linguistic choices,
21 stances, activities, and cultural ideology, which come into full play in this indirect relationship.
Knowledge of how language relates to gender is not a catalogue of correlations between particular linguistic forms and sex of speakers, referents, addressees, and the like. Rather, such knowledge entails tacit knowledge of (1) how particular linguistic forms can be used to perform particular pragmatic work (such as conveying stance and social action) and (2) norms, preferences, and expectations regarding the distribution of this work vis-à-vis particular social identities of speakers, referents, and addressees. To discuss the relation of language to gender in these terms is far more revealing than simply identifying features as directly marking men’s or women’s speech. (Ochs, 1992, p.342)
Moreover, linguistic forms associated with broader social meanings at the level of indirect relation are not directly linked to social categories like gender but to social characters or personas, such as “burnout girls” (Eckert, 2000), “Chinese yuppies” (Zhang,
2005), and “divas” (Podesva, 2007); that is, the deployment of linguistic forms is not a maker of broader social categories but a marker of styles that differentiate one social character from the other.
As the thesis shows in the following chapters, in the analysis of one gay speaker in an LGBT talk show in Taiwan, the subject performs his own way of speaking that indexes a particular persona by employing a set of linguistic and symbolic practices that build up his own style.
22 2.4 Stance, Persona, and Identity
If style is something that we are able to articulate via a piecemeal examination of linguistic and symbolic behaviors, then what lies behind such performance and causes it to be socially meaningful? To answer this question, it is important to think about what is social meaning. Adopting the definition of social meaning by Podesva (2011, p. 234), it is defined as “the stances and personal characteristics indexed through the deployment of linguistic forms in interaction”. This definition suggests that social meaning can be understood through stances taken by using a specific linguistic variant.
In order to take a stance, Du Bois (2007) further observes it in the following pattern: “a stance-taker needs to (1) evaluate an object, (2) positions a subject (usually the self), and (3) aligns or disaligns with other subjects.” In order to understand this logical pattern, the study of Chinese yuppies by Zhang (2005) would be a prime example for demonstration. A group of Chinese yuppies (stance-taker) in foreign companies was found to use full tone more frequently than did their professional counterparts in state- owned companies. The frequent use of full tone by Chinese yuppies indexes a professional stance taken in response to their workplaces (the object), a stance that is socially meaningful to Chinese yuppies with whom the professionals in state-owned companies disalign in terms of the use of full tone. That the frequent use of full tone indexes professionalism hereby becomes a social marker of Chinese yuppies, which partially constitutes their professional style in interactions. To further explore what lies behind the style, it is also necessary to discuss the term “identity.”
23 As it is mentioned before, the term “identity” has been construed in a broader sense and thus has become somewhat overloaded in sociolinguistics. In order to tease out the complexity of identity, Bucholtz and Hall (2005, p.592) theorize identity as encompassing three subcategories:
1) macro-level demographic categories
2) local, ethnographically specific cultural positions
3) temporary and interactionally specific stances and particular roles
The categorization of identity offers us a new perspective to understand identity.
It is from subcategory (3) that we are able to understand identity in interactions. To illustrate the notion of subcategory (3), the study returns to the “Chinese yuppies” example. For those Chinese yuppies, the frequent use of full tone is an index of professionalism while doing their businesses in foreign companies, but the frequent use of it does not indicate that they are intended to be a Hong Kong or Taiwan wannabe; rather, they use it to take a professional stance as needed, such as when they are interacting with their clients or colleagues. It is on this temporary and interactional level that the yuppie’s identity is linguistically, culturally, and contextually specific.
Consequently, the study uses the term “persona” to refer to identity on such an interactional level.
In Eckert’s (2000) ethnographic study, there are two social personas of school girls (in Belton High, Detroit) found to use a variety of linguistic and symbolic resources
24 in school to stand in contrast to each other—the opposition between the burnout and the jock. One of the linguistic practices in which they constantly engage is negative concord.
Eckert found that the burnout used negative concord more frequently than did the jock and that such differential use of negative concord was associated with their social orientation to the school: the burnout girls (a typical persona) take a rebellious stance to their school while the jock girls are more active for participating in school activities, as these activities provide them with institutional status. It is important to note that both personas are not enduring and ascribed identities throughout their life in high school; rather, both personas are temporally and interactionally constructed. The differential use of negative concord is just one element of a whole set of linguistic and symbolic resources that differentiate the burnout from the jock.
Adopting the notion of a persona as interactionally constructed, the study aims to find out how a gay persona is interactionally constructed in the Chinese context and how such a persona is projected through style that is “a socially meaningful clustering of features, within and across linguistic levels and modalities” (Campell-Kibler et al., 2006).
Moreover, to understand the social meaning of a gay persona, the thesis also conducts an analysis of discourse in which the gay subject’s pitch variation surface in an LGBT talk show in Taiwan. Previous work also demonstrates a need for looking at linguistic interactions at the discourse level.
In Zhang’s (2008) study, she proposed that rhotacization took on its social meaning—Beijing Smooth Operator —through co-occurrence with key Beijing cultural terms and frequent use in written representations of authentic Beijing-ness. This could
25 not be achieved without looking deeper into the context where the social meaning becomes specific. In a similar vein, Podesva’s (2007) also found that the frequent use of both falsetto and creaky voice is best understood as expanding the pitch range to physical extremes, producing the connotation of expressiveness. The “expressiveness” becomes concrete in specific contexts and thus gives meaning to Heath’s ‘diva’ style while attending a barbecue with his close friends. Based on previous studies concerning social meaning, the thesis draws on both quantitative and qualitative approaches for examining the gay persona projected through his style and interpreting the social meaning of it based on his interactional conversations in the talk show.
2.5 Summary
Throughout this chapter, the study shows that there are tremendous approaches to style that surfaces in different venues. As recent sociolinguistic approaches continue to develop into a more united account for stylistic variation, multidimensionality has become an indispensable criterion for us to interpret stylistic variation.
Since the first examination of stylistic variation in Labov’s study in New York
City, many other sociolinguistic models were theorized to account for different stylistic variations. However, adopting unidimensional sociolinguistic frameworks (Attention to
Speech model or Audience Design model) to explain multidimensional linguistic phenomena is questionable, for it is impossible to exhaust all stylistic variations by using one single model. In addition, this might be considered as a reductionist approach to essentialize the complexity of stylistic variation in process (Schilling-Estes, 2002).
26 Until recently, the agency of speaker is brought up to sociolinguists’ attention.
The addition of Speaker Design to stylistic variation is one of the reflections of that change, considering linguistic variation as a resource in constructing speakers’ multifaceted identities. In order to explain this model, the study reviewed previous research on stylistic variation in different venues. In the study of Rice’s speech performance, Podesva et al. (2012) investigate how multifaceted identities are displayed through the collective use of a set of different linguistic resources; In Zhang’s (2012) study, she focuses on examining linguistic innovations in a Mandarin Chinese shopping program and establishes a possible precedent for future research on media interaction.
She argues that the hosts in the program employ a set of innovative linguistic features to construct a trendy, cosmopolitan Mandarin that reflects a new consumer style in modern urban China. Finally, Podesva’s (2007) research on the variation in voice quality demonstrates the possibility of relating pitch variation to a specific persona type in context.
While these models are able to account for stylistic variation, there is a further need to ask the question of how linguistic forms and social meanings are linked. To this end, the thesis draws on the notion of indexicality (Ochs 1992) to understand the indirect indexical relation between linguistic variation and social meaning.
Finally, the study adopts the categorization of identity by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) and considers identity in context as interactionally constructed. Therefore, the thesis uses the term “persona” to refer to identity as a refinement in the following chapters.
27 Chapter 3. Methodology
3.1 Introduction
This chapter mainly explains the methodology used for the thesis. It starts with a background introduction to recent LGBT movements in Taiwan and the LGBT talk show, including information on the subject and on Taiwan Mandarin that the subject speaks.
The methodological measurements used for the fundamental frequency (f0) of the subject are also explained. The chapter concludes with a summary of statistical analysis for data presentation in Chapter 4.
3.2 LGBT in Taiwan
The abbreviation ‘LGBT’, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, has gained currency in western countries since the 1990s. The term is a modification of the early abbreviation ‘LGB’ which was used as a replacement for ‘gay’ to refer to larger sexual minorities. LGBT activists believe that the term is intended to highlight a diversity of gender and sexuality cultures. It also embodies an ideology that is non-conformist and non-heterosexual. Although the circulation of the term is widening, its use in East Asian and Asian countries is still fairly limited and not widely known to the public.
28 Taiwan, one of the most progressive regions in East Asia that supports equality of the LGBT community, has been promoting the legalization of same-sex marriage for the last several years. On 24 May 2017, the Constitutional Court of Taiwan declared that the current marriage laws are unconstitutional and that the Taiwanese government is required to modify the marriage laws in order to legalize the marriage of same-sex couples. Two years are given to the executive branch of the government to amend Taiwanese marriage laws. If not passed within two years, same-sex marriage will be legalized automatically.
Before the legalization of the same-sex marriage in Taiwan, the first LGBT talk show TA
們說 (TAmén shuō) “What They Say” was launched and broadcasted on YouTube to publicize their appeals. Since the first episode was aired in August 2016, the talk show has already been viewed more than 200,000 times. This indicates that the talk show has become increasingly popular online and might have significant impact on LGBT move- ments in Taiwan.
The introduction of social background in Taiwan helps to situate the study in a historical frame for a more precise understanding of how the data source is chosen and collected for further analyses in the study. Following this is the background introduction of the LGBT talk show under analysis and the subject chosen for the study.
3.3 The LGBT Talk Show: TA 們說
The data considered for the study is taken from the first LGBT talk show in
Taiwan: TA 們說 (TAmén shuō) “What they say.” ‘TA’ is the romanization of the third
29 person pronoun ‘ 他 / 她 ’in Mandarin Chinese. The third person pronoun has two orthographic forms that are differentiated by the use of two different radicals to distinguish gender. Specifically, the radical ‘ 亻 ’ is used in conjunction with the component ‘也’ to index a male while ‘女’ used with ‘也’ to index a female in contemporary Chinese usage. With respect to the program title, the linguistic innovation of the Chinese character ‘他/她’ as ‘TA’ is an ideological representation of the program.
First, it is not intended to replace the conventional gender distinction between men and women but to blur gender identities such that one finds it difficult to distinguish one from the other. Second, the linguistic invention of the ‘TA’ not only suggests producers’ attitudes towards the talk show but also towards the society in which they are living— sexual orientation is no longer categorically-based, but is in the fluidity of the spectrum to varying degrees.
Historically and culturally, the LGBT community in Taiwan has been marginalized and underprivileged in relation to their human rights, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage. In order to denaturalize the categorical distinction between men and women, the use of ‘TA’ in the program title acknowledges the diversity of the LGBT community in Taiwan. The linguistic innovation of ‘TA’ thus serves as a meeting ground for different sexual minorities to use for reference of pronoun, a pronoun that is non-categorical and non-binary. Moreover, the slogan of the program, tīng tīng tā mén zěn me shuō (聽聽 TA 們怎麼說) “please listen to what they say,” was reiterated every time by the hosts to greet their interested audience. The attempt is made in the hope of enabling the voice of the LGBT people to be heard through calling attention to their
30 appeal from the audience. Given the nature of the talk show lies in its entertainment value, this program contains the following features.
First, entertainment sound effects are played from time to time in the talk show. If a guest mentions something funny or surprising, the sound effect is added to his or her speech to produce comical effects. (The addition of sound effects actually turns out to be a technological issue for the thesis.) Second, not all the topics discussed are related directly to critical LGBT issues. For example, one episode was filmed with the theme of a dancing competition. Third is something rather unique to this program, namely, that the hosts (one female and two males) dress in clothing of the opposite sex. The female host acts with exaggerated masculinity, and the men act with exaggerated femininity. The result is a blurring of the boundary between Chinese women and men.
In addition to its lighter entertainment value, the program also has a more serious side, in inviting professionals and social activists to disseminate LGBT-related knowledge to a wider audience. The topics discussed in the program are presented below.
As shown in Table 3.1, first, the subject participated in the talk show as a guest throughout the entire talk show, and second, the LGBT talk show covers a wide range of topics from strategies for coming out to same-sex marriage.
Table 3.1 LGBT-related topics in talk show I with subject as guest
Date Episode Topics 我的家庭真可愛 2016/08/08 1 My family is so adorable
31 我的超直好友(上) 2016/08/25 2 My super-straight best friend I 我的超直好友(下) 2016/09/05 3 My super-straight best friend II 相煎何太急: LGBT 族群看不順眼? 2016/09/12 4 How to get along with each other within the LGBT Community 世代大不同! 我們的美好時光 2016/09/19 5 Different generations: our beautiful times 出櫃策略 (上) 2016/10/17 6 Strategies for coming out I 出櫃策略 (下) 2016/10/24 7 Strategies for coming out II 超可口! 夢幻鮮肉撲倒聯誼會 2016/10/31 8 So yummy! Speed dating with the young handsome 愛情要全勝! 另一半出軌該原諒嗎? 2016/11/09 9 Love wins! Should I forgive my cheating partner 同志為什麼一定要結婚? 2016/11/14 10 Why do tongzhi call for marriage? 跟往日情告別和解? 那些難忘分手回憶 2016/11/21 11 Say goodbye to our exes: unforgettable break-up memories 全場跳起來: 超驚豔舞蹈大賽 2016/12/05 12 Let’s dance: amazing dancing competition
The program was established in 2016. It was aired on Youtube weekly. The first episode began in August, 2016 and the last ended in December that year. The four-month long program attracted over 37,448 subscribers on Youtube. Moreover, due to the success of the talk show I, the producers have decided to continue the second season of the talk show (talk show II) where the subject was invited to be one of the hosts for running the
32 program. The topics about which the subject discusses as a host in talk show II are presented in Table 3.2.
Table 3.2 LGBT-related topics in talk show II with subject as host
Date Episode Topics
黃益中老師新書專訪 2017/15/05 6 Exclusive interview for his new book: Teacher Yizong Huang 2017/17/05 7 塔羅牌大王來了 The king of Tarot is HERE! 2017/26/05 14 特殊性癖好口味千奇百怪 Special sex fetishes are so weird! 2017/31/05 15 軍中樂園：恐怖到了極點喔! Military playground: extremely scary!
The data under analysis were the episodes where the gay subject appeared in the talk show—whether as a guest or as a host. In the next section, the study provides general information on the gay subject and the three speaking situations chosen for the acoustic measurements.
3.4 The Subject and Speaking Situations
The subject of the acoustic analysis is Huang Yuxiang 3 (henceforth, HY), a
Taiwanese gay man who is a regular guest in talk show I and a host in talk show II. HY’s stylistic performance stands vividly in contrast to other gay men in talk show I for two reasons: his linguistic and paralinguistic performances. For his linguistic performance,
3 The name of the subject is presented following the Chinese convention, i.e. family name followed by given name.
33 one typical feature is his constant production of a high-pitched voice, which is quite distinctive as compared to other gay men. For his paralinguistic performance, HY’s performance evokes a typical gay stereotype through his clothing, hair style, and effeminate gestures. With all these verbal and nonverbal cues considered, HY was selected for the acoustic measurement.
For comparative purposes, two other speaking situations in which HY was present are also examined. The first speaking situation is a video-taped monologue given by HY before he was invited to be part of talk show I. He talks on a variety of topics ranging from his self-introduction to his coming out story. Subsequently, the self-recorded monologue was sent to the program producers as an audition for a chance to be a regular guest in talk show I. The next speaking situation is selected from when HY was invited to be one of the hosts running for talk show II. On this occasion, HY shifted his speaking style from his persona as a guest to one of a host who was more professional, formal, and in control of the interview situation. A total of three speaking situations are examined, under an assumption that when taking on different personas, ranging from being an applicant for talk show I, a guest in talk show I, and a host in talk show II, HY will exhibit considerable phonetic variation in his pitch range.
Setting up different speaking situations for the comparison suggests that when HY participates in varying speaking situations, he performs his linguistic behaviors differently, such that he can project himself with different personas in accordance with the different speaking situations. The shift from one persona to another may lead to linguistic variation in pitch range. Therefore, it should be expected that the variation in
34 pitch range is a dynamic reflection of his style shifting, indicating that he is changing his persona across different situations. However, the three speaking situations for the acoustic measurement are not made up evenly in terms of the length of time. This is shown in Table 3.2.
Table 3.3 Three different roles in various situations
Self-introduction Talk Show I Talk Show II Roles Applicant Guest Host Duration 3 mins 58 sec 24 mins 28 sec 4 mins 57 sec
As illustrated, the uneven time length4 across the three speaking situations is mainly due to the uneven contribution of HY’s speech, with the longest being a guest in the show and the shortest being an applicant for the self-introduction in the monologue.
For the remainder of the chapter, the study explains Taiwan Mandarin that the subject speaks and discusses methodological issues encountered while conducting the study.
3.5 Taiwan Mandarin
The linguistic landscape of Taiwan is a complex one that merits our attention. The island originally was occupied by indigenous languages— the Formosan languages that are not linguistically related to the Chinese languages or Sino-Tibetan language family
4 The acquisition of time length is based on how long the subject talks in each episode. After the measurement of the subject’s speaking time in each episode, the study simply did an addition for the overall time length in each setting, as shown in Table 3.3.
35 but to the Austronesian language family. When Taiwan came under the Nationalist
Kuomintang 國民黨 (KMT) government of the Republic of China in 1945 (Wu 2011),
Mandarin Chinese was imported and imposed on the population through powerful and effective language teaching campaigns. As a result, the prestige of Mandarin Chinese was established and widely used thereafter. Moreover, the KMT administration furthered their attempts to promote wider circulation of Mandarin through the suppression of the use of other languages in Taiwan. Consequentially Mandarin Chinese has completed its transformation as the official language of Taiwan.
Linguistically, the local languages in Taiwan are composed of Taiwanese, Hakka
Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, and Austronesian languages spoken by aboriginal people.
Around 75% of the people speak Taiwanese (Liu 2012), thus this multiplicity of language use led to the contact-induced variation in Mandarin Chinese. Yen-Hewi Lin (2007) proposes that the accents of Standard Mandarin in Taiwan range from those prescribed standard Mandarin in Taiwan, Taiwanese-accented, and to those with heavily Taiwanese- accented Mandarin. The Mandarin spoken by the subject belongs to the prescribed standard variety. This variety is often referred to as Táiwān guóyǔ (台灣國語) “Taiwan
Mandarin.”
Essentially, Taiwan Mandarin is the language variety generally spoken in Taiwan and some overseas communities, with some minor differences from Mainland Standard
Mandarin (Putonghua). The phonological and grammatical inventories of Taiwan
Mandarin are based on that of Beijing dialect. Phonologically, Taiwan Mandarin and
Mainland Standard Mandarin both have four lexical tones, conventionally named as Tone
36 1 (T1), Tone 2 (T2), Tone 3 (T3), and Tone 4 (T4). Every stressed syllable has a tone, spreading over the voiced part of the syllable. A summary of the tones is presented below
Table 3.4 The four tones in Taiwan Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin
Tone pattern Pitch value Example T1 High level 55 mā 媽 “mother” T2 Mid rising 35 má 麻 “hemp” T3 Low dipping 214 mǎ 馬 “horse” T4 High falling 51 mà 罵 “scold”
The tonal representation system5 of pitch value for the tour tones in Table 3.4 was proposed by Chao (1956) and has become the most widely used system within Chinese linguistics. As indicated in Table 3.4, Chao classified the four tones in Mandarin as 55,
35, 214, and 51, with his system of tone numbers representing a scale from ‘1’ indicating the lowest pitch value and ‘5’ the highest. For example, a high-level tone is transcribed as
‘55’ while a high-falling tone ‘51’.
Two tonal features in Mandarin deserve our further attention. First, one common tonal property in both varieties of Mandarin is the tone sandhi effect. For instance, in the case of T3, one of its tone-sandhi variations is that it is changed from 214 to 35 before
5 In fact, the tonal representation system proposed by Chao (1956) is prescriptive. In the work of Janice Fon and Wen-Yu Chiang (1999), they found that there was a significant amount of discrepancy between the prescriptive (55, 35, 214, and 51) and the descriptive pitch values (44, 323, 312, and 42) for the four tones in Taiwan Mandarin. However, for the current study, what is at issue here is not whether the system is prescriptive or not, but is the scale of pitch values that can represent the highest and lowest pitch values of syllables in Taiwan Mandarin. For convenience’s sake, the study will use the prescriptive one to represent the scale of the highest and lowest pitch levels, respectively.
37 another T3 syllable in a tone-sandhi span. For both varieties of Mandarin, it often does not have a final pitch rise for T3 syllables. For example, the word xiǎogǒu (小狗) “little dog” is conventionally pronounced [çjɑu]35 [kɔ]214, but when in spontaneous speech, it is often pronounced as [çjɑu]35 [kɔ]21. The second tonal property commonly observed in
Taiwan Mandarin is the realization of full tone on both syllables of a disyllabic forms where Mainland Standard Mandarin has trochees; that is, the second syllable has a neutral tone the weakly-stressed second syllable 6 . For instance, what is Mainland Standard
Mandarin [miŋpái] 明白 ‘understand’ is realized as [míŋpái] in Taiwan Mandarin, with full tone on both syllables.
Although the sound system of these two varieties of Mandarin have many similarities, they also exhibit some differences (Kubler & Ho 1984). For example, in
Taiwan Mandarin, the initials [ts], [tsʰ], and [s] have the tendency to merge with [ts̨], [ts̨ʰ], and [s̨], respectively, whereas they are kept distinct in Mainland Standard Mandarin.
Overall, the linguistic similarities between Taiwan Mandarin and Mainland
Standard Mandarin are much greater than their differences. In order to develop acoustic methods for measuring the pitch value of target syllables produced by the subject in the talk show, the tone sandhi effect should be taken into account; moreover, additional methodological issues should also be explained and addressed. Following this is an
6 Again, the study is not proposing that Taiwan-Mandarin speakers does not use neutral tone at all, but when compared with Putonghua speakers, Taiwan-Mandarin speakers seem to use less neutral tone overall.
38 explanation of methodological constraints on data collection before discussing the linguistic measurements.
3.6 Some Constraints on Data Collection
While many empirical studies favor using experimental methods to extract the pitch value of utterances from their participants in a laboratory setting, one reason to focus on conversational speech is what Wolfson (1976, p.202) points out: “people do not speak in a social or situational vacuum.” This implies that social factors play a crucial role in conditioning how we talk in various situations. Besides, reading passages or sociolinguistic interviews in effect might, more or less, establish an artificial context in which participants are consciously aware of the fact that researchers are looking for something from their interviews. This self-awareness might inhibit speakers from producing natural speech. With this in mind, one’s sexuality might not emerge as naturally as it appears in conversational speech. This is particularly true, as speakers are not robots that perform their styles mechanically; instead, speakers shift their styles in constant negotiation with their interlocutors and other contextual factors. Therefore, conversational speech is the most appropriate type of speech to examine how HY moves his style from one situation to the next.
However, the paradigm shift from laboratory settings to conversational speech also has some methodological constraints. Given the study is not intended for an investigation of pitch variation in a laboratory setting, the study lacks controllability to varying degrees. It is impossible for the researcher to control the speech rate as well as
39 other contingent variables. For instance, the talk show reinforces its entertainment value by inserting entertaining sound effects to the talk show. If attempts are made to measure the mean pitch value of overall utterances produced by the subject in the talk show, then the quality of the data will be seriously degraded by that sound effect. Moreover, the subject’s speech rate also varies from one situation to the other. This makes it difficult to identify pitch patterns using Praat, the speech analysis software program.
With all these constraints considered, the following section is to explain how to measure the pitch value, with the focus on particular syllables produced by the subject at the utterance level.
3.7 Linguistic Measurements
To study HY’s speech across the three different situations, measurements are made at the syllable level to study the maximum and minimum f0 in our subject’s speech production as well as to obtain the pitch range produced in those three settings. In making the measurements, the tone sandhi effect is taken into consideration.
Pitch variability is especially relevant in this study in looking at the relationship between pitch variation and the speech of sounding gay. One common stereotype about gay-sounding speech is that gay people usually produce higher f0 while talking. However, previous work (Gaudio, 1994; Jacob et al., 2003) on gay-sounding speech has demonstrated that there is no direct link between high f0 and gay identity. More recently, research on gay-sounding speech (Levon, 2007; Podesva, 2007) has found that pitch
40 range could be a reliable phonetic cue to the identification of gay people in English and their studies support that pitch range could be a potential variable for the current study to examine the phonetic variation produced by the subject in the three situations. Therefore, measurements will be made on the subject’s pitch range in productions across the three speaking situations.
Specifically, in this study, the pitch range of the subject is obtained as follows.
First, it is necessary to measure his maximum and minimum f0s (Henceforth, fmax and fmin). Variation in pitch range then can be obtained for the subject across the three different situations.
Second, following previous scholarship which considers pitch range as related to gay identity, the study concentrates on the measurements of fmax and fmin on particular full-tone syllables. For this purpose, the study considers the peak f0 value of T4 and the lowest f0 value of T3 syllables as represented for the fmax and fmin, respectively. For T3, the [35] tone sandhi form is not used; only the [21] and [214] forms are used to obtain their lowest f0 values.
Next is making quantitative measurements7 to derive the pitch ranges. First, as shown in Table 3.5, pitch range is calculated by subtracting the fmin from the fmax; second, all utterances produced by HY in different situations will be transcribed and divided into three columns for indicating different speaking situations. After the transcription, the current study went through all the noise-free utterances one by one and then manually
7 As mentioned in the section 3.6, there are sound effects and other noises imposed on the raw data. In order not to include these noises for making the measurements, the current study first manually transcribed all of the utterances produced by HY and then made measurements only on those utterances without any overlapping noises
41 marked up all T3 and T4 syllables in each utterance. A total number of utterances produced by HY is presented in Table 3.6.
Table 3.5 Acoustic measures and method of calculation
Acoustic measures Method of calculation
fmax (Hz) -
fmin (Hz) - F0 range (Hz) F0 max-F0 min
Table 3.6 The number of utterances for making the measurements
Self-introduction Talk Show I Talk Show II Roles Applicant Guest Host Number of episodes 1 8 4 Number of utterances 101 184 87
Table 3.7 The number of T3 and T4 syllables for making the measurements
Self-introduction Talk Show I Talk Show II Roles Applicant Guest Host Number of T3 88 248 73 Number of T4 184 414 156
After the preparation for singling out all usable T3 and T4 syllables, the method the current study used to measure the pitch value of the target syllables (T3 and T4 syllables) is to extract the pitch value manually using Praat. The data information for the
42 measurements is presented above in sequence. Table 3.5 shows that there are uneven distributions of utterances in terms of the number of tokens across the three situations, with HY as a guest producing the largest number of utterances while the least number of utterances were produced as a guest; Table 3.6 reveals that in terms of the number of T3 and T4 syllables, the three different situations also contain different numbers of target syllables, with having the most in talk show I and the least in talk show II. The raw measurements will be processed using the statistical analysis software program, SPSS.
3.8 Statistical Analysis
For the quantitative study, the raw data results were statistically analyzed to test if there is any significant difference across the three speaking situations, where HY takes on different roles. Specifically, the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed first to test whether significant differences can be found between situations. In the analysis, the null hypothesis is that if the null hypothesis is proved false, one may feel confident that the results are due to the difference in situations. Therefore, the three speaking situations will be taken as situational factors that condition how HY manipulates his mean fmax level and pitch range.
Later, because the ANOVA test only tells whether the results have overall significant difference between situations, post hoc test will be run to confirm which pair of situations are significantly different. In the current study, the Scheffe test was used as the post hoc test, as the study hopes to compare all simple and complex pairs of situations so that the processed results could provide us with a narrower confidence interval.
43 In what follows, the thesis will present the quantitative results and discuss the sociophonetic variation patterns in greater detail.
44 Chapter 4. Data Presentation and Discussion
4.1 Introduction
The main goal of this chapter presents and discusses the quantitative results of the acoustic measurements for T4 and T3 syllables, representing the fmax and fmin, respectively. An analysis of his cross-situational phonetic variations follows through taking a closer look at talk show I in which HY participates as a guest. Specifically, two conversational excerpts are examined for how HY creates his personal way of speaking by using additional linguistic and symbolic features. Lastly, the notion of indexicality is applied to explaining the relationship between linguistic forms and social meaning found in the current study.
4.2 Sociophonetic Variation Patterns
4.2.1 Variation Patterns of Maximum Mean Pitch
Table 4.1 shows the fmax mean pitch of each of the T3 syllables in the three situations and Figure 4.1 is presented for a better reading of the data.
45
Table 4.1 Maximum mean pitch of T4 syllables in three situations
Situations Mean N Std. Deviation Self-introduction 246.79 184 74.09 Talk Show I 285.82 414 72.12 Talk Show II 289.13 156 105.71 Total 276.66 754 82.48
300 285.82 289.13 290 280 270 260 246.79 250 240 230 220 Self-introduction Talk Show I Talk Show II
Self-introduction Talk Show I Talk Show II
Figure 4.1 The average level of maximum f0 (Hz)
As shown in Figure 4.1, HY exhibits a higher mean fmax in the context of the talk show—both as a guest and a host, reaching the peak at over 280 Hz. Even though the mean fmax value is not as high as the pitch level (over 400 Hz) found in the work of
Podesva (2007), at least, it is higher than the pitch boundary8 of 150 Hz between Chinese men and women proposed by Cheng (1995). Obviously, the calculation of the mean fmax value cannot tell us the story with accuracy. Therefore, the current study analyzes the
8 Note that the information here is cited from Chan’s (2000) survey on Chinese language and gender. Cheng (1995) developed a software program, Speech Analysis for Windows, to identify the pitch difference between Chinese men and women. The program offers information on placing the boundary to distinguish Chinese men and women at 150 Hz.
46 data via the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), which is mainly used to determine whether there are any statistically differences between two or more independent situations. As shown in Table 4.2, significant difference is found between groups; that is to say, there are statistically differences (df = 2, p < .05) across the three speaking situations.
Table 4.2 The one-way analysis of variance for differences between situations
Sum of Mean df F Sig. Squares Square Between 223946.173 2 111973.086 17.031 .000 Groups Within Groups 4944269.197 752 6574.826 Total 5168215.370 754
Note: significance *p < .05.
Table 4.3 Comparison of situational differences on the maximum mean pitch level
Mean 95% Confidence Interval (I) Situations (J) Situations Difference Std. Error Sig. Lower Upper (I-J) Bound Bound
self- talk show I -39.02758* 7.1708314 .000 -56.61498 -21.44018 introduction talk show II -42.33161* 8.8139617 .000 -64.05900 -20.71422 self- 39.02758* 7.1708313 .000 21.440182 56.614980 talk show I introduction talk show II -3.304025 7.6175812 .910 -21.98714 15.379087 self- 42.33160* 8.8139617 .000 20.714215 63.948997 talk show II introduction talk show I 3.3040252 7.6175812 .910 -15.37909 21.987137
*. The mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level.
47
In this study, the Scheffe method was used to test which groups are significantly different specifically after the one-way analysis of variance. Table 4.3 shows that the first row compares the self-introduction to each of the remaining situations, indicating there are statistically difference between the self-introduction and the other two situations (p <
0.05). But the second and third rows reveal that there is no significant difference between talk show I (p > 0.05) and talk show II (p > 0.05).
These statistical results concerning the mean fmax variation support that there are significant differences between the self-introduction and the two talk show situations, but no significant difference is found between talk show I and talk show II where HY is a guest and host, respectively.
4.2.2 Variation Patterns of Pitch Range
We next study the phonetic variation in HY’s pitch range. Table 4.4 presents the quantitative data on the mean fmax of T4 syllables and the mean fmin of T3 syllables.
Table 4.4 Mean fmax of T4 syllables and fmin of T3 syllable in the three situations
Situations Mean fmax T4 N (T4) Mean fmin T3 N (T3) self- 246.79 184 197.50 125 introduction talk show 285.82 414 193.67 289 talk show II 289.13 156 243.00 87 Total 276.66 754 202.31 501
48 As shown in Table 4.4, it is important to note that there is an unequal number of tokens of T4 and T3 syllables. In order to successfully perform the mathematic formula for acquiring the pitch range, as indicated in Chapter 3, the current study subtracts the mean fmin T3 from the mean fmax T4 in the three speaking situations, respectively. This is shown in Figure 4.2.
Our study shows clear variation patterns below: First, HY’s pitch range is considerably wider in talk show I than in the self-introduction—the former over twice as high as the latter. Second, even within the two sets of talk shows, HY also exhibits a considerably wider pitch range when he participates in talk show I as a guest than in talk show II as a host.
100 92.15 90 80 70 60 46.13 50 42.29 40 30 20 10 0 Self-introduction Talk Show I Talk show II
Self-introduction Talk Show I Talk show II
Figure 4.2 The variation in pitch range (Hz) across three speaking situations
49 4.2.3 Interpreting Variation Patterns
How should we explain the subject’s phonetic variation in pitch range across the different situations? Is it due to how much attention he paid to his speech or to the audience in the talk shows? First, the two sets of talk shows are set in a formal situation, but it is an entertainment talk show that encourages their guests to talk freely. Second, the subject sometimes uses Taiwan Mandarin and Taiwanese interchangeably and often makes use of vernacular expressions, such as lǎoniáng (老娘) “old woman” in both talk show I and II. Such expressions do not fall into the standard-vernacular continuum—the more formal the situation is, the more standard language people tend to use. In this case, it is hard to say that the phonetic variation in pitch range was triggered by the formality of the situation.
For the audience effect, since the program9 was aired on Youtube to which every has open access, it is difficult to tell which group of people the subject was inclined to converge with or diverge from. In other words, the audience effect cannot exactly account for his stylistic variation in pitch range. Based on the above discussion, it is obvious that the Attention Paid to Speech and the Audience Design might not be able to best explain such stylistic variation.
However, if we interpret the phonetic variation as related to situational factors, where the subject takes on different personas in response to different situations, then we can further assume that the subject might pick up different sets of features in his
9 Note that the program was released in Taiwan Youtube, where Mainland Chinese audiences have no access to.
50 linguistic repertoire to be compatible with particular situations. It is very likely that when
HY was a guest in talk show I, he was given much more freedom to talk on a variety of
LGBT-related topics than when he was a host. His open, casual, gay persona might not be in accordance with the setting where he undertook the responsibility of being a host.
When he was attending talk show II as a guest, what he was told is to be himself in an environment where his sexuality is fully accepted. But when he was a host, he knew that he had to be professional, sophisticated, and restrained as a professional who is tasked with running the program. Under such a social circumstance, the subject was situationally motivated to be more attentive to his linguistic and behavioral expressions.
Therefore, it is proposed here that it is the subject’s agency that decides whether to move his style from one situation to another. The speaker is being proactive by purposefully picking up particular linguistic and symbolic features from his repertoire to construct and perform his persona and style. However, investigating the variation in pitch range only tells us part of the story of how HY constructs and performs his persona and style. If stylization is a process of ‘bricolage’, then the variation in pitch range is by no means the only one being stylized. There must be other verbal and nonverbal features in the talk show that are also stylized as resources for constructing his gay persona.
In addition, the relation between his linguistic features and gay identity is also crucial for us to understand how the indirect indexical relation is established, mediated, and ideologized. As Bucholtz (2009) suggests, an interactional stance may be ideologically associated with social categories like women or men and that particular stance could be directly expressed through the deployment of a set of linguistic and
51 symbolic features in interactions. To capture such a form-meaning relationship, this study further examines talk show I in which HY was a guest. It should be expected that HY stylized other linguistic and symbolic features as a whole and that the social meaning of his persona and style became specified and interpreted as more related to his gay identity.
This implies that all levels of his self-presentation for his gayness can be made, not only through his linguistic choice, but also through his clothing, hair style, gestures, and bodily movement. At the same time, the most salient pitch range that he uses, found in talk show I as a guest, serves as an additional resource that the subject can manipulate, along with other linguistic and symbolic resources, to construct his gay persona. The topic of other linguistic and symbolic resources will be discussed in greater depth in the following subsection.
4.3 Social Meaning as a Cluster of Features
When we are thinking about how to derive meaning from an utterance, we usually attend to lexical and pragmatic meanings from each unit of that utterance at once and process them simultaneously. In a similar vein, when we are thinking about how to derive social meaning from one’s style, we also attend to a set of linguistic and paralinguistic features from that style. This holistic view of social meaning provides us with insight into how to interpret our sociolinguistic data. As noted in Chapter 2, style is a cluster of features that carry social information. This social information is embedded in our linguistic and social practices. By interpreting it as a whole, we are able to tell a specific persona and style on an interactional level. In Zhang’s (2008) study, she explores the
52 imbued social meaning of rhotacization by situating the use of such linguistic feature in its sociocultural contexts. She found that the social meaning of rhotacization is ideologically associated with the social character “the Beijing Smooth Operator,” who is an authentic representation of Beijing-ness. The indexical relation between Beijing-ness and rhotacization is established and mediated through the co-occurrence with key Beijing cultural terms and frequent use in written representations of authentic Beijing-ness
(Zhang 2008). In this case, the use of rhotacization is just part of the entire authentic representations of Beijing-ness.
For the present study, it shows that the subject exhibits a considerable cross- situational variation across different situations. If the phonetic variation in pitch range is also part of the subject’s self-representation, then this requires us to interpret the sociophonetic variation with recourse to its context in which HY reveals the most salient variation. Therefore, there is a need for us to examine what the meaning of the variation denotes and how such meaning comes into being in that context.
For research on prosodic variations, previous work has shown that the variation in pitch range can communicate a variety of pragmatic meanings, such as emotion (Scherer,
2003) and attitude (Krahmer & Swerts, 2005). For example, a higher pitch and wider pitch range is a clear sign of anger, or surprise in some cases while a lower pitch voice and narrower pitch range may signal sadness and boredom. Experiments (See Schröder’s review in 2001) have also attempted to eliminate prosodic features from a set of utterances and investigated whether these degraded utterances could still convey speaker’s emotion. It was found that the absence of prosodic features did impair the
53 perception of emotion and attitude. However, what these specific emotions and attitudes communicate should be understood within particular contexts, which presumably decides how one talks and behaves.
In this study, HY performs a wider pitch range when he is a guest, as opposed to being an applicant and a host. As discussed earlier, the wider pitch range should serve as one of the linguistic resources that carries the pragmatic meaning in the constitution of his gay persona. Therefore, two conversational excerpts, where HY performs the widest pitch range, are used to specify the social meaning of the phonetic variation and demonstrate how such form-meaning relationship is established and mediated via the mediation of the subject’s stance.
4.3.1 The Stylistic Use of Female Terms of Reference
As Zwicky (1997, p.22) notes: “the lexicon is in many ways the easiest part of language to study, especially when comparing other linguistic levels that may carry under-specific meanings.” Indeed, the use of lexical resources can, to its greatest extent, provide us with more straightforward information for interpreting its social meaning.
Compared with phonological and phonetic variables, the investigation of the stylistic use of lexical items should be more direct to understand the social meaning of a particular variable.
Moving into the discussion in the Chinese context, some lexical items have been used primarily or exclusively by Chinese women, such as terms of address or/and sentence-final particles (see a more detailed discussion by Chan and Lin in press). For
54 example, terms of address ideologically associated with Chinese women include the first- person pronoun rén jiā, (人家) ‘terms of endearment’, qīnàide (亲爱的) ‘darling,’ while sentence-final particles (SFP, henceforth), including ne (呢), la (啦), ma (嘛), and o (哦), have been reported to be more frequently used by Chinese females. Moreover, the gendered ideology embedded in lexical items serves to play up to Chinese traditional gender norms that configure the linguistic behaviors of Chinese women. For instance, the use of SFPs is to soften the tone of speech, and thus, to produce a less blunt and less definitive stance (Chan and Lin in press). In order to acquire more qizhi 气质 “refinement”
(Su, 2008) while talking, Chinese women are socialized to use sentence-final particles more often than men to soften their tone. Therefore, these feminized characteristics of an idealized Chinese woman are made explicitly through their socialized linguistic behaviors.
This gendered ideology in Chinese culture has been important momentum in influencing how a Chinese woman should perform.
In the next subsection, this study suggests that some of these linguistic and gestural features are stylized into a new package that is available to the subject. Although these features are ideologically associated with Chinese women, they have the semiotic potential to be reinterpreted via the subject’s stance on a local, interactional level.
An analysis of discourse is conducted to interpret HY’s stylistic performance in the talk show as a guest. Through contextualizing his interaction with the hosts, it permits us to study how the subject stylizes these preexisting linguistic and symbolic features into his stylistic repertoire and how these features become rich resources available to the subject, who is able to project a gay persona in response to the talk show as a guest.
55 4.3.2 Conversational Analysis
Two conversational excerpts are presented in this subsection. Excerpt one comes from Episode 9 of talk show I where HY is a guest interacting with two of the hosts.
Mako in the excerpt is a Japanese female guest on the talk show. The excerpt illustrates how HY takes his personal stance to the scenario given by Host C. The conversation pertains to an occasion where sometimes ‘straight men’ would pretend to be gay and go to gay bars to hook up with heterosexual women who consider gay men to be ‘harmless,’ since they feel that women are not sexually attractive to gay men. In other words, those women think that men in the gay bar are all gay, some straight men then would try to take advantage of these women in there.
Table 4.5 HY’s conversational except one in the talk show as a guest
Conversational Role Chinese Transcription English Gloss Sequence
“我好奇一點，因為 Mako I am curious about one thing, 說她穿得很辣去同志夜 because Mako said she was (1) Host C dressed very prettily and had 店，那如果你在同志夜店 gone to gay bars before. So 看到一個女生穿得很辣， suppose that you also see a hot 你會覺得討厭還是什麼?” girl in a gay bar. Do you feel annoyed or something else? I feel that someone is (2) HY “我覺得又一個來較勁, 拜 competing against me, come 託 ” ! on!
(3) It’s like competing against you “就會搶菜?” Host B for a guy?
Absolutely, and I was like, I (4) HY “對, 就會想說在這裡老娘 am the QUEEN here, not you! 才是焦點呢 坐下 , !” Just sit down!
56
In this excerpt, in line (1), Host C asked if HY felt threatened when he came across a pretty woman like Mako in a gay bar. HY responded to the question by considering her as his competitor who was trying to steal his glamour (in line (2)), but meanwhile he was using the word bàituō (拜托) “come on” to take on his personal stance explicitly that he was not afraid that Mako was going to steal his attractiveness.
Linguistically, the main pragmatic function of the word bàituō “come on” is to soften the speaker’s imposition on the listeners. However, the word here expresses the subject’s stance, namely, that of being fearless. The interpretation of the utterance is that
“Mako is going to compete with HY for men in the bar, but HY is not afraid of her challenge.” What is interesting here is that a Chinese phrase that originally functions to soften a speaker’s direct speech act becomes a stance-taking strategy for expressing what
HY thinks about the scenario. In line (3), Host B further confirmed that “it’s like competing against you for a guy?” The question is answered with a strong statement of confirmation: “absolutely, and I was like, I am the QUEEN10 here, not you! Just sit down!” In this statement, the subject’s femininity is made vivid through his linguistic and gestural features.
10 There is a lexical gap in English in translating the word “老娘” in Chinese, which should literally be translated as “old woman.” The main reason for translating the term “老娘” as “queen” is that the word “queen” can be used to refer to the speaker himself.
57 The first linguistic feature being stylized was the female term of reference 11 lǎoniáng (老娘), literally translated as “old woman.” This is not the first time that I have encountered the use of this female term of reference in the Chinese gay community.
Instead, based on my personal experience, many Chinese gay men frequently use such kind of female terms of reference to express their multiple stances in interactions. This female term of reference12 is usually used to refer to a female speaker who is married, but with a negative connotation of being arrogant. The use of female terms of reference by
Chinese gay men is not to simply project themselves as a woman wannabe; rather, it has its own discourse function in interactions. For instance, in line (4), when Host B made his confirmation about what HY thought about the scenario, HY gave him a positive answer and said: “I am the QUEEN here, not you!” This female term of reference here in fact encodes the subject’s stance, being fearless about what he would do when that scenario happens. With the addition of his direct request to “Sit down!”, his stance is made more explicit and thus has multiple connotations: first, the use of this female form of reference associates HY with femininity that stands contrast to his ascribed identity as a Taiwanese man. Second, the use of the direct request “Sit down” encodes HY’s stance with a more demanding attitude. In addition, the production of the sentence-final particle ne (呢)
11 There is a difference between the form of address and the term of reference. For the form of address, as it is defined by Dickey (1996), the address meaning of a word is decided by its usage as an address; for the term of reference, it is used to refer to people or things, including the referrer himself or herself. In the current study, the word lǎoniáng (老娘) is the term of reference to HY himself. 12 In Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (現代漢語辭典) ‘A Dictionary of Modern Chinese’, lǎoniáng (老娘) is defined as the term of reference. The Chinese definition here is “已婚中年或老年婦女的自稱 (含自負意),” A self-reference term for those senior women who are married, but with a negative connotation of being arrogant.
58 accompanied by sharp falling intonation also serves as an addition to HY’s stance-taking, making his stance more emphatic.
On the prosodic level, when HY responded to the question, his pitch was over 400
Hz on the word wǒ (我) ‘I’ at the very beginning of line (2). The entire utterance “I feel that someone is competing against me, come on!” also reached the average pitch level of over 200 HZ. Hence, the entire response was uttered at an overall raised pitch. At the same time, HY also performed a gesture that typically signifies femininity, namely, the tucking of hair behind one’s ear, in his case, his short hair behind his ears. This particular feminine gesture is normally used by women who have long hair. Given HY is a male with short hair, this bodily gesture is a strong demonstration of his effeminacy (See
Figure 4.3).
Figure 4.3 HY’s gestural feature: tucking the short hair behind his ear
How should we understand HY’s stylistic performance from excerpt one? This study proposes that, first, the linguistic features used by HY have their own pragmatic
59 functions, such as the word bàituō (拜托) and the SFP ne (呢). These linguistic forms originally should serve to soften speakers’ imposition on their listeners. However, here, they are being stylized by HY to take up a specific stance as a means of identity expression; that is, HY made them into a stylistic package that is available for him to express his gay identity. Although these linguistic features have been found to be used more frequently by and thus intuitively associated with Chinese women, there is no direct indexical relationship between them. Instead, they could be re-associated with, and reinterpreted as, other social groups like Chinese gay people.
Second, the co-occurrence of the female term of reference with the feminine gestural action of hair-tucking can further verbalize and visualize his stance to certain topics in talk show I as a guest. By using these linguistic and gestural features, the stance taken by HY is successfully associated himself with femininity, a characteristic that stands in contrast to the masculinity of heterosexual culture.
Third, the stylization of these linguistic and gestural features is a typical process of ‘bricolage’ that assembles a set of multidimensional and multimodal resources to serve an agent’s social ends. When HY is a guest, these stylized resources become available for the subject to construct and perform his gay persona and style. But the indexical relation between his stylized features and his gay identity is not established directly, but is mediated through his stance.
What is left unanswered is whether or not HY is playing a female role in talk show I, since he employs some linguistic and gestural features that are ideologically associated with Chinese women. In the study of slang use, for instance, Bucholtz (2009)
60 observed that much work has focused on surveys and other elicited data to compare the gender difference between men and women in terms of their use of slang, but argued that the assumption that there are linguistic differences between men and women in terms of slang use is questionable. This is because slang is an ideologically fraught linguistic category that might carry different social meanings related to different social categories, such as class, race, and sexuality. While such an approach enables scholars to scrutinize gender differences, this approach also ignores the possibility that “slang terms ideologically associated with one gender or the other may in fact be shared in practice.”
(2009, p.149). To illustrate in the present study, it seems that HY employs a limited set of linguistic and gestural features found to be used more frequently by Chinese women, but such practices in talk show I are shared with the subject—a Taiwanese gay man—and thus are further ideologically re-associated with the subject’s gay identity. The re- association between these features and his gay identity is reinterpreted and understood in the LGBT talk show. Moreover, Bucholtz (2009, p.149) argued that “the social meaning of a linguistic variable cannot be directly taken out of its semantics or demographic distribution of its use”; that is, the semantic meaning of a lexical word or the distribution of frequency use of that word cannot help us to interpret the social meaning directly.
It is worth noting that Elaine Chun (2001), in her research on Korean American males’ identities, found that most Asian Americans do not have linguistic repertoires that are attached to ethnically specific meaning. She proposed that some of the Asian men borrow linguistic elements from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a means to fight against racial ideologies that advocates whiteness. Her study further
61 implies that the use of a particular linguistic variable does not mean that the user of that linguistic variable is intended to designate a specific social group. For Chun, Korean
Americans using linguistic elements of AAVE does not mean that they are trying to become Africa Americans; rather, the use of a linguistic variable might serve as a means for fighting against racism. In a similar vein, the use of the female term of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) by HY is not meant to project himself as a woman, but is a means for associating himself with femininity and thus constructing his gay persona and style.
Because HY as a gay man lacks access to a variety of Chinese linguistic features that are associated with homosexually specific meanings, what he could do to perform his gayness is to borrow linguistic and gestural resources that are ideologically linked to
Chinese women. Therefore, it is proposed that the subject is not playing a female role in the LGBT talk show; instead, he is stylizing these linguistic and symbolic resources into his “gay” package for constructing his gay persona and style.
Turning to excerpt two which comes from Episode 11 , this study further analyzes the use of the female form of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) and will examine how the indirect indexical relation between forms and meanings is established.
Table 4.6 HY’s conversational except two in the talk show as a guest
Conversational Role Chinese Transcription English Gloss Sequence “因為我當時很沒有安全感 I was so insecure, he was 啊，他就是時不時，我們 like, he even did not 的關係他沒有承認然後又 acknowledge our relationship, (1) HY 會去跟我說他要在外面跟 and then he told me that he 女生約會。” was going to date another girl again.
62 “那他出去約會後還會跟你 Would he also share what was (2) Host B going on with you after the 分享嗎 ?” date?
“我就會跟他說我不想聽, I would tell him that I didn’t 然後我自己也有做過, 算 want to listen, and I also had 是劈腿, 但是,可是講這個 cheated on him before. But It 好像是為自己辯護, 我就 seems like talking about this 是, 當時的情況, 我覺得 is to defend myself, I was, but the reason why I cheated on 因為真的很沒有安全感了, (3) HY him as well was because I 我覺得我不可以全心全意 was so insecure. I felt that I 放在他身上, 然後 should not devote my full self 我就有點催眠自己,因為我 to that relationship, so I tried 非常想要全心全意放在他 to hypnotize myself even 身上。” though I really want to devote myself to him. “就是雞蛋不要放在同一個 Just don’t put all the eggs into (4) Host B 籃子裡。” one single basket. “對! 所以我當時就找了一 個, 找了一個很喜歡我的 Right! so I just hooked up 學長, 然後跟他去,就是發 with a guy who was also into 生一些事情, 可是沒有很 me, then we had sex. But I (5) HY was still so upset because I 開心, 因為我並不喜歡那 didn't like him, I just wanted 個學長,我只是覺得我需要 to find one reason to convince 給自己一個理由去說服自 myself. 己。” After a long pause, HY continues. “給自己講說, 那我今天, So I just told myself, from 老娘也不是全心全意放在 today on, I, as a queen, (6) HY 你身上, 就算我們分開 would no longer be upset 了。” about the relationship, even though we are already apart! “哎呀, 可是這樣會很 Uhnn…But that would be (7) Host A 耶!” very painful! “很難過, 就是想要說服自 So sad, but I had to convince (8) HY myself that I would be fine 己分開我不會難過。 ” after we split up.
63 In excerpt two, HY primarily discusses his relationship with his ex-partner, in one of his relationships with a straight man, and one who did not acknowledge their relationship. In the conversation from lines (1) to (4), HY showed his vulnerability to the host in saying “I am so insecure” while dating a straight man. He further explained why he wanted to date another man, even though he was already in a relationship with one man. His self-narrative of how he felt about the relationship with his partner demonstrates his subordinate and powerless positon in the relationship. It should be emphasized here that the gender norms of Chinese culture do not encourage Chinese men to openly display vulnerability.
As an old Chinese (Cantonese) proverb goes, naahmn yahn daaih jeuhng fu, lauh hyut bat lauh leuih (男人大丈夫, 流血不流淚) “A man sheds blood, not tears,” this implies that there are two opposing gendered norms that confine how Chinese men and women should behave. For the use of the female term of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) “old woman” here, when the word was uttered, the average f0 across this disyllabic word was lowered from the surrounding syllables to that of 189 Hz,. The change of the pitch level reflects a change in emotion, suggesting the possibility of HY adjusting his stance to one that exhibits a more sentimental tone.
In both excerpts presented here, the use of the female terms of reference lǎoniáng
(老娘) “old woman” exemplifies how HY takes on a stance and disengages himself from heterosexual people and other groups of LGBT members in the talk show. Recall that in order to take a stance, a stance-taker needs to evaluate an object. The objects presented here are topics discussed in both conversational excerpts. Based on the topics in the
64 conversations, HY draws on the female term of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) to associate himself with femininity and the misalignment occurs when this female term of reference is used by HY with his ascribed identity—a Taiwanese man.
HY’s use of the female term of reference recalls Hall’s (1997) ethnographic study in India. Hijras, a transgender category of those who, though born as male, sees themselves as neither men or women. This ideology is reflected in how they dress and talk, namely, like women. However, they draw on linguistic resources that violate gender norms of Indian femininity. For example, in the linguistic gender system of Hindi, the use of gender marking is obligatory. When the subject in Hall’s study refers to her family members, she uses a masculine gender marking; yet when she is using her own voice, she employs the feminine one to refer to herself. The use of feminine forms does not directly reflect the ascribed social identity of the user; instead, as Hall argues, the use of feminine forms plays against her family’s perception of her gender as a male. This linguistic construction of her stance results from the subject’s interactions in the interview. The hijras subject alternates the use of masculine and feminine gender marking in constant negotiation with the context in which she is placed or displaced.
In the present case study, the use of the female term of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) also serves a similar purpose. The use of the female term of reference by HY is not to assign himself a female identity, but to serve as a powerful tool to relate himself with femininity to fight against gender norms of heterosexual culture and contrast himself with other groups of LGBT members in the talk show.
65 The instances of the use of the female term of reference further imply that there is no direct indexical relation between linguistic forms and social meanings. Instead, the form-meaning relationship is occasioned specifically by stance-takers on an interactional level. These interactional stances gain their semiotic value within the sociocultural context in which it is used (Bucholtz, 2009, p.149). The use of the female term of reference lǎo niáng (老娘) has its direct semantic association with Chinese women, but it could be also imbued with different ideologies depending on its use in a specific context.
The analysis demonstrates that the use of this female term is imbued with HY’s perception of his gay identity. To take his stance for particular topics, he sees using this female term of reference as related to femininity, but he tries not to project himself as a
Chinese woman; rather, he uses it as his opposition to linguistic sexual norms of heterosexual culture in the Chinese context.
Based on the two conversational excerpts, this study proposes that the indexical relation between form and meaning is established through the mediation of stance-taking.
And stylization is an important ‘bricolage’ process that makes linguistic and symbolic resources available to speakers before the form-meaning relationship is established. This process emphasizes the speaker’s agency in being able to pick up specific linguistic and symbolic features for creating their own stylistic repertoire. Moreover, it is in the indirect indexical relation that ideology plays a crucial role, because it allows specific stances to gain enduring semiotic associations (Bucholtz, 2009). Over time, linguistic forms become ideologically associated with certain social categories like the Chinese gay community.
66 4.3.3 The Form-Meaning Relationship
Stance-taking is by no means the only mediator in the form-meaning relationship.
In the indexical relation between rhotacization and Beijing-ness, for example, Zhang
(2008) demonstrates that the linguistic feature ‘rhotacization’ takes on its semiotic representation of Beijing-ness through co-occurrence with key Beijing cultural terms and its use in orthographic form frequently found in Beijing local novels. Zhang’s exploration of the relationship between rhotacization and its sociocultural contexts provides us with insight into how an enduring indexical relationship between linguistic forms
(rhotacization) and social meanings (Beijing-ness) comes into being.
In the sociophonetic examination of a medical gay professionals, Podesva (2007) shows that the relationship between the variation in voice quality (falsetto) and a ‘diva’ persona is established, and mediated through looking for meta-discourse function in falsetto; that is, the connotation of expressiveness. He interprets such discourse function by linking it to a specific persona, focusing on the actual practice of his subject, Heath, in interactional contexts. Both studies have suggested that the establishment of form- meaning relationship is multidimensional and contextually-specific.
Drawing on the notion of indexicality, the study illustrates that the form-meaning relationship can be established through the mediation of stance-taking. In the current study, the female term of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) serves as a stylistic device in discourse to help HY take a stance to specific topics in the talk show. By using this female term, his stance is thus associated with femininity, which plays against the linguistic sexual norms of heterosexual culture.
67 It should be kept in mind that the use of the female term lǎo niáng (老娘) is just a part of a whole set of symbolic practices in constructing his persona; that is to say, there are other symbolic features that constitute his stylistic performance. For his verbal performance, his higher pitch and wider pitch range, along with other discourse markers like SFP ne ‘呢’ and bàituō ‘拜托,’ were found in the talk show where he was taking on a gay persona as a guest. For his nonverbal performance, a typical feminine gesture— tucking the short hair behind his ears— serves as a bodily addition to his self-presentation.
This symbolic practice has visualized his performance as more related to femininity.
Ultimately, this set of linguistic and paralinguistic features has been synthesized to represent the entirety of his gay style. These linguistic and paralinguistic features also have become ideologically re-associated with, and reinterpreted as his gay identity in the
LGBT talk show.
4.4 Persona-based Stylistic Differences
In this subsection, the main comparison is made between the subject as a guest and as a host in two speaking situations—talk show I and talk show II. The focus of this subsection is to examine the subject’s other linguistic and gestural differences, which give us cues of how the subject shifts his personas from one to the other.
Previous research concerning linguistic perceptions has shown that persona-based information can affect our linguistic perception of speakers (D’Onofrio 2015). Focusing on production patterns of persona-based style shifting, Figure 4.4 shows both fmax and fmin pitch variations while the subject takes on two specific personas on a prosodic level. For
68 his maximum average f0 variation, it reveals no significant difference in both personas, while there is a sharp contrast in terms of minimum average f0 variation. This suggests that the significant contrast in both settings with different personas signifies the prosodic aspect of his persona-shifting. HY performed a wider pitch range as a guest in talk show I, implying that HY took on a specific persona in that setting. Instead of saying that HY took on a ‘guest’ persona, this study proposes that he was taking on a gay persona specifically and thus creating his own way of speaking through his agentic manipulation of pitch range.
Maximum and minimum average pitch levels (Hz) 400 289.13 300 285.82 200 183.35 238.89 100 0 Gay Persona Host Persona
Maximum F0 Minimum F0
Figure 4.4 fmax and fmin average variations while taking on different personas
In addition to his pitch variation as a prosodic demonstration of his persona- shifting, a rich clustering of linguistic and symbolic features is also found when he participates in talk show I as a guest, as opposed to being a host, which is presented in
Table 4.7. As Irvine (2001) suggests, the perception of style is made through its contrast with other styles. Each persona is embedded in their stylistic practice that defines who
69 they are and whom they converge with and diverge from. When HY participates in the talk show as a guest, he is constructing his gay persona in interactions. In order to linguistically specify his gay persona, Table 4.7 shows that the subject employs meaningful clusters of linguistic and gestural features that have been ideologically associated with Chinese women, but this cluster of features is absent when he is a host in talk show II.
For instance, the female term of reference lǎoniáng (老娘) has its lexical meaning for specifying the gender of speakers, but the social meaning of such lexical term does not index demographic information like woman but a specific gay persona in the LGBT talk show. The indirect indexical link between this lexical term and his gay identity is mediated through the subject’s stance in interactions. By contrast, the absence of the use of this lexical item while being a host suggests that his gay persona is toned down as compared to being a guest. And such persona-based shifting can be observed through a piecemeal examination of the use of specific linguistic and gestural features in immediate contexts.
70 Table 4.7 The linguistic and paralinguistic features used by HY as a guest
Symbolic Gay Persona Host Persona13 features Higher pitch Lower pitch14
wider pitch range Narrower pitch range The female term of reference Absence of female term of Linguistic lǎoniáng (老娘) reference features absence of Chinese phrase bàituō Chinese phrase bàituō ‘拜托’ ‘拜托’ Sentence-final particle (SFP) ne ‘呢’ Absence of sentence-final accompanied by sharp falling particle (SFP) ne ‘呢’ produced intonation ne ‘呢’ with sharp falling intonation Paralinguistic Tucking his hair behind the ear Absence of feminine behaviors features
4.5 Summary
In this chapter, the study shows that the subject performs a cross-situational variation in pitch range. The variation at the prosodic level comes in conjunction with other linguistic and gestural features to serve as symbolic resources for constructing his gay persona and style.
In addition, the association of linguistic and gestural features with HY’s gay identity is not a one-to-one mapping. Drawing on the notion of indexicality, this study
13 One reason to explain the absence of specific linguistic and gestural features associated with HY’s host persona is due to the fact that there are uneven distributions of the number of episodes, with having the largest number of episodes in the talk show when HY is a guest while the limited number of episodes as being a host. 14 By saying lower pitch, it is the relative usage as compared to the wider pitch range when HY takes on his gay persona. In fact, HY’s average pitch level is not low at all, as indicated in Figure 4.1.
71 demonstrates that the indexical relation between linguistic forms and social meanings is established by, and mediated through, stance-taking in a particular, interactional context.
That is to say, the relationship between linguistic features and the subject’s gay identity lies on the level of indirect indexicality. It is on this level that ideology plays a crucial role. Therefore, his gay identity is able to take on a specific persona via the linguistic and gestural representation of his style.
Chapter 4 has provided us with a better understanding of how and why the subject employs these linguistic and symbolic resources for constructing and performing his gay persona and style. At the same time, this chapter demonstrates that the form-meaning relationship can be established through the mediation of stance-taking.
72 Chapter 5. Conclusions
5.1 Introduction
The main goal of this study has been to serve as a starting point for examining sociolinguistic issues of sexual minorities in Taiwan. While a few studies (Wong, 2005;
Shiau, 2015) have investigated this topic in the Chinese context, none of them has integrated the social constructionist paradigm to understand how linguistic variation serves as an additional resource in constructing a persona, style, or/and identity.
In Chapter 4, we showed that the form-meaning relationship is multidimensional and contextually specific. Such relationship is built up at the level of indirect indexicality, for which there is no one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning. The connection between linguistic features and gay identity is mediated through the subject’s stance-taking. It is in the process of mediation that ideology comes into play. Taking the sociophonetic variation as Speaker Design, the subject draws on his agency to stylize his higher pitch and wider pitch range in talk show I. Moreover, other linguistic and gestural features are also incorporated into his stylistic package, a package that serves as resources for his sexuality expression. Although these symbolic features have been ideologically associated with Chinese women, they have the semiotic potential to be ideologically re- associated with the subject’s gay identity in the LGBT talk show.
73 While many sociolinguistic studies have demonstrated that Speaker Design is a powerful tool to explain sociolinguistic variation, the current study aims to bring this additional dimension to Chinese sociolinguistics, suggesting that sociolinguistic variation is not just a linguistic product of societal structure and ordering, but also an act of identity expression.
This thesis also shows that linguistic forms are directly associated with interactional stances or social orientation to ongoing communication. These stances come in conjunction with other visual features, such as clothing and bodily movement, for constructing a fleeting, interactional gay persona.
5.2 The Significance of the Current Study
This work is a pioneering case study for examining intraspeaker variation in pitch range, with its focus on Chinese sexual minorities. While the study is a sociophonetic case study of one gay speaker in the LGBT talk show, it is to serve as a starting point for paying close attention to sociolinguistic issues of the Chinese LGBT community, because very little research on this topic has been carried out in Chinese sociolinguistics. In this sense, the contribution to be made from the study is that it provides a more comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of how gay people in Taiwan use language in constructing their sexual identity; in addition, the study goes beyond the question of what they talk and further examines how and why they speak this way by drawing on the
Speaker Design model and the notion of indexicality.
74 Methodologically, the study offers a new way of analyzing linguistic variation in
Mandarin Chinese. First, as social media plays a crucial role in the lives of individuals, online video has become a new source of linguistic data. This openly shared data set of online video is a valuable and accessible resource to sociolinguists. Moreover, these web video data, as Voigt et al. (2016) suggests, is another form of natural data that can really reflect on how people talk online. However, the con of such a form of data is that researchers might not be able to have full control for their research design as compared to laboratory settings. In the current study, despite some constraints on the data collection, the study chooses to measure T3 and T4 syllables to represent the fmin and fmax, respectively, which can help us to examine the phonetic variation in pitch range.
Finally, the current study shows the possibility for taking bodily gestures as interactional variables for jointly constructing a persona, style, or/and identity.
5.3 The Limitations of the Current Study
Because the work is a sociophonetic case study involving just one gay individual in a particular set of situations pertaining to a talk show, the results may not reflect in any systematic way the linguistic patterns of the broader gay community. In other words, the study lacks generalizability to conclude that the variation in pitch range shows similar linguistic patterns on a macro level.
Due to limited time, the study only investigated the phonetic variations of maximum and minimum f0 and fluctuations in pitch range. Other sociophonetic variables, such as those at the segmental level, may also play a crucial role in the construction of the
75 subject’s persona and style. There are many more exciting research projects and topics for future exploration.
5.4 Future Directions
One goal for future research is to conduct a large-scale sociolinguistic survey in the community and to explore more linguistic and symbolic variables that potentially take on social meanings attached to Chinese sexual minorities. Such a goal requires us to consider the following possible paths in Chinese sociolinguistics.
First, the quantitative results have shown that pitch range as a phonetic variable functions as an important component in constructing our subject’s gay persona and style in the LGBT talk show. If language use could be highly performative, it should involve different levels of linguistic performance. For example, previous work has found that segments /s/, /z/, and /l/ are phonetically longer in gay-sounding speech than straight- sounding speech in English (Crist, 1997; Rogers et al., 2000). The paucity of research at the segmental level pushes us to take further steps to study the relationship between linguistic forms and sexual identity.
In addition to the realm of phonology and phonetics, future studies should also take lexical variables into consideration. For instance, the stylistic use of female term of reference is not just a personal choice but a phenomenon observed in the Chinese gay community. These female terms take on semiotic value and thus become commonly used in the community. Overtime, these kind of lexical terms develop as a semiotic marker for the community.
76 Moreover, Chan (1996, 1998a, 1998b, & 2000) has shown that SFPs are used more frequently by Chinese women. If such kinds of particles have been ideologically associated with Chinese women, as mentioned in Chapter 4, these particles could also have the semiotic potential to be re-associated with Chinese gay people. But the fact is that there is no empirical research on this topic demonstrating this potential linguistic pattern. Hence, future studies should attend to linguistic variation at the lexical level as well.
Second, the locus of the current study is built upon the premise that speakers shift their style in accordance with a specific, interactional context, therefore, the study concentrates on intraspeaker variation. While such variation lacks generalizability to reveal macro-sociological linguistic patterns, it is such micro-analyses that give us a more nuanced analytic perspective on understanding how linguistic forms are ideologically associated with a persona, a style and an identity at an interactional local level. Further quantitative research is needed for a more comprehensive understanding of how intraspeaker variation is associated with interspeaker variation at different linguistic levels.
Third, while the current study has concentrated on production, it would informative to incorporate a perceptual perspective into the analysis. Perceptual experiments might explore the overt attitudes of listeners’ perception and evaluation of the performance of Chinese sexual minorities and how the listeners’ judgements may shape the linguistic and gestural behaviors of these sexual minorities.
77 5.5 Concluding Remark
The current study has tried to answer the three research questions, as mentioned earlier. First, it has shown that the gay subject shifting his style from one situation to the next is due to the need for projecting his different personas in accordance with certain situations. It is the persona-based motivation that triggers his style shifting.
Second, the gay subject not only employs a set of linguistic features, such as higher pitch, wider pitch range, and the female term of reference, but also a typical feminine gesture, tucking the short hair behind his ears, to construct his gay persona and create his own way of gay speaking in talk show I as a guest.
Lastly, the study also shows that the form-meaning relationship is established by and mediated through the subject’s stance-taking. It is on the temporary and interactional level that the subject constructs his gay persona via the representation of his style.
To conclude, given the paucity of sociolinguistic research of Chinese sexual minorities, there is so much future investigation waiting to be conducted. It is my hope that future studies will explore and explain more linguistic phenomena that are related to
Chinese sexual minorities.
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85 Appendix A Chinese, English, and Pinyin Transcriptions for the Two Excerpts
Excerpt One
Role Chinese English Pinyin
I am curious about one wǒ hàoqí yīdiǎn, yīnwéi 我好奇一點，因為 “ thing, because Mako Mako shuō tā chuān de Mako 說她穿得很辣 said she was dressed hěn là qù tóngzhì yèdiàn, 去同志夜店，那如 very prettily and had nà rúguǒ nǐ zài tóngzhì Host C 果你在同志夜店看 gone to gay bars before. yèdiàn kàndào yīgè 到一個女生穿得很 So suppose that you also nǚshēng chuān de hěn là, 辣，你會覺得討厭 see a hot girl in a gay nǐ huì juédé tǎoyàn háishì 還是什麼?” bar. Do you feel annoyed or something shíme? else?
I feel that someone is “我覺得又一個來較 wǒ juédé yòu yīgè lái HY competing against me, 勁 拜託 ” jiàojìn, [bàituō]! , ! come on! It’s like competing Host B “就會搶菜?” Jìu shì qiǎngcài? against you for a guy? Absolutely, and I was “對, 就會想說在這 duì, jiù huì xiǎng shuō zài like, I am the QUEEN HY 裡老娘才是焦點呢, zhèlǐ [lǎoniáng] cái shì here, not you! Just sit jiāodiǎn ne, [zuòxià]! 坐下!” down!
86 Excerpt Two
Role Chinese English Pinyin yīnwéi wǒ dāngshí hěn méiyǒu ānquángǎn ā, tā “因為我當時很沒有 I was so insecure, he 安全感啊，他就是時 was like, he even did jiùshì shíbúshí, wǒmen de not acknowledge our 不時，我們的關係他 guānxì tā yě méiyǒu relationship, and then HY 沒有承認,然後又會 he told me that he was chéngrèn, ránhòu yòu huì 去跟我說他要在外面 going to date another qù gēn wǒ shuō tā yào zài 跟女生約會。” girl again. wàimiàn gēn nǚshēng yuēhuì. Would he also share “那他出去約會後還 what was going on with nà tā chūqù yuēhuì huí Host B 會跟你分享嗎?” you after the date? háihuì gēn nǐ fènxiǎng ma?
wǒ jiùhuì gēn tā shuō wǒ búxiǎng tīng, ránhòu wǒ I would tell him that I zìjǐ yě yǒu zuò guò, suànshì didn’t want to listen, “我就會跟他說我不 and I also had cheated pītuǐ, dànshì, kěshì jiǎng 想聽, 然後我自己也 on him before. But It zhègè hǎoxiàng shì wéi zìjǐ 有做過, 算是劈腿, seems like talking 但是,可是講這個好 about this is to defend biànhù, wǒ jiùshì, dāngshí myself, I was, but the 像是為自己辯護, 我 de qíngkuàng, wǒ juédé 就是, 當時的情況, reason why I cheated on him as well was yīnwéi wǒ zhēn de tài 我覺得因為真的很沒 HY because I was so méiyǒu ānquángǎn le. wǒ 有安全感了, 我覺得 insecure. I felt that I 我不可以全心全意放 should not devote my juédé wǒ bú kěyǐ quánxīn 在他身上, 然後 full self to that quányì fàng zài tā 我就有點催眠自己, relationship, so I tried 因為我非常想要全心 to hypnotize myself shēnshàng, ránhòu wǒ jiù even though I really 全意放在他身上。” yǒu diǎn cuīmián zìjǐ. want to devote myself to him. yīnwéi wǒ fēicháng xiǎng
yào quánxīnquányì fàngzài tā shēnshàng.
87
Just don’t put all the “就是雞蛋不要放在 jiùshì jīdàn búyào fàng zài Host B eggs into one single 同一個籃子裡。 tóng yīgè lánzǐ lǐ. ” basket. duì! suǒyǐ wǒ dāngshí jiù zhǎo le yīgè, zhǎo le yīgè “對! 所以我當時就 hěn xǐhuān wǒ de 找了一個, 找了一個 Right! so I just hooked 很喜歡我的學長, 然 up with a guy who was xuézhang, ránhòu gēn tā qù 後跟他去,就是發生 also into me, then we jiùshì fāshēng yīxiē 一些事情, 可是沒有 had sex. But I was still HY so upset because I shìqíng. kěshì méiyǒu hěn 很開心, 因為我並不 didn't like him, I just kāixīn, yīnwéi wǒ bìng bú 喜歡那個學長,我只 wanted to find one 是覺得我需要給自己 reason to convince xǐhuān nàgè xuézhǎng, wǒ 一個理由去說服自 myself. zhīshì juédé wǒ xūyào gěi 己。” zìjǐ yīgè lǐyóu qù shuōfú zìjǐ.
So I just told myself, gēn zìjǐ jiǎngshuō, nà wǒ 給自己講說, 那我 from today on, I, as a “ jīntiān, [lǎoniáng] yě búshì 今天, 老娘也不是全 queen, would no longer be upset about HY 心全意放在你身上, quánxīnquányì fàngzài nǐ the relationship, even 就算我們分開了。” though we are already shēnshàng. jiùsuàn wǒmen
apart! fènkāi le
“哎呀, 可是這樣會 Uhnn…But that would āiya, kěshì zhèyàng huì Host A 很耶!” be very painful! gèngtòng yē. So sad, but I had to “很難過, 就是想要 Hěn nánguò, jiùshì convince myself that I HY 說服自己分開我不會 xiǎngyào shuōfú zìjǐ fēnkāi would be fine after we wǒ búhuì nánguò. 難過。” split up.
88