East Asian Languages and Literatures Theses and Dissertations

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TRANSGRESSING THE STAGE: FEMALE XIQU PERFORMERS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Deng, Xiaoyan; Chan, Roy
This dissertation explores a previously overlooked aspect of xiqu history - the role of female xiqu performers in fin-de-siècle China. Focusing on the transitional period between the late Qing and the early Republican era (1870-1937), it argues that female xiqu actors were not merely marginal figures but played a crucial role in shaping the stagecraft and culture of xiqu, on par with their male counterparts. The study begins by examining the performances of female xiqu actors in foreign concessions in Shanghai and Tianjin during the late-Qing period. It highlights how these performers demonstrated their exceptional stagecraft, which was comparable to that of the top male performers of the time. This challenges the notion that female performers were inferior in the xiqu tradition. Moving on to the 1910s in Beijing, the dissertation explores the significant contributions of female players like Liu Xikui and Xian Lingzhi. These performers challenged the traditional sheng players of the previous generation, showcasing their talent and pushing the boundaries of gender norms within xiqu. The study then delves into the 1920s, a period when female players such as Zhang Wenyan, alongside nandan stars, formed the first star culture in modern China. This highlights the importance of female performers in shaping the entertainment industry and popular culture of the time. Contrary to popular belief, the dissertation argues that the triumph of Republican nandan stars over their female counterparts was not solely due to the male players’ alleged artistic superiority. Instead, it suggests that various forms of social prejudice against women placed the female actors at a disadvantage in their competition with male players. This sheds light on the complex dynamics of gender and power within the xiqu tradition. Overall, this dissertation aims to rectify the neglect of female xiqu performers in the study of xiqu history. By highlighting their significant contributions and challenging traditional gender roles, it seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the role of women in shaping the stagecraft and culture of xiqu during the Qing-Republic transition.
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Exhibiting Socialist Chineseness Abroad: PRC’s Audio-visual Propaganda in Cold War Hong Kong and Beyond, 1950s-1970s
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Tao, Sabrina Y.; Groppe, Alison
This dissertation investigates how socialist Chinese audiovisual productions (especially cinema) that incorporate folklore, regional, and traditional Chinese cultural elements after socialist reform were exported internationally to win the hearts and minds of diasporic Chinese audiences via the intermediary of Hong Kong in the early Cold War era. In contrast with previous conceptions on PRC’s domestic propaganda that highlight revolution and class struggle, my dissertation argues that “socialist Chineseness” was an alternative as it blurred revolutionary messages in its audiovisual representations and marketing strategies for the purpose of circumventing censorship from the British colonial government and to construct a benevolent image of the new PRC to global audiences. Muting overt political themes while still shadowed by ideologies of socialism and anti-colonialism, these audio-visual texts created a nostalgic space of “cultural China” that blurred boundaries between regions, nationhood, social class, political and cultural identifications. In the meantime, they also had anti-colonial and anti-capitalist stances and acted as a contesting discourse against pro-rightist and pro-American culture in Cold War East Asia. By tracing these long-neglected transnational cultural interactions, this study hopes to reexamine the national boundary of Chinese cinema, as PRC films in the early socialist era were circulated in the broader regions of the Sinosphere. Meanwhile, by building a bridge between PRC and Hong Kong studies, this study explores the role of Hong Kong as a cultural nexus for the PRC’s audiovisual propaganda overseas. The dissertation not only reexamines how China presented itself to the world historically, but also explores how the socialist bloc conducted and responded to the global cultural Cold War in the realm of “soft power.”
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Primordial Narratives: The Jomon Period in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Strikwerda, Timothy; DiNitto, Rachel
This dissertation explores the reasons that Japanese intellectuals and writers reached back to the Jōmon period (12,500-500 BCE) to define Japanese culture in the wake of Imperial Japan’s defeat after World War II. The Jōmon period covers the Stone Age on the Japanese archipelago. Despite leaving no written records, Jōmon period inhabitants produced some of the world’s earliest pottery and left behind a cornucopia of anthropomorphic ceramics that have long fascinated archaeologists. Beginning in the 1950s, however, the discourse surrounding the Jōmon period shifted from a tone of antiquarian curiosity to a more ideologically fraught mode, where the period was recast as a foundational era of Japanese history and culture. Taking this shift in discourse as my departure point, my project examines the ways that the Jōmon period has functioned as a shifting signifier across the postwar period. Drawing equally from cultural studies and intellectual history, I trace the ways prehistory has been used to define modern Japanese identity in texts and media as varied as literary fiction, philosophy, ethnographic travel narratives, and film.
Open Access
Decoding Anime: National Discourses and Identities of Japan and Taiwan
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Chung, Ai-Ting; DiNitto, Rachel
This dissertation historicizes the transnational animation industry in Japan and its former colony Taiwan, and analyzes identity transformation in animation texts in the two countries from the late 1980s to the 2010s. I examine how the lingering colonial mindset is obscured in the current scholarly framework and by the global dominance of Japanese anime. By examining the deification of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki Hayao, I analyze the hierarchical system in the animation industry inside and outside Japan and elaborate how the development of a national animation cinema in 1960s, 90s, and 2000s connects to the colonial history in East Asia. Breaking from the focus on labor in the current cinema and media industrial studies, I examine the coloniality of the outsourcing system in anime industry. Observing Taiwan as a case study, I analyze how Taiwanese animators turn their marginality into visibility in a market dominated by Japanese productions via shaping Taiwan’s colonial identity into a new national identity that differentiates Taiwan from China. Broadening current scholarly frameworks by decoding the bond between anime and “Japanese-ness,” my analysis contextualizes how the inter-Asian power relationship has shaped the animation industries, global reception, and the national identities of Japan and Taiwan. I argue that anime is paradoxically an extension of colonial power relationships, yet also an alternative art form to lead a decolonial turn. My project’s aim is to broaden the field of anime studies beyond the national. Providing a postcolonial story of anime beyond Japan. My intervention in this field is the first attempt in English-language scholarship to make visible the animation history in Taiwan and its struggles for national identity.
Open Access
Conceptual Network in Creative Morphology: The Linguistic Representation of the Quality of Perception in Chinese
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Hung, Hsiao-Hsuan; Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo
Sensory language, the linguistic conveyance of sensory perception and experience, has attracted considerable scholarly interest in linguistics and linguistic anthropology. In particular, recent anthropological research on the representation of qualia, the subjective or qualitative properties of sensory experiences, and the revival of linguistic research on mimetic language, including but not limited to sound symbolism, have greatly energized scholarly engagement with the linguistic representation of sensory perception and cross-modal conceptualization of senses. To this date, however, there is no systematic research that explores the role of morphology or word formation in the representation of qualia in Chinese based on large-scale usage data.This dissertation aims to fill this major gap in the research by exploring the dynamic and complex nature of perceptually based conceptualization in a family of reduplication-based mimetic morphological constructions in Chinese. Using a data-driven method, I show that the Chinese morphological pattern [A-BB] is a creative and productive linguistic device of qualia representation in a wide range of sensory perceptual and related experiential domains that form a complex, intertwining conceptual network. Taking a constructionist approach, which argues that the meaning of the whole is larger than the sum of the meanings of the parts, I demonstrate that the schema [A-BB] is associated with the function of psychomimetic conveyance of perceptual qualities. Using sophisticated methods of data analysis and visualization, this dissertation makes new discoveries in Chinese morphology in the representation of sensory perception. In doing so, this dissertation breaks a new path in Chinese sensory language research and offers rich and valuable datasets for future studies.
Open Access
Articulating Desire: Power, Identity, and Recognition in Modern Okinawan Literature
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Wang, Xiaoyu; DiNitto, Rachel
My dissertation analyzes four Okinawan literary works to explore how desire and the struggle for recognition, as formulated by Hegel, unfold within the Okinawan context. Through examining the various manifestations of the Okinawan characters’ desire, my dissertation investigates what is ultimately desired by Okinawans as colonized individuals, and how this desire reveals a subjective domain of colonial deprivation that goes beyond political and material dispossession. The four stories, I maintain, reveal how colonial domination reproduces itself through a vicious cycle that feeds on the colonized subject’s desire to be seen and recognized for their human validity and value. This psychological mechanism of colonialism keeps producing a false sense of inferiority and dependence among the colonized, which in turn perpetuates the hierarchical power structure of colonialism. In the meantime, however, Okinawan subjects negotiate for themselves recognition they seek and reap certain benefits from the process, even if this recognition turns out to be deceptive and detrimental to their quest for true autonomy. The four Okinawan texts, I argue, question the nature of recognition that Okinawan subjects pursue under the colonial condition and indicate how self-alienation as well as loss of autonomy occur during the pursuit of such illusory recognition. In addition, I contend that these works depict a complex and nuanced image of Okinawans, which prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between Okinawa and its colonizers in terms of intimacy and collusion to go beyond the simplistic binary of resistance and oppression.
Open Access
Gender Labels in Flux: The Role of Women in Gender Discourse in Post-Reform China
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Lang, Jun; Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo
With the boom of networked digital communication, verbal misogyny permeates Chinese social media, reflecting and reinforcing a sexist gender order in society at large. At the same time, a new generation of Chinese women is seizing digital platforms to counterstrike linguistic sexism in a gender discourse warfare. How has the role of Chinese women in gender discourse changed from passive targets of gender labeling to active agents of feminist activism? My dissertation attempts to answer this question by analyzing the changing gender dynamics in the shifting social labels in contemporary China (1980 to present). Following the groundwork on verbal sexism in wireless China by Jing-Schmidt and Peng (2018), I take an interdisciplinary approach to gender label analysis, integrating the sociolinguistic principle of the mutual constitution of language and society, critical discourse analysis of gender labels as vehicles of power, feminist linguistics, and a socio-technological view on grassroots digital communication. Not only will this dissertation fill a gap in the interdisciplinary research on gender and language in Chinese, it is also the first to use data mining from digitized press and social media, supplemented with survey data on the perceptions of the social meanings of gender labels. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary digital humanities project and has implications for both gender research and social actions toward gender equality.
Open Access
Revolutionary Melodrama: Tales of Family, Kinship, and the Nation in Modern China
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Xiong, Shuangting; Chan, Roy
Revolutionary Melodrama: Tales of Family, Kinship, and the Nation in Modern China investigates the seemingly paradoxical pairing of “revolution” and “melodrama” and the vital role the melodramatic mode played in shaping modern aesthetics in China. Where melodrama is commonly understood to disavow revolutionary change and maintain the status quo, I argue that revolutionary melodramas function as emotional pedagogies in which abstract revolutionary ideas and ideals are made emotionally legible, and political solidarities more possible, to the masses. By deploying melodrama as an analytical category, this dissertation focuses on three representative manifestations of revolutionary melodramatic aesthetics at the micro-level of individuals and families. Each chapter of my dissertation draws together different media across three key historical moments in twentieth century China: the iconic May Fourth novel Jia (1933), the music-drama The White-Haired Girl (1945) created in wartime Yan’an, and the model opera film The Red Lantern (1970) produced during the height of the Cultural Revolution. In their reappropriations of the melodramatic mode, these texts deploy the affective trope of family and kinship to articulate alternative affiliations and create a passionate revolutionary collective capable of making socio-political change. Revolutionary Melodrama shows that aesthetic texts can be more than a mere reflection of what people’s thoughts and feelings at a given historical moment; they are also mediated experience of history and modernity that can actively shape the affective meaning of family/kinship and transform existing structures of feeling at the same time. On the other hand, while the melodramatic mode provided a powerful, dichotomized trope that can be mobilized in different historical circumstances for varied ideological purposes, it ultimately failed to transcend these sets of dichotomies. Revolutionary melodrama oscillates between personal si feelings and public/social gong passions, between the particularities of familial and kinship bonds and the universality of the nation-state, and yet is never able to truly transcend such dichotomies.
Open Access
Second Dialect Acquisition of North Korean Refugees in Seoul
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Lee, Jungah; Idemaru, Kaori
The current study examines second dialect acquisition of North Korean refugees living in Seoul. A total of 14478 stops were measured from each of 22 Pyongyang North Korean standard (NK) and Seoul South Korean (SK) speakers. First, stops of NK and SK have been directly compared to each other by measuring VOT, F0, and H1-H2. In addition to providing acoustic analyses of stop production in NK and SK, effects of various sociolinguistic factors on stop production have been statistically investigated. Moreover, topic-based style shift and interlocutor effects on their production have examined. First, NK and SK stops were significantly different in terms of VOT and F0. The NK speakers still primarily rely on VOT as a cue to distinguish the stops, unlike the SK speakers. In addition, three different speech conditions significantly influenced the NKs’ stop production. Specifically, in reading nonce word task, the NK speakers produced more NK-like stops. However, in a conversation with a SK interviewer, they produced more SK-like stops. Acquisition of SK stops were also significantly related to sociolinguistic factors. Other than age of acquisition and length of residence in Seoul, Identification and Language attitudes were significant predictors in producing SK-like stops. The more they identified themselves as South Korean, the more they produced SK-like VOT patterns. Moreover, the more positive attitudes they expressed towards SK, the better they produced SK-like F0 patterns. Topic-based style shift of NK speakers was also uncovered. Topic itself did not influence the NKs’ stop shifting; however, topic x stance effects significantly affected their stop production. When they talked about North Korea negatively, they performed SK identity, by producing more SK-like stops. Finally, interlocutor effects were also significant. With the SK interviewer, they used clear speech strategy, by enhancing both VOT and F0 cue in stop production. In contrast, with the NK interviewer, their VOT and F0 were less differentiated, showing more casual stop production. This study highlights the process of acquiring new manner of stops in SK and predictors that influence better SK stop production, by providing speech data from more vulnerable and marginalized population in a society.
Open Access
Museums in Chinese: Nationalism, Universalism, and the Chinese Museum
(University of Oregon, 2022-02-18) Moore, Lee; Groppe, Alison
The PRC museum is becoming a space for the construction of a national identity grounded in an ethnicized notion of Han Chineseness. This dissertation traces the origins of the museum in the Chinese-speaking world, exploring how the conceptualization of the museum shifted from the universal to the nationalistic mode. In the history chapters (Chapters II and III), I explore how both discursive and built museums were initially conceptualized in the universal mode, as epistemological spaces where knowledge was conceived of in universal terms, before moving to the nationalistic mode, where knowledge was understood to produce the Chinese nation. In Chapter IV, I examine how the museum is used to construct a Chineseness grounded in an ethnicized understanding of a Han Chinese identity by close reading two museums to elucidate the extent to which the nation is authorized as the sole subject of history in PRC museums.
Open Access
Toward Sublime Beauty: Politics of Aesthetics in Modern Japanese Literature, 1870-1947
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Tokuyama, Chie; DiNitto, Rachel
The study explores the relationship between modern Japanese literature and the notion of Beauty (bi), the element that was purported to be the sole object of artistic exploration in the modern philosophy of art. In the 1870s, literature (bungaku) was newly introduced from the West as one of the artistic categories of the fine arts, whose only purpose was to arouse in the beholder the pleasure of Beauty. The study asks what Beauty meant and signified, what roles the pleasure of Beauty played in society, and why the philosophical debates justifying the value of Beauty emerged in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism and continued to persist well into the 1940s. By recontextualizing the origin and the development of modern literature in the theoretical framework of aesthetics (bigaku)—the branch of scientific study on the perception of Beauty, this study goes back to the basics. It excavates the understudied discourse of Beauty that set forth the fundamental agenda of modern literature. The study demonstrates that the aesthetic quest for Beauty was a philosophical investigation of the pathway leading to transcendence, a sublime state attaining self-effacement by aligning oneself with the morality of Nature. By claiming disinterestedness in both moral and utilitarian concerns of the sociopolitical domain, aesthetic notion of Beauty prevented intervention of ethical value systems external to the boundary of art. The study demonstrates that in its place, morality immanent in Nature was invoked as the locus of the good, wherein Beauty and Nature became morally allied and identical. To align oneself with the morality of Nature was to seek the timeless universal human experience within the particularity of the self. Hence, the study argues that Beauty was a politically-charged ideology of aesthetics that aimed at re-uniting the vanishing bond of organismic communities. The study begins by examining the rise of the discourse of Beauty in the 1870s and traces its development up to the 1940s. It re-analyzes the major literary movements (i.e. Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modernism) from the perspective of modern writers’ aesthetic quest for the timeless essence of Nature=Beauty and scrutinizes its shifting meanings and symbols.
Open Access
The Qi Monistic Vision in Late Imperial Chinese Literature
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Kim, Jinsu; Epstein, Maram
This dissertation examines the material and corporeal configurations of the moral self in the Chinese literary tradition from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Unlike the modern Western understanding of morality as an abstract valence produced by the interiority of a rational self, the Chinese fictional narratives of this period exhibit a shared propensity for exteriorizing morality in the material and corporeal realms. In terms of intellectual history, this physio-moral representation marks a reaction against the established earlier metaphysical system, known as Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, which divided the cosmos between a transcendental, purely moral reality and a material counterpart susceptible to moral corruption. The narratives that I identify as illustrating this new monistic worldview reject dualism and present a physical world that is morally self-complete, in which the corporeal and the material regulate the moral order through their inherent mechanisms. The late imperial promotion of corporeality and materiality is indebted to a philosophical paradigm shift, later called qi monism. Qi monism challenged the earlier dualistic model by claiming that the phenomenological world possessed an intrinsic moral capacity. The monistic narratives that I examine go beyond being mere fictional adaptations of a Confucian discourse. They appropriate Buddhist and Daoist elements and shape them into a syncretic vision. The qi monistic vision as a literary concept challenges the current scholarly approach that reduces subjectivity to an inner psychic state. This dissertation argues that a holistic conception of Chinese subjectivity, in which the moral, the material, and the corporeal are inseparable, was more prevalent in late-imperial fiction than current scholarship recognizes.
Open Access
Gender socialization of Chinese children: empirical evidence from school, family, and media
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Shi, Hui; Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo
This dissertation seeks to deepen understanding of language-mediated gender socialization of Chinese children by answering three questions. In the family setting, how do parent-child interactions convey gender norms and gender-related expectations? In the school setting, how do teacher-child interaction embody gender norms? What role is cartoon playing in socializing Chinese children with gender? I analyze linguistic data collected from two Chinese families, two Chinese kindergartens, and one household name Chinese cartoon. The results provide novel answers to the three questions. First, parent-child verbal interactions differ in terms of the child’s gender. While the father-son pair focus more on rules in the physical world and skill development, the mother-daughter pair care more about social relations, emotions, and joyful life experience. Second, though aware of gender-egalitarian principles, Chinese kindergarten teachers subconsciously treat boys and girls in inconsistent manners. Children of different gender receive diverse interaction frequency, speech length, and speech acts from their teacher. Third, through artistic creation, Chinese cartoon embraces overt gender stereotypes through its language and plots. Male characters produce statistically significantly more utterances and visit a wider range of out-home locations than female characters. Male characters are portrayed through lexemes that embody adventurous and heroic masculine gender norms, while female characters are primarily associated with lexemes that related to home-based and appearance-related feminine gender stereotypes. All three case studies associate gender socialization with contemporary Chinese zeitgeist. I thus advocate an approach to gender socialization that considers layers of factors in a target society, as it allows us to develop a more comprehensive understanding of gender in dynamic social practices.
Open Access
Sentence-Final Particles (SFPS): A Usage-Based Constructionist Approach
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Zhu, Lin; Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo
This dissertation adopts the usage-based constructionist approach to investigate three sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Mandarin Chinese, bei, ne, and a, with the help of British corpus linguistics techniques. The study is based on data collected from the BCC corpus and the instant communication tool WeChat. The results show that their functions are best understood holistically as part of those constructions, instead of associating functions with SFPs as morphemes. This study therefore demystifies the long-held belief that SFPs are elusive.
Open Access
Printed, Pasted, Traded: Nōsatsu as an Invented Tradition
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) McDowell, Kumiko; Walley, Glynne
This paper examines the prosperity of nōsatsu culture between the 1900s to 1920s. Nōsatsu are paper placards created through wood block printing techniques used for pasting or exchanging, which date back to the 18th century. Very little significant research has been done on the reasons for the popularity of nōsatsu practices as they moved from a small group of enthusiasts in the late Edo period to become a cultural fad that resonated in modern Japanese society in the Meiji and Taishō periods. In this thesis I argue that nōsatsu culture developed in the early 20th century along with Edo shumi as a social trend invented through social protest against the government and spurred on by commercialization and the modern mass media. I explore the background of the flourishing of nōsatsu culture in the 1920s employing visual analysis of nōsatsu slips along with theories on media and social networking.
Open Access
Save the Children: Nation, Childrearing, and the Modern Self in Republican-Era Chinese Literature 1911-1949
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Chou, Yu Chih (Clay); Chan, Roy
My dissertation examines the modern ideological concept of children and individualism in Republican Chinese literature. It draws upon eugenics discourse, ideological essays and fictional stories to examine the emergence of the modern individual amid the tensions within the ideological call to revolutionize the traditional Confucian family in order to build a modern Chinese nation. Linking Chinese nation building with evolutionary thinking and eugenics discourse, my research explores how parenthood was inevitable for modern Chinese men and women and how the experience of raising children revealed conflicts between self, family, and nation in Chinese modernity. In response to the perception that China was the “Sick Man of Asia,” intellectuals developed what I call a developmental eugenics narrative about the need to produce a generation of children who are biologically and spiritually advanced so that China could defend itself against both imperialist and colonialist encroachment. This developmental eugenic thinking, I argue, permeated Republican fictional stories in which children organically arrive in a modern conjugal relationship between a man and a woman. Contradicting the notion of the modern family as both the building block of the modern Chinese nation and the producer of future Chinese citizens, the fictional modern family often struggles to meld its two functions. These fictional men and women face their new parental responsibilities as they also struggle to uphold their recently acquired modern personhood. Despite their focus on “saving the children,” a famous slogan coined in Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary,” Republican writers often depict the act of parenting as a sacrifice that modern individuals do not want to make. In consequence, the fictional modern family fails to transform into the imagined nation-building modern family. My research reinforces and advances current ideas about the convoluted and paradoxical nature of individualism in Chinese modernity. It points out the reproductive imperative within the family revolution discourse coinciding with Chinese nation building. Analyzing the fictional stories written by Republican radicals through the lens of the developmental eugenics narrative suggests that Republican radicals struggled to surrender their individualism for the sake of Chinese nation building when it came to parenting the next generation.
Open Access
Politeness and Multimodality in Korean and Japanese
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Kim, Hyun Ji; Brown, Lucien
This dissertation work aims to explore multimodal strategies of politeness in Korean and Japanese by investigating 7 hours of spoken and visual data produced by Korean and Japanese speakers. The analysis particularly deals with ways of controlling density of lexical information, use of kinetic cues and manipulation of gestural space in deferential and non-deferential situations. To begin, the first study examines how speech in interactions with a status-superior and a status-equal differ in the quantity of honorific lexemes, honorific sentence-ending particles, formal case-marking particles, mimetics, Chinese-origin words, pronouns, fillers and backchannels. Statistical tests revealed that use of honorifics and other lexical items that are related to formality and politeness increase in deferential situations. On the other hands, the general quantity of lexical information given to the addressee did not significantly differ in deferential and non-deferential situations. Second, in the study on kinetic cues of politeness, it was found that deference and intimacy can be embedded by manipulating multiple types of nonverbal behavior involving manual gesture, head movements (nodding and shaking), erect body posture, eye contact and self-touch by looking at the frequency in formal and informal situations. In general, both native speakers of Korean and Japanese more actively and animatedly moved their bodies in intimate situations compared to deferential situations. An additional analysis further revealed that Korean and Japanese speakers use smaller gestural space to produce manual gestures when interacting with a superior than when interacting with a friend. In conclusion, this study contributes to developing methodological approaches of research on politeness by demonstrating that politeness-related verbal and nonverbal behaviors can be quantitatively examined. Furthermore, the statistical results indicating particular verbal and nonverbal patterns of (im)politeness support the perspective that politeness is a social practice of members of a community that share similar moral orders. Lastly, the findings that show how (im)politeness is complicatedly expressed in verbal and nonverbal ways can also have significant educational implications in that this research has brought to the forefront the issues in classes of Korean and Japanese where the focus of (im)politeness instruction has been placed mainly on honorifics rather than the true multimodality of (im)politeness.
Open Access
Impoliteness, Identity and Power in Korean: Critical Discourse Analysis and Perception Study of Impoliteness
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Lee, Keunyoung; Brown, Lucien
The current dissertation aims to further our understanding of the impoliteness phenomenon in language by investigating how impoliteness is connected to the construction of identity and the exercise of power in on-going interaction. To achieve the research goal, the study closely examines naturally occurring polylogal discourse from two different institutional settings in the context of Korean: the TV talk show (television entertainment discourse) and the National Assembly’s hearing (political discourse). Following the notion of relational work proposed by Locher and Watts (2005) and the bottom-up approach (i.e. impoliteness 1 or first order impoliteness) which focuses on participants’ judgements of discourse in interaction, the study argues that impoliteness is inextricably linked to participants’ co-constructions of identity as an interactional resource causing conflicts and as a linguistic index showing where co-participants identities are negotiated. The study also argues that impoliteness plays a significant role in the exercise of power in political discourse by illustrating that the successful use of impoliteness causing offense is strategically used to restrict the action environment of one’s interlocutor. The findings of the study suggests that the judgements of impoliteness are related to the institutional norms and expectations but also highly context-dependent. The study also expands the discussion of impoliteness to L2 learners’ perception of impoliteness in the target language by examining how L2 proficiency and cross-cultural variations affect learner’s perception of impoliteness. It is observed that there is L2 proficiency effect when the context has limited visual and prosodic features that learners can rely on for their judgements. The study identifies that Korean honorifics is one of the major causes which lead the novice learners to misjudge impolite utterances as polite because they could not understand the sarcastic use of honorifics which appear as polite on surface but convey offensive and insincere messages. The results of the study suggest that interpreting humor, jokes and sarcasm/irony is a quite difficult pragmatic task for the novice L2 learners.
Open Access
Perceptions of an Osaka Father: How Regional Dialect Influences Ideas on Masculinity and Fatherhood
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) King, Sara; Idemaru, Kaori
In this current research, we aimed to examine the authenticity of a hands-on father’s Osaka dialect in Kore’eda’s 2013 film Soshite Chichi ni Naru and explore whether native Japanese listeners would perceive him to have those caregiving qualities. The results of a dialect recognition survey indicated ambiguity in the authenticity of the Osaka dialect and that the Osaka dialect-speaking father sounded more non-Standard especially when he spoke in scenes with a Tokyo dialect-speaking father. Next, the results of a series of qualitative interviews showed that the Osaka dialect did project the image of a masculine, dedicated father while also that of a stubborn man of low social status that might not be a good husband. These findings align with a previous discourse analysis and provides new evidence on the ability of Osaka dialect in media to signify an affective, hands-on father as opposed to a cold, distant, Tokyo dialect-speaking father.
Open Access
Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Beyond: Potential Social Indices Behind Osaka Dialect
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Ren, Yi; Idemaru, Kaori
This study examines the prospective role of Osaka dialect, a language variation in Japan, in indexing masculinity, fatherhood, and social class. The 2013 film Soshite Chichi ni Naru (Like Father, Like Son) employs Osaka dialect to shape a new style fatherhood that is affective and warm, and engaged in child-rearing, differing from the hegemonic father image of an unconnected salaryman. Prior studies on this film have closely examined either the detailed use in the film, or to what extent the audience actually recognizes the mediatized Osaka dialect. With an approach of perception study, this study advances the previous research by asking the following research questions: (1) whether the audience perceives the targeted indices of the Osaka dialect in this film as the previous research has argued, and if so, to what extent; and (2) what other indices do audiences associate with Osaka dialect, such as social class, affect, or personality.