Benjamin Bailey

Heteroglossia and Boundaries

Language is the primary semiotic tool for representing and negotiating social reality, and it is thus at the centre of social and political life. Among its myriad social and political functions is to position speakers relative to a wide variety of phenomena including co-present interlocutors, the activities in which speakers are engaged, and various dimensions of the wider world, including social identity categories and their relative value. To speak is thus to position oneself in the social world, i.e. to engage in identity practices (cf. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985).

Parental Involvement in Children's Education: Lessons from Three Immigrant Groups

Objective. This study explores immigrant group and individual differences within groups in parental reports of involvement in their childrens education as a function of both sociodemographic and cultural variables. Design. Over 300 parents from three different immigrant groups - Portuguese, Dominican and Cambodian - were interviewed when their children were in either second or fifth grade. Results. Language comfort and immigrant group membership were the most frequent variables associated with group differences in the various aspects of parental involvement. Cambodian parents showed the lowest levels of parent involvement as expressed in measures of attitudes, contact with schools, home-based control over childrens behavior, and provisions of material support for homework. Ethnographic data suggest that differing forms of group migration, the educational systems differing responses to the groups, and group differences in cultural values explain the above findings. Within the Portuguese and Cambodian groups, language comfort was also the variable most frequently associated with individual differences in the dimensions of parents involvement. Finally, the different dimensions of parental involvement are highly correlated amongst each other within the Portuguese and Cambodian families, but not so for Dominicans. Conclusions. These findings suggest both similarities and differences in the processes of parental involvement in childrens education across three quite different immigrant groups.

Language and negotiation of ethnic/racial identity among Dominican Americans

The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,” are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms “Black” or “African American,” applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US. (Dominican, construction of race, African-descent immigrants, ethnolinguistic identity, Spanish)* Dominican American self-definition of race in terms of ethnolinguistic heritage ‐ as “Spanish,” “Dominican,” or “Hispanic” ‐ runs counter to popular and historical US notions of race in which African-descent phenotype has preceded all other criteria (e.g. national origin, language, or religion) for social classification. African-descent race has historically been treated as equivalent to Africandescent ethnicity in the US (Mittelberg & Waters 1993), with the result that immigrants of African descent have largely merged into the African American population by the second generation (Bryce-Laporte 1972, Woldemikael 1989, Waters 1994). Unlike these other African-descent groups, Dominican Americans are successfully reversing, in many contexts, the historical precedence of African

Communication of respect in interethnic service encounters

Divergent practices for displaying respect in face-to-face interaction are an ongoing cause of tension in the US between immigrant Korean retailers and their African American customers. Communicative practices in service encounters involving Korean customers contrast sharply with those involving African American customers in 25 liquor store encounters that were videotaped and transcribed for analysis. The relative restraint of immigrant Korean storekeepers in these encounters is perceived by many African Americans as a sign of racism, while the relatively personable involvement of African Americans is perceived by many storekeepers as disrespectful imposition. These contrasting interactional practices reflect differing concepts of the relationship between customer and storekeeper, and different ideas about the speech activities that are appropriate in service encounters. (Intercultural communication, respect, service encoun

Greetings and compliments or street harassment?: Competing evaluations of street remarks in a recorded collection

In this article I evaluate competing discourses about the meaning of street remarks – the remarks men make to unacquainted women passing on the street – in 1000 comments posted to a YouTube video of street remarks recorded in New York City in 2014. One discourse prominent in the comments posted to the video defends the remarks as civil talk, highlighting the literal meanings of remarks such as ‘Have a nice evening’. A second, less frequent, discourse characterizes these encounters and utterances as sexual harassment, citing men’s ostensible sexual intentions and personal experience. I find that (a) difficulties in articulating the ways in which street remarks are injurious may veil their harm, thus contributing to the perpetuation of male domination of women in public spaces, and (b) the close juxtaposition of explicitly misogynistic comments with interpretations of the street remarks as civil casts doubt on the sincerity of such interpretations.

The power of names in a Chinese Indonesian family’s negotiations of politics, culture, and identities

ABSTRACT Based on patterns of naming across four generations in first author Lie’s Chinese Indonesian family, we argue that naming practices are not just a function of personal taste or cultural habit but rather reflect negotiation of larger-scale political and historical conditions. We show that seeming contradictions and puzzles in the names and naming practices in Lie’s family can be explained by the specific social and political challenges faced by members of the family, particularly during the assimilation period of Suharto’s 1966–1998 reign. Both Lie’s family and the Indonesian state have treated names as having a high degree of constitutive power in these negotiations.

Mandarin learners' (L2) comprehension of zero anaphora in Mandarin phone conversations

Abstract This article analyzes patterns of comprehension of zero anaphor by native-English-speaker learners of Mandarin in recordings and transcriptions of four naturally occurring Mandarin telephone conversations. Because many anaphoric pronouns have no overt expression in Mandarin, comprehension of even basic clause constituents of Mandarin texts can require discourse-level inferencing that English does not require. Despite these differences between English and Mandarin, intermediate to advanced level Mandarin learners in this study were able to successfully interpret and translate zero anaphor in these telephone conversation texts about 72% of the time. The greatest difficulties with zero anaphor were related to a) instances in which the initial, explicitly expressed antecedent was misinterpreted, and b) shifts in footing, or verbal activity, in which speakers moved, for example, from narrative description to direct address of interlocutor or personal evaluation of a situation just described. These patterns suggest that greater awareness of discourse level structures in naturally occurring verbal interaction – which could be taught through explicit instruction – might help intermediate and advanced Mandarin learners to correctly interpret a broader range of zero anaphora.

Negotiating Zen Buddhist and Western language ideologies and identities in a text-based, English-language online forum

This article explores how members of an English-language, online Zen Buddhist forum communicate their Buddhist identities and constitute a community through online postings. In the absence of the typical, constitutive elements of Zen Buddhist communities – a physical temple, monks, and copresent, silent meditation – ways of using language are the central means to performing Zen Buddhist identities. An analysis of segments of four threads on this forum shows forum members negotiating two competing linguistic ideologies: (1) an everyday Western language ideology that privileges logical, linear, and referential use of language, and (2) a Zen Buddhist language ideology that approaches everyday rational language as an impediment to achieving enlightenment and that privileges nonlogical, paradoxical language as a means to overcoming the limitations of ordinary, everyday thinking. Theoretically, this illustrates the power of language to enact ideologies and constitute community in an online space that is not tied to a particular cultural or linguistic place; it highlights the fact that everyday Western communication beliefs and practices – often treated as natural in the Western, English-speaking world – are cultural and ideological, and it shows that Westerners can adopt communication practices and ideology associated with Asia, thus paying symbolic homage to them.

Book Review: Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities

convincing and intuitively appealing as in the second part. In sum, this book is likely to be of interest to many readers of this journal for its contributions to discursive psychology, membership categorization analysis, moral psychology, and language-centered life-course research. Nikander certainly proves her initial thesis, attributed to Green (1993), that there is no researchable age in the manifoldness of reality unless language inscribes it there. From her discursive perspective, notions of age and age norms cease to be understood as situated outside interaction, as mental entities simply guiding, causing, or explaining certain types of behaviors. Instead, age is created and used for all practical purposes. These findings are emancipatory and postmodern in that they reveal the flexible nature of age and aging. Yet, one of Nikander’s findings is also that the linear imagery of age is still widely reproduced by the interviewees.