Dr. Tsung-Lun Alan Wan is joining us to give a colloquium talk this spring! Please see details of the talk below.
Dr. Tsung-Lun Alan Wan received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is a postdoctoral researcher in medical humanities at National Cheng Kung University. He will be presenting his work on agentive language use among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers in Taiwan.
Time: April 7, Friday 2023, 8:30-10:30am Eastern Time
Event: Virtual via Zoom
Abstract:
Deaf identity and style-shifting in read speech
Within a medical discourse of disability, deaf ways of speaking spoken languages are approached from pathological perspectives. In this talk, I instead focus on speaker agency among deaf speakers of Taiwan Mandarin in utilizing speech style-shifting to performhearingness/deafness. Looking at the linguistic variable ㄕ sh /ʂ/, in the first part of the talk,I will emphasize the importance of identifying indexical fields of variants from the perspectives of deaf speakers. In the second part of the talk, I will look at topic-based shifting which takes place when deaf speakers read aloud a passage about the oppression upon deaf signers by hearing people. The data show that even if the participants argue deaf speakers should conform to hearing ways of speaking Mandarin, some of them shift to deaf ways of realizing the variable when engaging with the identity politics topic, and the others instead shift to hearing ways of realizing the variable. I argue that this difference in topic effect is mobilized by different stances toward the content of the passage, and the stance-taking is mediated by the presence of a hearing interviewer.
If you are interested in joining the talk, please email Yongqing (yeyongqi@msu.edu) for the Zoom link.