Sociolinguistics

NTNU researchers in the Language, Society, and Culture Group believe that exploring the social and cultural meanings of language is an indispensable part of the quest to a general theorization of language. Sociolinguistics researchers in this group investigate the multiple micro-macro connections at both the linguistic and social/interactional levels. Our interests range from the micro levels of linguistic features—including phonological variation and particular discourse structures such as politeness and metaphors—and the micro levels of social interactions—including conversational management, identity construction, and humor, to the macro levels of language attitudes, ideologies, and sociolinguistic change. Sociolinguistic studies at NTNU adopt approaches such as ethnography, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and quantitative analysis.

The Language, Society, and Culture Group is also interested in names (onoma) and naming in culture. Research in this area is based on the premise set forth in Alford—that one way in which language and culture go hand in hand concerns the naming process. While proper names serve a referential function, cultural and linguistic groups differ in the way names are selected and assigned, and the degree to which they are viewed as meaning-bearing.

Prof. Hsi-Yao Su specializes in sociolinguistics and is particularly interested in the mutually constitutive relations between language, identity, and language ideologies. She has published and carried out research projects in phonological variation in Taiwan Mandarin, code-switching (translanguaging) and styling in online and face-to-face contexts, language ideological debates concerning Chinese writing, language and gender issues as manifested in popular discourses, and the metalinguistics of politeness.

Prof. Nai-Hsien Chen is interested in various kinds of proper names, including personal names, place names, institution names, ethnically-marked names, and presentation names. Recent works have contributed to the existing scholarship by providing insights into English given names, onomastic acculturation in translation, and courtesy titles across cultures.

Instructor(s):

• Dr. Chen, Nai-Hsien
• Dr. Su, Hsi-Yao

Related Course(s) Provided:

• ENU0178 Language and Gender
• ENU0179 Language and Life
• ENU0335 Language and Society
• ENC2026 Sociolinguistics
• END2017 Seminar in Sociolinguistics