Search

Forms of address have been studied as important discursive strategies in adversary political communication in Western democracies but few studies have looked into how unconventional forms of address are used by netizens to refer to presidential candidates on digital platform. Giving names/nicknames is one of the impoliteness strategies to cause/take offence (Culpeper, 1996, 2011:23; Haugh, 2015). They are part of the comments of netizens to register affective stances such as irony, sarcasm, and/or threats to defend/preempt a status quo over issues of concern during a race. These situated verbal aggressions are not only evaluative of group-based political opponents/policies, affective to in/out group identification but also evoking conflicting norms, thus strategic for relational work in the power struggle among competing political parties. The lexical, referential, and pragmatics of the online naming are evaluative and sensitive to the "threat" of a candidate, an issue, and/or a policy during political campaigning. By comparing both the online and offline naming of politicians, looking into how Chinese language and naming practices can be flouted to relate to a candidate and/or a political party, and stressing that verbal aggression is politic behavior in a high-stakes political game, we conclude that naming presidential candidates on FB walls constitutes a vital part of the acts of (dis)identification among different interest groups over issues of concern in a high-stakes political race. • FB affordances and limits can help naming candidates as preemptive verbal acts of (dis)identification for netizens on digital platform. • Impoliteness as situated evaluative expression helps analyze how/why norms are asserted/averted for strategic purposes in adversary political communication. • The lexical, referential and pragmatics of marked naming is responsive to the perceived "threat" of a candidate, an issue, and a political party in the race. • Language specific features such as puns and homophones as well social variables such as integrity, past experiences and sub-human are stressed in the 2016 race. • Chinese cultural and naming practices as well as negative othering provide added motives for naming the opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how political aspirations and convictions during Taiwan's authoritarian period (from the 1940s to 1996) are expressed through first-person plural pronouns. Combining both corpus-assisted method and discourse historical analysis (DHA, Wodak et al. 1999), we compared the speeches delivered by the presidents – Chiang Kai-shek (CKS, 1955–1975), Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK, 1978–1988), and Lee Teng-hui (LTH, 1989–1996) – from the one-party domination era to the time of the direct presidential elections in 1996. Moreover, by locating lexical items in the co-texts and checking the collocates, we have tried to find referents of we against changing socio-political contexts. The meaning of we has changed from representing Chinese compatriots on the Chinese mainland and the revolutionary militia in CKS's speeches to an over-inclusion and more hearer-dominant (HD) we in CCK's speeches. A "wandering we" was found in LTH's speeches with which a well-defined national collectivity was difficult to identify in the late 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores types of marked language choices and their uses in Taiwan, using examples from both everyday and e-generation online communication where language mixing, crossing, and stylizing are rampant despite the fact that most of the same individuals consider conventionally codified Mandarin, English, and Japanese more prestigious. The paper argues that this kind of hybrid language practice owes much to Taiwan's twice-reformatted national language policies in the 20th century, and to a rapid regime transition from one party dominance to a multi-party society. That is, the historical enforcement of both Japanese and Mandarin helped nation-state development but didn't leave other linguistic varieties with an equal chance for social advancement, modernization, and codification. Indigenous and ingenious, the language choices and uses in question tap into the lack of codification and standardization of non-Mandarin varieties, into the stereotypical features of Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, and into the incongruities of so many phonetic schemes and use of Chinese characters as phonetic symbols to sound out English, Mandarin, and Japanese. The pragmatics goes beyond immediate functional purposes and are used metaphorically to tap into taboos, for example, or to create humor by adopting a marked choice, in real and virtual discourse. By connecting these emerging language features to broader socio-historical changes in Taiwan, we are able to see the coming of age of a new pattern of reappropriating Chinese characters and therefore Chineseness in online communication. It is a development that may help us reflect on the meanings of speaking/writing Chinese in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]