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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]