Note from the Editor
Welcome to Volume 8 of the Northeastern University Working Papers in Linguistics!
Since its inception in 2016, this journal has served as an online home for the fascinating research which our undergraduate students complete on language and linguistics each year. In the last eight years, we have published highly original articles on every sub-field of the study of language, from syntax to child language acquisition; from pragmatics to evolutionary linguistics; from reports on fieldwork on understudied languages to presentations of conlangs. This year, we are again pleased to offer our readers two papers which highlight the range of academic research of our Linguistics Program.
Starting within the rich sociolinguistic field of language shift and maintenance, Abigail Chung presents a questionaire-based study of first-generation immigrant parents from East Asian backgrounds and their motivations for passing down their heritage language to the next generation, and how the parents cope with deeply personal questions of language, culture, and identity in the United States. Whereas there is a glut of sociolinguistic research on language maintenance across generations for other groups, notably Latinx, this work fills a gap in studies on language and identity among Asian-American communities, and presents rich qualitative data on the competing pressures which East Asian immigrant parents face: whether to help their children assimilate to the dominant language of English or to maintain their family heritage in terms of language and identity.
Meanwhile, the next paper showcases the growing amount of research taking place on discourse and conversational analysis at Northeastern. Using an integrated framework of frame analysis, positioning theory, and narrative analysis, Eliza Rice gives a corpus-based case study of audience positioning during storytelling. She argues that the roles which audience members adopt during storytelling in a North American context – including prompter, empathizer, evaluator, co-teller, self-relator, attentive listener, and affirmer – are based and interpretable largely through the lens of the culture background of the participants. By analyzing hours of audio recordings of dinnertime conversation, she evokes patterns of storytelling behaviors based on ethnicity, nationality, and cultural background of the audience.
Happy Reading!
Rob Painter
Current Volume
Vol. 8: 2023
Chung, Abigail. (2023). Language Attitudes, Heritage Language Maintenance, & Linguistic Assimilation for East Asian Immigrant Families in the US.
First and second generation immigrants comprise a significant amount of the US population, coming from various countries and various linguistic backgrounds. First generation immigrant parents will either choose to pass down their heritage language to their second generation children, or not. This decision will invariably impact the children and parents’ lives, as language is inextricably linked to culture, identity, and relationships. This sociolinguistic research seeks to investigate what factors are involved in the parents’ decision to pass down their language, and what consequences the child and parents experience as a result.
Rice, Eliza. (2023). Cultural Differences in Audience Positioning within the Context of Storytelling.
Following an integrated framework that combines aspects of frame analysis (Goffman, 1981), positioning theory (Davies & Harre, 1990), and narrative analysis, this case study analyzes audience positioning within a storytelling frame and focus on how differences in positioning may relate to the differences in the cultural background of the speakers. Using recorded data from a meal-time conversation amongst four friends, audience turns are analyzed within the context of the surrounding narrative. In the narrative data, seven categories of audience positionings can be isolated: prompter, empathizer, evaluator, co-teller, self-relator, attentive listener, and affirmer. Through comparing the frequencies with which each participant assumes each position, analysis shows that participants raised in Western households are most likely to assume the empathizer and attentive listener positions in interaction, while participants raised in Eastern households are most likely to assume the evaluator position and to disfavor the empathizer and attentive listener positions. These findings illustrate how, in the storytelling frame, differences in culture may influence the perceived appropriateness and conventionality of assuming certain positions when in an audience role.