Doctoral Dissertation Research: Chinese Nationals Among "Overseas Chinese" in Singapore: The Sociolinguistics of Multiple Linguistic Identities

在华德士博士和张青博士的指导下，李尔欣女士将为她的论文进行田野调查。她将研究来自中华人民共和国(也被称为大陆中国或中国)的专业工作者的语言实践，他们生活在新加坡的多民族社区，在新加坡出生的华人占主导地位。她将考察中国人在多大程度上使用与新加坡相关的语言资源，即新加坡英语和普通话，以索引新加坡社会和更广泛的跨国华人背景下的多重身份。除了研究语言混合的模式外，她还将研究特定语音和词汇特征在一系列风格和社会语境中的使用模式，以及包括说话者关于语言和身份的意识形态的论述数据。Lee将把对说话者在一系列情景和语境中的语言行为的人种学观察与参与者的自我录音以及一对一和小组访谈中记录的元语言数据结合起来。该项目有助于在语言学和语言人类学内部理解语言使用模式如何与多层身份相联系，特别是在影响力量既是本地的又是跨国的地方。在更大的范围内，该项目还促进了人类学家、经济学家和社会学家对研究新的移民模式如何使移民与其发送国之间保持强大的经济、文化和情感联系的兴趣日益浓厚。

Under the supervision of Drs. Keith Walters and Qing Zhang, Ms. Er-Xin Lee will conduct fieldwork research for her dissertation. She will study the linguistic practices of professional workers from the People's Republic of China (also referred to as Mainland China or China) who are living in multiethnic Singapore, where an established community of Singaporean-born Chinese predominates. She will examine the extent to which the Chinese nationals use the language resources associated with Singapore, that is, Singaporean English and Mandarin, to index multiple identities within the Singaporean society and within a broader transnational Chinese context. Besides examining patterns of language mixing, she will also study patterns in the use of specific phonological and lexical features across a range of styles and social contexts, as well as discursive data comprising speakers' ideologies regarding language and identity. Lee will combine ethnographic observations of speakers' language behaviors across a range of situations and contexts with metalinguistic data recorded from participants' self-recordings and from one-on-one and group interviews. This project contributes to an understanding within linguistics and linguistic anthropology of how patterns of language use can be linked to multiple layers of identity, specifically where the forces of influence are both local and transnational. On a larger scale, the project also contributes to a growing interest among anthropologists, economists, and sociologists in studying the ways in which new migration patterns have allowed strong economic, cultural and emotional ties to be maintained between migrants and their sending countries.