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

在博士的监督下。Keith Walters和Qing Zhang，李尔欣女士将为她的论文进行实地研究。她将研究中国公民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，她还将研究在各种风格和社会背景下使用特定语音和词汇特征的模式，以及包含说话者关于语言和身份的意识形态的话语数据。李将结合民族志对说话者在各种情况和背景下的语言行为的观察，以及从参与者的自我记录和一对一和小组访谈中记录的元语言数据。该项目有助于在语言学和语言人类学中理解语言使用模式如何与多层身份联系在一起，特别是在影响本地和跨国力量的地方。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徙模式如何使移徙者与其原籍国之间保持牢固的经济、文化和情感联系的兴趣。

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.