Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language and Identity among Ethnic Minorities

语言变量如何在日常互动中获得社会意义？语言在创造身份的过程中扮演什么角色？是否有一种独特的说话方式来识别一个群体，如果有，语言特征是什么？在Gregory Guy博士的指导下，Carina Bauman将通过调查亚裔美国女生联谊会的语言使用来调查语言和种族认同的相互作用，以回答这些来自不同种族背景的年轻女性如何共同定义“亚裔美国人”的含义。重要的话语事件将被记录下来，以确定如何使用特定的语言资源来构建身份和社区成员。访谈将在学年开始和结束时进行记录，并分析具体的语言学变量，如韵律、语音类型、引语和升调，以调查它们是否揭示了与民族身份相关的模式。语言数据也将从两个对照组中收集：没有参加亚裔美国女生联谊会的亚裔美国学生和不同种族背景的大学生。由于亚裔美国人在社会语言学中一直是一个研究相对较少的群体，因此这项研究有可能对我们了解美国的语言和种族做出重要贡献。

How do linguistic variables gain social meaning in everyday interaction? What role does language play in creating identity? Is there a way of speaking that uniquely identifies a group, and if so, what are the linguistic characteristics? Under the direction of Dr. Gregory Guy, Carina Bauman will investigate the interaction of language and ethnic identity by investigating language use within an Asian American sorority to answer the question how do these young women from diverse ethnic backgrounds work to collaboratively define what it means to be "Asian American." Important discourse events will be recorded to determine how particular linguistic resources are used to construct identities and community membership. Interviews will be recorded at the beginning and at the end of the academic year, and specific linguistics variables, such as prosody, phonation type, quotatives, and rising intonation, will be analyzed to investigate if they reveal patterns associated with ethnic identity. Linguistic data will also be collected from two control groups: Asian-American students not involved in an Asian-American sorority and college students of various ethnic backgrounds.Since Asian Americans have until recently been a relatively understudied group within sociolinguistics, this study has the potential to make an important contribution to our picture of language and ethnicity in the United States.