Keynote Speakers

Hongyin Tao is a professor of Chinese language and linguistics and applied linguistics at UCLA; he also holds a honorary Distinguished Chair Professor position at the National Taiwan Normal University. His research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and interactional aspects of Chinese language use in context. Among his over 130 publications are recent books: Chinese for Specific/Professional Purposes (with Howard Chen, Springer Nature 2019); Integrating Linguistics Research with Chinese Language Teaching and Learning (John Benjamin, 2016), Chinese under Globalization (with Jin Liu, World Scientific, 2011), and Working with Spoken Chinese (Penn State University, 2011). He was (2014) president of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA and currently serves on over twenty editorial boards.

Keynote Speech: Polyphony in Action: Prosodic Manipulation and Alternation for Stance Negotiation in Monolingual Mandarin Conversation

Abstract

While it is indisputable that communities throughout the world have become increasingly multilingual and multicultural, there is still much to be learned about the multiple voices within a single linguistic system, such as Mandarin Chinese, the large speech repertoires in a single speaker, and how speakers take advantage of voice manipulation and register alternation in everyday social interaction. In this talk, I use audio-video recorded naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation to analyze a number of phenomena where polyphone is at play, i.e., using multiple voices to represent diverse perspectives, stances, and identities in dialogic sequences. The discursive phenomena to be investigated include the following:

1. intonation contour matching for affiliative stance-taking;
2. voice matching and modification for disaffiliative stance-taking;
3. reporting unattributable speech with distinctive voice qualities to index and contest epistemic authority.

While the first two phenomena are typical manifestations of conversational resonance, defined by Du Bois (2014) as “the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances”, which takes place in the immediate conversational context, the latter seems to have more to do with allusion to distant discourse experiences.

By analyzing polyphony in Mandarin everyday conversation, I hope to show that fine-grained multimodal analysis of talk-in-interaction can help us better appreciate the complexity of linguistic repertoires in single speakers and the multiple voices and registers in single language systems – and how all this can be dynamically put to (inter)action.