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‘The words has been immigrate’: Chronotopes in context-shaping narrative co-construction about Taiwanese loanwords with Taiwanese Americans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2020

Abstract

This study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

I thank Dr. Richard Buttny for his comments on an earlier draft of this article and the audience for their feedback at the 69th Annual International Communication Association Conference in Washington, DC, 2019. I am particularly grateful for the valuable suggestions provided by the two anonymous reviewers.

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