LINGUIST List 21.2511
Mon Jun 07 2010
Diss: Disc Analysis: Uryu: 'Another Thanksgiving Dinner: Language ...'
Editor for this issue: Mfon Udoinyang
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1. Michiko
Uryu,
Another Thanksgiving Dinner: Language, identity and history in the age of globalization
Message 1: Another Thanksgiving Dinner: Language, identity and history in the age of globalization
Date: 07-Jun-2010
From: Michiko Uryu <michikouryugmail.com>
Subject: Another Thanksgiving Dinner: Language, identity and history in the age of globalization
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Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2009
Author: Michiko Uryu
Dissertation Title: Another Thanksgiving Dinner: Language, identity and history in the age of globalization
Linguistic Field(s):
Discourse Analysis
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Dissertation Director:
Claire Kramsch
Dissertation Abstract:
Intercultural communication is often discussed with reference to theparticipants' culturally different knowledge, its impact upon theirconversational styles and the accompanying effect on success or failure incommunicating across cultures. Contemporary intercultural encounters,however, are more complicated and dynamic in nature since people live inmultiple and shifting spaces with accompanying identities while national,cultural, and ideological boundaries are obscured due to the rapidglobalization of economy, the accompanying global migration and the recentinnovations in global information/communication technologies.
Re-conceptualizing the notion of context as conditions for discourseoccurrences, this dissertation research aims to explore the social,cultural, ideological and historical dimensions of conversational discoursebetween participants with multiple and changing identities in anintercultural global context. An ethnographic research was conducted during2006-2007 in an American non-profit organization founded 50 years ago tofoster social and cultural exchanges among female foreign visitors at aprestigious American university in New England, USA. Building on DeborahTannen's famous Thanksgiving Dinner (Tannen 1983), a 30 minute conversationamong a Russian, a German and two Japanese speakers, who participated inthe Thanksgiving Program, was tape-recorded and analyzed together withplayback interviews and participants' journals. The study disclosed thatparticipants not only brought ideological and historical elements in thegiven intercultural communicative context but also started viewingthemselves in the mirror of the 'Other' and ultimately constructed their'Self' in 'Other' with reference to their cultural memories of WW II andtheir postwar histories. The following contrastive study of three Germanand three Japanese subjects' journals and the transcriptions of theirinterviews with the researcher further confirmed history's impacts uponintercultural communication research.
The result shows the benefits of triangulating the relationship betweenJapan and Germany with the U.S. from inclusion of a third participantand/or a third perspective in the studied context. Accordingly, it suggeststhe need for a post-structuralist approach to discourse analysis in ourglobalized world (Blommaert 2005). Conversational style in interculturalencounters needs to be researched from an ecological perspective that takesinto account the ideological and historical dimensions of speaking subjects.
Page Updated: 07-Jun-2010
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