Rechronotopization and materiality: A sociolinguistics beyond discourse

Colloquium organizer and discussant: Lydia CATEDRAL (Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong)

Over the past decades, the study of discourse has enabled sociolinguists to explore the intricate interplay between (non)linguistic signs, their immediate situational contexts, the imaginative realms they conjure, and the material worlds they reference and shape. Within our diverse subdisciplines, varying degrees of attention have been directed towards these contextual elements. For instance, Conversation Analysis has meticulously examined textual contexts, while Foucauldian approaches to discourse have scrutinized the imagined domains where discursive ideologies operate. The focus of this panel is the material dimensions of context and their relationship to discourse. We attempt to provide a holistic approach to understanding the materiality of context alongside its prediscursive conditions and post discursive effects through diverse papers that draw on the notions of chronotope and rechronotopization. More specifically, the panel takes as its starting point an understanding of social life as structured by chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981; Agha 2007; Blommaert 2018) – or spatiotemporal units that are textual, material and imagined. Furthermore, we see these chronotopes as (re)constructed or (re)chronotopized  through the dialectic between imagined (i.e. ideological), textual (i.e. linguistic) and material (i.e. physical and bodily experienced) dimensions of space-time (Karimzad & Catedral 2022). Drawing on these theoretical frameworks and data from different ethnographic contexts, the papers collectively demonstrate the theoretical and applied significance of the materiality of space-time for sociolinguistics as a whole.

The papers by LIANG Xiaoyan and LI Yating illustrate the material consequences of chronotopic imaginaries by foregrounding the ways in which discursively reconfigured imaginations of space-times such as ‘small alternative theatres in China’ or ‘the home as a workplace for domestic workers’ lead to material (re)configurations of these space-times in terms of the number of people attending these theatres, or the physical abuse that is experienced by domestic workers in these homes. While these examples focus on post-discursive material impacts, the other papers focus more on pre-discursive materialities. SCHLUTER highlights the ways in which Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners try to make their own first-hand observations of the materialities of their patients’ conditions despite the spatiotemporal constraints of their work in telehealth. In this same vein, LIANG Yuyan shows how the material constraints of the space-times in which grassroots activists are working intersect with their imaginations of social media as "a space-time for relaxing", to bring about Facebook posts in which activists find quick and personalized means of sharing political messages. KALTENEGGER Sandra’s paper analyzes why and how the notion of “Taiwanese Mandarin” is discursively “made” and “unmade” over the course of an interview, as participants orient to both ideological and material chronotopically situated concerns. Similarly, JAMSHIDI Saman traces how Iranians differently position themselves in relation to vulgar language used during the recent anti-government protests in Iran on the basis of whether imagined or material dimensions of space-time become more relevant to them. The six papers in this panel highlight how a holistic conceptualization of the chronotope situates the social fact of life within its material fact, thereby allowing us to account for the often overlooked centrality of materiality in sociolinguistics as a whole.

The (re)chronotopization of Chinese Small Theatre in the Post-Pandemic Era

Xiaoyan LIANG (Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong)

This article aims to use the theoretical framework of chronotope to analyze the evolution of small theaters in China in the post-pandemic era. Small theatres encompass not only the physical space of the theatre in the urban area, but also a discourse practice that is replete with interpretations about the meaning of “small theatre”. In China, plays in privately run small theaters are more experimental, innovative, and anti-conventional than plays in state-owned mainstream theaters. In the post-pandemic era, there has been a notable rise in audience attendance, box office revenues, and the proliferation of small theaters, thereby rendering them no longer ignored. The utilization of chronotope enables the examination of the dynamic dialectical interrelationship between the societal framework and value system as well as material dimensions of space-time. This approach facilitates a deeper investigation into the interplay between the material and imagined dimensions of “small theatre”, i.e. rechronotopization (Karimzad, 2020), which also allows us to capture how this spatiotemporal configuration is a dynamic and mobile context (see also: Blommaert, 2017).

I will examine government discourses from official documents and media reports, as well as non-official discourses from dramatists and audience discussion. The preliminary investigation shows that in the post-pandemic era, there are changing images of "small theater" from the sides of both the government and Chinese society. Moreover, the increased funding and attendance show the changes to the material situation of these space-times. The relationship between these two is resulting in a rechronotopization of small theaters not only as limited performance venues but also as integral elements in the growth and evolution of the Chinese urban cultural ecosystems.

Positioned to Serve as a Maid: Chronotopic Normalcy and its Material Effects in the Case of Handbooks for Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Yating LI (Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong)

In this paper, I examine a “handbook” produced by an employment agency that mediates the relationship between employers and workers hired to work in their homes. While scholars have written critically about discourses about domestic workers (Lorente 2017; Ladegaard 2013), less is understood about the material effects of agencies’ discourses.Chronotope can help to make connections between the institutional discourse of agencies, the normative images of the space-time of the “home” that these discourses produce, and the material hardships of migrant domestic workers within the “home” of their employers.

This chronotopic approach examines the spatiotemporal imaginaries, and “normative behaviors” (Blommaert, 2018; Karimzad, 2021), that are being constructed through discourse, as well as the material and embodied experiences of space-time (Karimzad & Catedral 2022). Chronotopic imaginaries studies how the discourses in the handbook construct a normative image of the employer’s home. The discourses of migrant domestic worker advocacy groups and my ethnographic observations as a volunteer can help me to make connections between chronotopic imaginaries and embodied experiences of domestic workers. 

The findings show that while the handbook indirectly creates normative images of the employer’s home for the benefit of employers, and that detailed life guidance for domestic workers is a subtle way of stratifying power and commodifying identities.As workers are instructed to say “I must work hard and obey the order.” These same power-laden images of the home can be linked to abuses experienced by domestic workers, illustrating how  “docile bodies” are ‘caught up in a system of constraints, privations, obligations and prohibitions’ (Foucault, 1977).

Tongue Photos and the Centrality of Materiality in Traditional Chinese Medicine Telehealth Consultations

Anne Schluter (Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

By their very nature, telehealth consultations draw attention to materiality – or, rather, the lack thereof – as patients discuss bodies that practitioners cannot examine directly. Indeed, the perceived deficiencies of these modes of interaction underline the importance of embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016) in health communication contexts. This focus is especially pronounced in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) consultations, which emphasize the practitioners’ direct observation of a diverse array of physical cues to formulate diagnoses and prescribe individualized treatments. As a means of circumventing this challenge posed by the absence of patients’ bodies, the TCM practitioner in the current study exploits digital tools by requiring all patients to send her photographs of their tongues via WhatsApp prior to consultation, thereby highlighting a heightened role for “alternative modalities” (Kress 2009) in this setting.

As part of a larger study that analyzes observation and interview data from patients, practitioners, and clinical assistants [N=40] at a Hong Kong TCM clinic, this paper takes a deep dive into one practitioner’s use of tongue photos – rather than patient descriptions – as a means of directly observing patients’ current health conditions within the limitations of telehealth consultations. While patients can describe their tongues according to the parameters outlined by the practitioner, they commonly fail to incorporate the nuance of observational details that come with TCM expertise, resulting in potentially inaccurate interpretations of symptoms and treatment effectiveness. Accordingly, expert opinion in this context relies on the pre-discursive materiality of tongue photos, which showcase an example of “the centrality of materiality” (Karimzad & Catedral, 2022: 23) over discourse for this type of TCM patient care.

Understanding Personalized Rescripting in Migrant Domestic Workers’ Online Activism

Yuyan LIANG (Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong)

Georgakopoulou (2015) put forth rescripting in sociolinguistic studies, calling for researcher’s attention to the functions of rescripting - spoofs, memes, remixes, and mashups etc., as a productive resemiotic practice of the circulated activities (Georgakopoulou, et al., 2023; Humphrey, 2023). In this study – focused on the online activism of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) – I propose the notion of personalized rescripting to account for how my participants employ creative multimodal semiosis to mix their personal life with their collective political messages in their posts on Facebook.  

My data come from an ongoing ethnographic study of the online and offline practices of grassroots organizations in Hong Kong led by MDWs. I focus on how MDWs promote organizational campaigns by posting pictures of their everyday life alongside hashtags or short captions related to political campaigns. I investigate this personalized rescripting by drawing from interviews with participants about why and how they mix political and personal messages, and from my ongoing ethnographic observations of the grassroots, political organizations of which they are a part. I take a chronotopic approach to analyze their perspectives to better understand the intersections between the event of sharing, social media affordances, their ideologically loaded images of various space-times, and their material situatedness in particular space-times. 

Preliminary findings show that personalized rescripting is a strategy and means of sharing political messages among MDWs, in which we can see their chronotopic imaginaries of Facebook – treat it as a place for social networking and relaxing, and their chronotopic materialities, such as chronotopes of work time, are interacting with and inform each other.

Material considerations in the (un-)making of Taiwanese Standard Mandarin

Sandra KALTENEGGER (Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong)

Language making (Krämer, Vogl and Kolehmainen 2022) is a newly proposed concept that focuses on “conscious or unconscious human processes in which imagined linguistic units are constructed and perceived as a language, a dialect or a variety” (p. 3). In contrast, when the status of the imagined linguistic unit is denied by such processes, it is a matter of language unmaking. While being a valuable notion that brings forth new impulses, the concept still lacks clarity in terms of how the imagined and semiotic dimensions of language making are interrelated and it has thus far neglected the material conditions under which language is (un-)made. 

To achieve further theoretical rigor for the concept of language making, this study draws on a chronotopic-scalar understanding of context to illuminate the complex connection between imagined linguistic units, their semiotic representations, and their material conditions and effects (Karimzad and Catedral 2022). The particular variety in question is Taiwanese Standard Mandarin (TSM), a non-dominant standard variety of pluricentric Mandarin (Kaltenegger 2020) and the study focuses on how 12 Taiwanese Mandarin teachers who freelance online perpetually make and unmake TSM in the course of an interview. TSM is a contested variety due to the complex sociolinguistic context of Taiwan, which is why it is often erased or unmade. Mandarin teaching provides a context in which the variety becomes more salient, however, the analysis uncovers that the discursive making of TSM is highly dependent on the material foundations and consequences of this imagined linguistic unit (e.g. the prediscursive material condition of Mandarin’s vast geographic variation may lead to postdiscursive feelings of frustration and insecurity that are bodily experienced).

From Profanity to Revolution: Rechronotopization of Vulgar Language in Iran's Protests

Saman Jamshidi (Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Following the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, who was subjected to dress code-related violence in Iran, ideological tensions were raised in a form of protests to support women (generally human) rights in the country. Such a tense atmosphere heralded a tug-of-war between the government and protestors, with tragic consequences, for more than 4000 people were killed, imprisoned, and tortured in the ensuing clashes. In that situation, competing discourses could be observed in various contexts, including streets, social media, and broadcast. One of the most significant discoursal occurrences amid these protests was the widespread use of vulgar language among protestor’s slogans which which has been stigmatized and paradoxically seen as profane by others who believe that such language does not fit the intended purpose of these protests, namely fighting for human rights. In this study, I drew on the notion of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981; Karimzad & Catedral, 2022) which is spatiotemporal configurations of social interaction that are constructed and construed in terms of materialities, imaginaries, and textualities, to investigate the use of vulgar language within Twitter posts during Iran’s women, life, freedom protests. Specifically, I focused on the rechronotopization (Karimzad & Catedral, 2021) of vulgar language to highlight how spatiotemporal contexts can not only enable, but also endorse particular modes of conduct as favorable, preferred, or obligatory, while casting deviations from normativities in negative terms. Using SMAT (https://www.smat-app.com/), I sampled 4000 Persian tweets containing #Mahsa_Amini (مهسا_امینی#) and #Women_life_freedom (زن_زندگی_آزادی#) from 9/17/2022 to 8/1/2023. Then, a chronotopic analysis was conducted to investigate how vulgar language is evaluated and interpreted by those who favor imagined ideals versus those who have high resolution material experience of the happenings. That is, the study explored how individual’s orientation towards textualities, materialities, and imaginaries of these chronotopes shapes their interpretation and evaluation of vulgar language in this specific time-space configuration. This study aims to illuminate the transformative power of language and offer insights into how contextual shifts can reshape linguistic normativity and behavior.