Chinese sociolinguistics
This class will approach the Chinese language from a sociolinguistic angle. Sociolinguistics is a field that attempts to elucidate language in terms of its relationship with society, and its research targets range from familiar linguistic phenomena to language variation, multilingual use, language inheritance, language policy, language services, and more.
My own research topics that I have worked on/am working on include language policy for ethnic minorities, language evaluation attitudes, language use attitudes, attitudes toward the use of nominal terms for women, language services in Nagano Prefecture, and strategies for "refusal" in Chinese. In addition, the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence has become one of the most important topics in foreign language education. Therefore, this study group will also treat research on Chinese language education as one important issue.
The workshop will operate in the following sequence
(1) Students will read and critically analyze the literature related to the theme that they (or their team) will address in their project.
(2) Divide into projects, formulate themes, and derive hypotheses.
(3) Design and conduct effective research to substantiate hypotheses.
(4) Summarize the results of the investigation and report the findings.
Here are some examples of projects addressed in this class:
Pragmatic studies of Chinese language
Research on multilingual coexistence in neighboring municipalities
Studies on Chinese language education/acquisition
Research on language policy in China
Research on intercultural communication