“Self” in Language, Culture, and Cognition

Front matter

“Self” in Language, Culture, and Cognition

Yanying Lu

O

CHAPTER 1 Migrating the Chinese self

1.1 The contemporary concept of self 1 1.2 Contemporary Chinese immigrants 4

1.3 The discourse of contemporary Chinese identity 5

1.4 An overview of the present research 7

CHAPTER 2 Self-referential pronouns in Mandarin Chinese 2.1 Pronominal references in Mandarin Chinese 2.2 A discursive examination 13

2.2.1 Assertion 14

2.2.2 Mitigation 19

2.2.3 Persuasion 24

2.2.4 Accommodation 29 2.3 Summary 34

CHAPTER 3 Performing identities: Presenting the flawed self 3.1 Performing identities 38 3.2 Idealised self-representation 39 3.2.1 Evaluating the private self 40 3.2.2 Reflecting upon independence 44 3.2.3 Assessing the realme 48 3.3 From flawed to ideal 54 3.4 Conclusion 56

VIII

CHAPTER 4 Becoming Chinese: A discursive exploration 59 41 Defining Chineseness in the global context 6o 4.1.1 Where is zhongguo ‘China 6o 4.1.2 Who are Chinese people 63 4.1.3 Representing the non-Chinese 65 4.2 The emerging contemporary Chinese immigrant identity 70 4.2.1 The Huaren ‘ethnic Chinese people’ 71 4.2.2 Australian born Chinese 73 4.2.3 The guoneiren ‘people from within the country 77 4.3 Summary 81 CHAPTER 5 Chinese conceptualisations of personhood 83 5.1 The SPLIT SELF 85 5.1.1 The CONTROLLING SUBJECT 85 5.1.2 The UNBOUNDED SELF 88 5.2 Image-schematic dyads 91 5.2.1 Deep-shallow 91 5.2.2 INTERIOR-EXTERIOR 93 5.2.3 BALANCE-IMBALANCE 95 5.3 Relationship metaphors in Mandarin Chinese 97 5.3.1 The interpersonal PATH 97 5.3.2 Interpersonal PROXIMITY 99 5.3.3 The social CONTAINER 104 5.4 Conclusion 109 CHAPTER 6 The self within: On the Chinese embodied self 111 6.1 The embodied view of self 111 6.2 The EMBODIED SELF metaphor 113

6.3

6.2.1 The metonymy of the INNER HEART 114 6.2.2 THE HEART STORES THOUGHTS 116

6.2.3 THE HEART ACCOMMODATES FEELINGS 118 6.2.4 THE HEART BRAIN BONE EYES 123 Discussion and conclusion 128

Table of contents

Ix

CHAPTER 7

Conceptualisations of the migrant identity

71 Å BOUNDED AREA 132

7.1.1 A CULTURAL GROUP IS A BOUNDED AREA 7.1.2 The exclusiveness of the BOUNDED AREA

7.2 Viewpoints and perspectives in space 136

7.2.1 The space in discourse 136

7.2.2 Social proximity across cultural groups 7.2.3 From the perspective of women zhebian ‘we here’

7.2.4 From the perspective of “others” 143

73 The exemplar identity 145

74 The exemplar identity and beyond 150 CHAPTER 8 From perceptual to socio-cultural cognition

8.1 ‘The selfin language and culture 154

8.1.1 Theselfinlanguage 154 8.1.2 The cultural self 157 8.2 Cognition of the self in discourse 1 8.2.1 The representational principle 8.2.2 The intersubjective principle 8.2.3 The emergent principle 161 8.3 Chinese self in diaspora discourse

Index

159 160

132 134

List of figures

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

Figure 5.

Figure 6.

Figure 7.

The contemporary concept of self

Narrating the self in the Chinese diaspora discourse Discursive analysis of self-references in Chinese Performing identities

Conceptualising the self in the Chinese cultural system Conceptual analysis of the inner self and relationship metaphors in Chinese

Conceptualisations of migrant identity

Acknowledgement

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of those with whom I have had the privilege to discuss the development of ideas and reseach that is covered in this book. First of all, I owe many thanks to Dr Alice Gaby, Professor Gloria Davies and Dr. Anna Margetts who co-supervised my doctoral research at Monash University. I could not have been able to produce this monograph without their guidance and nurturance throughout my PhD candidature. I feel particularly fortunate for having them as my supervisors.

My involvement in the ARC linkage project (Connecting younger second language learners and older bilinguals. Intergenerational, intercultural encounters and second language development) inspired me to pursue reseach in migrant studies and to quest after their existance. Therefore, I am especially grateful to Associate Professor Marisa Cordella and Dr. Hui Huang who offered me the chance to work with them.

I am also greatly indebted to Professor Farzad Sharifian who has been a great mentor for encouraging me and supporting me to undertake research in the area of language, culture and cognition. I would also like to thank Professor Ning Yu and Professor Chris Sinha for their valuable advice and constructive comments on my PhD thesis which continued to inspire me during the preparation of this book.

My gratitude also goes to Faculty of Arts, Monash University and Monash Graduate School for their financial support which enabled me to conduct research that is included in this book. I was awarded Faculty of Arts International Postgraduate Research Scholarship and Co-Funded Monash Graduate Scholarship in 2014 as well as the Faculty of Arts Postgraduate Publications Award in 2016. Finally, I am very grateful to John Benjamins Publishing Company, as it is such a privilege to publish my first monographic book in the series Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts.

Preface

The way in which one uses language tells a lot about the individual. The present book tells the stories of twenty-five Mainland-born Chinese immigrants who joined a series of group discussions about their life in Australia. The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach to unpack linguistic manifestations and cognitive representations of “self” in the contemporary Chinese diaspora discourse. The research methodology incorporates elements from sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics and the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics.

The findings of the study reported in this book reveal how selfhood occurs at the interface of language, culture, and cognition. Mapping out the cognitive dimensions of “self” and discussing their relevance in constructing social and cultural identities in interactions, the study presents empirical and theoretical advancements through analysing how Chinese speakers’ self-perceptions influence their conceptualisations of social identities and the communication of which in a cross-cultural context.

Considering the power of language, migrant talk gives insights into understanding how contemporary Chinese immigrants perceive themselves and its impact on their social relationships. The study reveals a number of enduring and emerging beliefs that permeate these participating Chinese speakers who migrated to Australia in the early 2000s. The enduring beliefs, given their influence on various modern postulations of Chinese identity, provides clear evidence of cultural continuity. They shape the way Chinese people think about individuality, social relationships and collective identities. The emerging ones include views on cultural diversity and outlooks on migration, which impart wisdom to cross-cultural communication. These findings have significant implications for studying intercultural and cross-cultural communication as they reveal how traditional and modern ideas in Chinese culture are interacting with those of other world cultures.

CHAPTER 1

Migrating the Chinese self

This research explores Mainland-born Chinese immigrants’ perception of selfhood. Against the background of contemporary diaspora discourse, Chapter 1 seeks to define the self at the interface of language, culture and cognition. It highlights the role of the cultural context in the production of socially transmitted norms and tendencies in the articulation of personhood in modern China.

Keywords: self, diaspora discourse, Chinese language, culture, cognition

1... The contemporary concept of self

At the occurrence ofa shift in social sciences in defining “self”, the traditional view on it as being unified or indivisible has been replaced by the modern one which sees it as being fragmented and plural. ‘The self, across various disciplines such as sociology, social psychology and linguistics, is also increasingly viewed as being constructed and sustained in the linguistic activities of the individual.

The current study takes a linguistic approach to the investigation of selfhood through examining the ways in which it emerges from people’s talk. Linguistic and anthropological research cannot emphasise enough on the significance of language as a provider of symbolic resources for its speakers. It enables us to negotiate self-understandings and to exchange our views and opinions with others. Language also provides us with pragmatic strategies to achieve communicative purposes. In the linguistic process of differentiating and integrating a sense of self, we are defining who we are and becoming ourselves in relation to others.

Throughout one’s lifetime, cognition serves as the anchor for comprehending and processing information, some of which has been passed on to them as cultural assets and some emerges from moment-to-moment negotiation of meanings. The exercise of our cognitive faculties through perception, thinking and imagination is crutial to gaining self-knowledge and to understanding the many meanings of a cultural being. Using various concepts related to the self or making reference to it through language is part of a socio-cognitive process in which we strive to become who we are in the context of the socio-cultural world we live in.

Knowing how those concepts are linguistically conceptualised and communicated among speakers of the same language on a day-to-day basis is key to understanding the communal dimensions of the lexicons in relation to the expression of the self and and how the shared cultural knowledge shapes the way a member of that cultural group thinks and communicates, and vice versa. In the context of the present research, the contemporary concept of self highlights the process in which social performances and cultural imaginations are highly interactive and mutually constitutive (see Figure 1).

Social performances mia E> Self concept

Cultural imaginations

Figure 1. The contemporary concept of self

The social construction of the self through linguistic practices is a matter of social performance. According to the positioning theory originally outlined by Davies and Harré (1990), the choices that speakers make to position themselves with regard to others constitute emergent identities. These emergent identities account for aspects of the self. They are located in discursive interactions as observably and subjectively coherent positioning acts.

By means of narrating self-worth, needs, social responsibilities, moral principles, and ideals of the good, people situationally produce their own positions and perceive positions that their interlocuters take. Key to such practice is its performative nature with regard to the speaker’s imagination and evaluation of self-perceptions in social interactions. The self we speak about, therefore, indirectly indexes who we think we have been and who we want to be in the eyes of others.

While self-understandings are unique to the individual, they nonetheless reflect the broader cultural background of that individual. With regard to the aforementioned social act of speaking of oneself, the linguistic practice of relating oneself to others tells many personal stories. The manners in which these stories are told

Chapter 1. Migrating the Chinese self and the values they transmit are subject to the ecological, cosmological, social and moral orders permeating the culture in which the individual is nurtured.

Concerning the sense of self that is culturally-situated, the conceptualisation of cultural identities is contingent upon the social positioning of self and other in relation to forming cultural imaginations, which is highly relative and context-dependent. In cross-cultural comparisons, the positioning of one another as “imagined” members of larger cultural collectives is a way to consolidate perspectives and viewpoints that are seen as unique to certain cultural groups or a method for rationalising differences and even misunderstandings in the cross-cultural context.

Modern psychological and anthropological studies go even further in saying that the self forms an integral part of a cultural system (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Marsella, De Vos, Hsii, & others, 1985; Shweder & Bourne, 1982; Triandis, 1989). The cultural experience of the self may include naming different cultural groups and discussing their collective features. ‘These linguistic interactions reveal how individuals imagine their place within the cultural group with which they identify. The socio-cultural categories that arise from these activities provide researchers with a window into the mental models of a culture’s members.

Among the contemporary Chinese immigrants there remains a strong causal assumption about how selfhood develops out of nationhood. A number of participants indicate that they see themselves as not only responsible for their individual image, but also for a collective image, the image of China. The cultural imagination of what it means to be Chinese is inseparable from their sense of self. The convergence can be traced back to the classic view of personhood in the Confucian school of thought. Other examples of present-day cultural thinking showing an intimate relationship between individuality and being Chinese can also be said to reflect the legacy of the conceptions of Chinese selfhood in late Qing and early Republican China.

As for how Chinese people perceive themselves and what cognitive models they rely on for conceptualising collective identities, the answer can be found in the way they use the Chinese language when talking about themselves. ‘This is the point of departure for this book. This insight paves the way for understanding how Chinese think about themselves and what they expect from others. Linguistic features of speaking about oneself in Chinese also provide a rich resource for exploring the cultural meanings of being Chinese in the contemporary world.

1.2 Contemporary Chinese immigrants

The current book is a report on the cross-cultural experience(s) of a group of Chinese immigrants in Australia. The history of Chinese-Australians goes back a long way. Ever since the gold rush in the mid-19th century, waves of immigrants from Mainland China and Southeast Asia have contributed to the ever-growing Chinese communities in Australia.

In the most recent wave, individuals born in China made up the third largest group of overseas-born Australian residents, accounting for 2.2% of Australia’s total population, according to the latest Census data (ABS, 2016). These Chinese immigrants represent a new and growing group of global citizens living in a society where multiculturalism and plural understanding of identity is celebrated.

The interviewees of the present study were born and raised in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Some have been studying in Australia with the intention of permanently staying there. Others have lived in in the world’s sixth largest country for several years upon receiving tertiary education and have entered its labour force. These young professionals are likely to contribute massively to the social landscape of contemporary Australian society in the long run.

As members of the same generation, these participants have a common understanding of China and her history in the twentieth century as a result of the education they received in Mainland China. The responses and comments from these participants contain comtemporary Chinese ways of viewing personhood. The term “Chinese” embraces a global perspective in the present study. It is a constellation of cultures that emerge from the interaction among these interviewed Chinese immigrants in Australia, the interpretation of which contributes to the plurality of Chinese cultures in the global sense. The analysis will be carried out by detailing the Mandarin Chinese lexical system of individuality and collective identity.

In recent studies of cross-cultural adaptation, theorists start to view the cultural transition among immigrants as an open-ended process. The impact of their home culture may continue to shape their way of life in the new cultural environment. Aspects of the home culture can also exert an influence on their accommodation of new experiences. The interaction among immigrants and with people from other geographic or linguistic backgrounds helps them accommodate more diversified views than they would have received prior to migration as well as repackaging their beliefs and convictions shaped by their past experiences.

The reported group of Chinese immigrants has not been studied systematically. The central theme of the present book is thus to gain a deeper understanding of the younger Chinese generation born in China after the country adopted the Reform

Chapter 1. Migrating the Chinese self and Opening-Up policy.’ The formal education they received in Mainland China was still heavily advocating nationalism and the communist ideology. However, they also grew up in times when drastic social and economic reforms were taking place in the country.

The contemporary globalised world has made it possible for the current generation of young Chinese immigrants to constrast and identify with a variety of cultural collectives. They have had a distinctive material, cultural and political experience that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations could not have had. The demography and the historical background of the participants forms the socio-cultural context for a descriptive interpretation of the stylistic way they speak and talk about themselves. Conceptualisations and reconceptualisations of enduring and emerging cultural beliefs all carry profound socio-cultural implications.

1.3 The discourse of contemporary Chinese identity

Theorists and researchers with an interest in cross-cultural differences have often argued that members of different cultures and in different historical periods have diverging beliefs or ideas about the nature of personhood. In this spirit, a variety of empirical studies contrasted the self in Chinese and other Eastern cultures to the Western conception and proposed revisions to the existing Western theories to accommodate cross-cultural differences (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Marsella et. al, 1985; Shweder & Bourne, 1982; Triandis, 1989).

The difference between Western and Asian models can be traced back to indigenous Chinese schools of thinking, such as Confucianism, one of the dominant ideologies in Chinese imperial societies. Confucius’s teachings, therefore, have become an important resource for interpreting the Chinese personhood. For example, the Confucian moral principle of interdependence as a result of fulfilling role obligations can be said to influence Chinese people’s inclination to be socially dependent on one another.

Whether the Chinese self is purely reactive to role expectations or individually autonomous has been the subject of a great deal of debate. Anthropologists Fei Xiaotong and Francis L. K. Hsü embraced a psycho-cultural perspective and depicted features of Chinese social networks in the form of a continuous field of concentric layers. According to Fei, the Chinese self is bound to others in a social

1. The second generation of the central leadership of the Communist Party of China, led by Deng Xiaoping, started the implementation of a series of political and socio-economic reforms in 1978 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

network. The extent of intimacy with another person is reflected by the relative position of that other person within the concentric circles of one’s psychological field (Fei, 1948, pp. 24-27). Similarly, Hsü argued that the Asian conceptualisation of the individual removes the individual from the centre of the world and recognises that the individual is embedded in a social network (Hsii, 1971). Hsü believes that Chinese people’s inclination to be socially and psychologically dependent on one another is influenced by Confucian moral principles.

Although the participants of the present study may not explicitly discuss their understandings of influential premodern Chinese schools of thought, such as Confucianism and Daoism, their statements about how they perceive themselves as Chinese, how they view other Chinese people, and how they see themselves in relation to non-Chinese people, all indicate some socially-constructed norms and ideals of what it means to be a good person. However, a narrow interpretation that places the focus on the continuation of traditional Chinese thinking suffers the drawback of being culturally essentialist. The idea of self-awareness in the Chinese context is open to numerous interpretations.

From a constructivist perspective, Western notions, such as individuality and national identity, since entering the modern Chinese vocabulary in the early twentieth century, have gone through waves of vernacularisation in which indigenous Chinese notions always play a large role. A number of Chinese terms related to the conception of the self, such as guomin ‘national people’, geren zhuyi ‘individualism’ and guominxing ‘national character’ embody the discourse of nation-building in which some premodern ideas have been visited by some influential intellectuals in modern China. Key attributes of the self found in their writings are never short of re-interpretation and re-imagination of some “old” values.

Notions from traditional Chinese literature about selfhood along with many other premodern ideas of a person prescribe the appropriate types of social roles people ought to play in an ideal society. Such assumption continue to influence the Chinese discourse of individuality and collectivity, particularly in the twentieth century where new senses of Chinese self were discussed to produce new cultural meanings. To this day, interpretations of traditional Chinese concepts have still never ceased to spark a great deal of discussions on the making of an idealised Chinese identity.

The discourse of nationalism and individualism in modern China has also informed a rich socio-political context for the interpretation of the cultural influences on participants’ stylistic way of speaking and talking about themselves. When unpacking the cultural meanings of self-related descriptions in the modern Chinese language, one needs to consider the underpinning nationalistic and ideological context which could well be shaping the ways in which participants in this study construct facets of the self.

Chapter 1. Migrating the Chinese self

Some nationalistic ideas have become a shared cultural resource on which Chinese speakers draw in self-expression and might also have influenced the assumptions that the present cohort holds. We cannot gain a full understanding of the types of statements made by the participants in this project without exploring the meanings of these notions with reference to their first uses in the historical context of modern China.

In any case, it is clear that premodern Chinese teachings on interpersonal relationships continue to be relevant to the study of contemporary Chinese people’s social experience of the self. The nationalistic and ideological context of modern Chinese discourse on the self and the society is also pertinent to the discussion. The Chinese immigrants are likely to have internalised the official narrative of nation-strengthening as part of their overall perceptions of being a Chinese person in the global world.

Society has witnessed a profusion of alternative modes of thinking. Awareness of these many viewpoints enables scholars to investigate many alternative realities, including different culturally oriented conceptualisation models of personhood. As explained previously, this book explores how the self is conceptualised in Chinese through the discursive interaction among a group of Mainland-born Chinese people. The aim is not to compare them to other groups of people in terms of their cultural characteristics and cognitive patterns, nor is it to generalise their perceptions of different cultural norms and behaviours.

Instead, the interplay of Chinese conceptions of personhood and Western theories of individuality has been presented here as an example to show the complexity that one must overcome while interpreting the cultural meanings of the self. The formulation of an interdisciplinary framework is essential to overcoming the complexity. The interdisciplinary approach also has the benefit of broadening the discussion by exploring the construction and negotiation of social identities in the cross-cultural context. This will be elaborated on in the remaining chapters by marking out the methodological significance and contribution this book is making in the related areas of study.

1.4 An overview of the present research

Drawing on the latest developments in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics and the newly developed Cultural Linguistics, the ways self and other are conceptualised in the social space offers philosophical insights for gaining a better understanding of the interplay of how individuals perceive themselves as having an identity vis-avis others and how they construct relationships and group belonging with other individuals through imagination.

While the interviewed participants discuss their lives as immigrants, their views on migration, individuality, and collective identity emerge as reoccurring themes, which they treat as key cultural assets. Their evaluations and discussions of being Chinese serve as the primary target for investigation. The participants’ narrative accounts of being an individual, evaluative remarks concerning collective identity and their use of embodied metaphors for the inner self, have been analysed discursively and conceptually. These utterances show how speakers discursively perform their social identities with shifting perspectives and how they employ numerous symbolic and pragmatic strategies to display and claim various interpersonal relationships. They also depict the speakers’ inner being, their interpersonal proximity and their imagined positions within relationships and groups.

The present research discusses the idea of becoming oneself as a matter of social performance. Situated in the contemporary Chinese diaspora discourse, Chapters 2 to 4 explore the performative aspect of migrant talk. Chapter 2 introduces methods for the analysis of identifiers for enacting a self-image in discourse, laying the groundwork for a qualitative analysis of the implications of nuances of many variations. Self-references, naming Chinese socio-cultural groups and utterances that are evaluative or reflective of the typicality of being who they are form part and parcel of Chinese ethnicity.

Speaking of oneself also reflects the speaker’s understanding of some enduring socio-cultural values. Responses and comments from these participants that contain references to collective identities or membership in Chinese socio-cultural communities reflect the cultural ways of viewing personhood in contemporary China. Analytical perspectives from sociolinguistics help break down the value-laden statements provided by the participants and determine their pragmatic as well as moral implications.

Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 focus on utterances that reflect descriptions of individuality, interpersonal relationships and discussions about social collectives, and uncover social constructions of the self among contemporary Chinese which are deeply embedded in their language use. These two chapters will interpret how some premodern ideas and values, and the re-imagination of them in the nation-building discourse in modern China have carried over into the language of contemporary Chinese immigrants. These ideas are a shared cultural resource on which Chinese speakers draw for self-expression in their social interactions. Speakers negotiate a number of normative presuppositions with their audience in order to enact a favourable self-image and to establish a sense of correctness. In the meantime, they also project their own creation of meanings onto some imagined cultural collectives.

The current book also tests out the general belief that a person’s navigation in the world is built upon a cognitive anchor by addressing the cognitive basis for the

Chapter 1. Migrating the Chinese self conceptualisation of the self and the construction of identities with regard to the cognitive strategies of the speaker. Chapter 5 analyse the ways in which speakers conceptualise individuality, internal causation and interpersonal proximity. Lexical concepts, in this regard, reveals the speakers’ perceptual cognition.

Chapter 6 explores the Chinese embodied conceptualisation of the self. Cultural Linguistic research promotes the idea that a person’s embodied conceptual anchor is conditioned by cultural contingencies. The cultural system that underlies a particular language should be studied in terms of its cultural context (Yu, 2007b, p. 77). The analysis presented in this chapter targets cultural conventions in the designated cognitive patterns in the Chinese language with numerous embodied descriptions of inner self or internal causation.

Chapter 7 departs from the Chinese speakers’ process of narrating themselves and arrives at how they create and exchange symbolic information in discursive practices. In the process of communicating to their intended audience to whom aspects of an idealised migrant identity are projected, speakers draw on and exercise various normative presuppositions and cultural ethos, simultaneously perceiving, re-enacting and negotiating their conceptualisations of a migrant identity. The analysis is an attempt to capture the intertwining relationship between linguistic, conceptual and cultural knowledge in the conceptualisation of social identity.

Chapter 8 summarises the integration of cognitive linguistic and sociolinguistic analytical methods as the type of research that adds a social dimension to the cognitive enterprise. This socio-cognitive discourse approach towards interpreting the cognitive patterns of the self in Chinese extends the cognitive paradigm into the nuances of social interaction.

CHAPTER 2 Self-referential pronouns in Mandarin Chinese

In Chinese interactions, conversational parties presume the existence of a social protocol that maintains face, or harmony, and acts in such a way as to protect its integrity. This chapter introduces how the examination of the participants’ referential pronoun can provide a salient window into the relational aspects of selfhood that arise in social interactions in relation to the communication demands in Chinese culture.

Keywords: self-referential pronouns, discursive functions, social construction

2.1. Pronominal references in Mandarin Chinese

Linguistically speaking, one constructs a sense of self through referring to oneself. The current chapter focuses on self-referential pronouns. Linguists regard personal pronouns as a key discursive feature for they reveal how individuals perceive themselves with respect to others (e.g., Bourdieu, 1992; Grundy & Jiang, 2001; Mühlhäusler & Harré, 1990; Ochs, 1992; Wortham, 1996). The perceived relationship between the speaker and the hearer affects pronominal choice (Brown & Gilman, 1960). Pronominal choices are therefore fleeting interactional moves and are not made randomly.

Chinese self-referential pronouns include the singular form wo ‘T and the plural form women ‘we’ along with other inclusive or exclusive referential terms. Self-references that the participants used while talking about their experiences as Chinese immigrants in Australia are signals of representing the self in front of one another. Figure 2 illustrates the analytical framework for examining these self-references in the context of the present study.

The analysis of these self-referential pronouns first considers their positioning impact as pronominal references in conversations. In front of old and new acquaintances, each speaker makes choices between the singular and plural person references to strategically include or exclude the hearer or other non-present parties.

The Chinese collective self-referential pronoun women ‘we’ is found to denote the speaker as a member of a specified group, or as someone who is more generally

Self-references Social context

Narrating self in Chinese diaspora discourse

Chinese ethnicity

Figure 2. Narrating the self in the Chinese diaspora discourse aligned with some unspecified individual or group. Speaker are also found to use second person singular pronoun ni ‘you’ in lieu of first person pronouns. In this case, ni ‘you or ‘one’ is often used as an indefinite personal pronoun which can facilitate the speaker to speak through the consciousness of others (Xiang, 2003, p. 500).

As introduced in Chapter 1, the data is based on focus group discussions among Chinese immigrants. Five groups of participants were asked to talk about their life experiences in Australia. Most of the participants did not know each other before the focus group discussion took place. It then became interesting to observe how they made themselves known to each other through revealing what they thought as the correct ways of being a Chinese individual.

The study also looks for concepts and ideas that might have shaped the participants’ stylistic ways of narrating the self in the diaspora discourse in relation to its social context. The current study places its focus on the participants’ cross-cultural experience which is a very unique circumstance itself because of the exposure to various cultural constructs. Impact of migration can be found in references to Chinese-based social groups and evaluations of their characteristics, positively or negatively. These evaluations form part and parcel of their Chinese ethnicity.

Using personal pronouns to refer to oneself is also intimately linked to identity construction, thereby contributing to identity negotiation and to the construction of a social reality in social situations (Mühlhäusler & Harré, 1990). Using collective self-reference signalling allegiances to multiple collective identities, speakers can either include their interlocutors in these allegiances to shorten the distance with their interlocutors or exclude them by identifying with imagined co-present others thereby adding distance to their interlocutors.