Elaine Chun

Assistant Professor

Office: 201 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2014
chune@mailbox.sc.edu

Education

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, Linguistics, 2007
B.A., Stanford University, Linguistics, 1995

Specialization Areas

• sociolinguistics
• stylization
• crossing
• code-switching
• speech play
• language and identity in Asian American and multiethnic communities
• ideologies of race, nation, class, and gender in the U.S.
• discourse analysis
• ethnography

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• ENGL 455/LING 440: Language in Society
  
• LING 740: Introduction to Sociolinguistics
  

Current Research Project(s)

My research addresses the sociocultural meanings that speakers achieve when they employ linguistic styles in everyday interaction. I am interested in the kinds of social identities that speakers construct through their ‘styling’ practices, the cultural functions these practices serve, and the ways that we—as community members and researchers—know, learn, circulate, and negotiate the sociocultural meanings of styles. I have found these issues to be productively explored in multiethnic youth communities, where I have focused on the construction of Asian American identities in relation to other kinds of social identities. My work has primarily relied on methods of discourse analysis to examine meanings as they emerge within and across interactional moments, while also drawing on ethnographic techniques of studying local cultural practices as they pertain to ideologies of race, nation, gender, and class.

In my dissertation, I focused on the specific practice of stylized mocking, through which speakers performed linguistic parodies of stereotypical styles associated with Asian immigrants and white preps. Based on fifteen months of daily participant observation and the analysis of recorded conversations, I found stylized Asian mocking to articulate with images of Asians as linguistically incompetent, comically incomprehensible, and rudely aggressive. On the other hand, stylized prep mocking lay at the ideological intersection of whiteness, class privilege, and femininity and recalled characteristics that non-prep girls constructed as simultaneously desirable and undesirable. Importantly, neither of these styles depended on a set of ‘essential features’ as stylers drew on a flexible variety of linguistic resources. The analysis of the cultural significance of these practices demonstrated that the specific cultural meanings of practices were only loosely tied to circulating ideologies. For example, students sometimes explicitly contested ideologies of race and national belonging on which stylized Asian mocking practices depended. Additionally, stylized prep mocking served important social functions for girls who used it to construct their identities, display their cultural competence, and socialize one another into local cultural norms. Interestingly, despite the oppositional alignment that stylized mocking involved, girls mocked preps in order to construct their own femininities.

I am currently collaborating with Adrienne Lo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) on a large-scale perceptual and ethnographic study of Asian American language styles in Southern California

Publications

2006. Taking the mike: Performances of everyday identities and ideologies at a U.S. high school. In SALSA XIII: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Symposium about Language and Society—Austin, Er-Xin Lee, Kris M. Markman, Vivian Newdick, and Tomoko Sakuma eds. Pp. 39-49. Austin: Department of Linguistics, University of Texas

2004. Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho’s revoicings of mock Asian. Pragmatics, 14 (2/3): 263-289

2004. Co-edited with Wai Fong Chiang, Laura Mahalingappa and Siri Mehus. SALSA XI: Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Symposium about Language and Society—Austin. Austin, TX: Department of Linguistics, University of Texas

2001. The construction of white, black, and Korean American identities through African American Vernacular English. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11(1): 52-64

2000. Talking about whitey: The construction of Korean American male identities. In SALSA 7: Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Symposium about Language and Society—Austin, Anastasia Coles, Amanda Doran, and Nisha Merchant Goss, eds. Pp. 15-27. Austin: University of Texas, Department of Linguistics