Abstract
In this dissertation, I analyse the select social media posts and the related metapragmatic comments to examine how Hong Kong social media users make sense of the heteroglossia of Cantonese and negotiate their related identities in different Hong Kong contexts of online communication. Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated how identities can be negotiated through language use. I add to this scholarship by focusing on how social media users’ identities are negotiated in relation to their access to and (perceived) understanding of heteroglossic online language use. To reveal the complex meaning-making processes of these posts, as well as social media users’ unequal access to these posts which influences their negotiation of identities, I use a scalar-chronotopic approach which allows me to illustrate how social media users make sense of heteroglossic language use through their unequal access to diverse differently scaled timespaces of Hong Kong.In this work, I draw on a variety of online data that concern three empirical cases, namely the Hong Kong government campaigns on environmental hygiene and protection, the advertising of a local noodle chain called “TamJai”, and the protest movement opposing the Extradition Law Amendment Bill in Hong Kong. Data such as memes, online forum discussions, video ads, and their related comments were collected from different social media platforms that are popular among Hongkongers. Although scholars have independently studied language use in the government, commercial, and protest sectors within the Hong Kong context, these empirical cases are not typically theorised in relation to one another. By studying the three cases in tandem, I show how similar processes through which social media users make sense of heteroglossic online communication and the related identity construction and perception are at work. The data are analysed through a scalar-chronotopic framework supplemented by multimodal discourse analysis and my emic perspectives.
In Chapter 5, I first examine how the government departments make use of heteroglossic memes on Facebook in a humorous way to establish its authoritative voice. Then the analysis of the metapragmatic comments will show that social media users’ variations in accessing the jokes embedded in the memes can be observed due to their unequal access to the related local timespaces of Hong Kong. Such an unequal access also has an impact on their acts and processes of identification of self and other. In Chapter 6, I investigate a mock variety of Cantonese used in a commercial for the local noodle shop “TamJai” which was mainly diffused through social media. I show how Facebook users demonstrate their different access to this heteroglossia in the comments by orienting to particular timespaces that are salient to them, and how their different orientations to particular timespaces have influence on their uptakes of the video, their implicit identity performance of oneself as well as the identity perception of others. In Chapter 7, I focus on forum users’ discussions about the use of “ Loose Cantonese Romanisation” (LCR) on the local online forum LIHKG during the protest in 2019 in Hong Kong. I first showcase how forum users construct an ingroup-outgroup boundary within the timespaces of the protest based on the question of accessibility of LCR. However, such an ingroup boundary is further destabilised when the question of having access to LCR becomes less salient than other factors such as political stances within the timespaces of the protest.
This dissertation contributes to conceptualising the relationship between language and identity, that Hong Kong identities can be constructed or perceived not only through language use, but also through how people understand the complex meaning-making in heteroglossic language use on the basis of some local timespaces that are shared among Hongkongers. This research also engages in advancing the debates over the question of language discreteness and boundaries by employing a less language-centred approach and foregrounding the contexts in terms of the interconnectivity of time and space (i.e. chronotope). Furthermore, by adopting an inclusive overarching framework like heteroglossia, I follow other scholars in contributing to a complex conceptualisation of the diversity of language use in Hong Kong.
| Date of Award | 14 Feb 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Lydia Hwa-Che Medill CATEDRAL (Supervisor), Yuet Hung Cecilia CHAN (Co-supervisor) & Farzad Karimzad (External Co-Supervisor) |
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