River-Crabbed Shitizens and Missing Knives: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Trends in Chinese Language Use Online as a Result of Censorship.
In: Applied Linguistics Review, Jg. 6 (2015-03-01), Heft 1, S. 97-120
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Zugriff:
In today's digital age, the online public domain, particularly social networking websites, is the new frontier for the battle between censors and dissidents. This paper examines linguistic trends in the ways in which Chinese web users exploit Chinese phonology, morphology, and orthography to avoid notice by online censors through the lenses of pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. The linguistic transformations can be divided into 1) phonologically derived transformations, e.g. the well known "river crab" (héxiè, ...) in place of the word "harmony" (héxié, ...); 2a) character suggestion (phono-orthographical) e.g. referring to former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (WenJ iabao, ...) as "Teletubby" (tianxiàn baobao, ...) because of the two names' shared character ... (bao); and 2b) character suggestion (morpho-orthographical) e.g. the made-up word ... (mù tián, "eye field") being substituted for ... (zìyóu, "freedom"). Consequently, introducing multiple linguistic transformations, in particular introducing elements of foreign languages and ideograms, drastically increases the level of encoding. This paper presents examples of combination methods, including Chinese-English compound words that connote disparate yet interdependent meanings in multiple languages meanings, as well as the youth culture phenomenon of Martian language, or ... (..., huoxing wén). In characterizing the ways in which web users manipulate Chinese language, this paper aims to demonstrate that these transformation techniques are inherent to the Chinese language as well as a byproduct of the relationship between web users and censors, reflected in the encoded subversive messages heavy reliance on political and cultural references. Thus, interpreting the output strings of subversive messages requires both linguistic knowledge and social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Titel: |
River-Crabbed Shitizens and Missing Knives: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Trends in Chinese Language Use Online as a Result of Censorship.
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Wozniak, Audrey M. |
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Zeitschrift: | Applied Linguistics Review, Jg. 6 (2015-03-01), Heft 1, S. 97-120 |
Veröffentlichung: | 2015 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
ISSN: | 1868-6303 (print) |
DOI: | 10.1515/applirev-2015-0005 |
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