Mie Hiramoto - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Mie Hiramoto

Social Semiotics, May 18, 2020

This study investigates voluntourism activity directed by a local university in Singapore. The ph... more This study investigates voluntourism activity directed by a local university in Singapore. The phenomenological experience of participating in voluntourism is captured in the form of reflective Ins...

World Englishes

This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a ... more This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organizing CoSEM and describes the corpus's initial structure and composition. We further discuss the social variables used in tagging the data, as well as ethical challenges, advantages, and disadvantages unique to online message datasets. In addition, we present preliminary analyses of two selected CSE features: (1) the Hokkien‐derived expression (bo)jio and (2) sentence‐final adverbs (already, also, only). As CoSEM is an ongoing project, we conclude the article with notes on future directions.

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

This study investigates changes in Tōhoku dialect speakers’ phonology after their immigration to ... more This study investigates changes in Tōhoku dialect speakers’ phonology after their immigration to Hawaii, specifically concerning intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers. Tōhoku dialect is known for its unique phonology compared to other Japanese dialects and, for this reason, it is often stigmatized. Previous studies of second dialect acquisition have suggested that older speakers tend to retain the phonological features of their original dialects during dialect contact situations. The results from adult Japanese plantation immigrants, as expected, suggested that adult Tōhoku dialect speakers demonstrated limitations in acquiring second dialect phonology in their contact with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers. However, there are different degrees of second dialect acquisition between the intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers among the Tōhoku dialect immigrants who interacted with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers on a daily basis and those who did not; namely, the former e...

Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics

English Today

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Si... more Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of world Englishes (e.g., Greenbaum, 1988; Richards & Tay, 1977). Linguistically, the grammar and lexicon of CSE are systematically imported from other non-English languages used in the island nation (Leimgruber, 2011). From a creolist perspective, it can be viewed as an English-lexifier creole that contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Malay, Tamil and other varieties in the Singapore language ecology (McWhorter, 2007; Platt, 1975). Several distinct features across various levels of language...

Pinkdot is Singapore’s annual LGBTQ pride event with over 10 years of history. Over the course of... more Pinkdot is Singapore’s annual LGBTQ pride event with over 10 years of history. Over the course of its operations, it has successfully made visible and raised awareness for LGBTQ people and their sociopolitical rights. However, there has always been dissident opinions against the LGBTQ community from political and/or religious parties. One of them is a newly established Christian ministry, TrueLove. While Pinkdot’s mission is to call for greater inclusivity of LGBTQ individuals by accepting non-heteronormative love, TrueLove focuses on relabelling gay, lesbian, and bisexual people as struggling with same sex attraction, and coaxing them towards a more godly life that does not include pursuing their homosexual desires. We have been investigating how these two opposing groups try to reason their views in discourses of love in their websites and promotional materials such as videos, blog posts, and campaign posters. The two parties are similar in how their websites are well maintained with content regarding sexuality and love, e.g., For family, for friends, for love (Pinkdot) and True love never gives up (TrueLove). Although they position the idea of love in a similar manner by appealing to their audiences’ affects, their agendas are completely polarized. As a result, these materials function as the center of multiple public debates on politics, religion, and sexuality. We employ Peterson’s (2016) approach to homophobic discourse analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics as well as Goffman’s (1974) work on frame analysis as methodological tools to investigate the ideologies that accompany the two organizations’ multimodal materials about treatment of queer Singaporeans. As part of a larger study, this presentation shows a comparative study on both organizations’ discourses of love found in their promotional videos to understand how love and desire is linguistically constructed. Two individuals with a strikingly similar background, Pauline (Pinkdot 2016) and Tryphena (TrueLove 2019), were selected for analysis. Both are pastors and have identified as a lesbian woman; they talk about their experiences regarding homosexuality, love, and desire. Nonetheless, the findings show that the fundamental definition of love that they use to justify their positions towards homosexuality is nuanced in their presentations

The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, 2019

This chapter outlines the benefits of a linguistic landscape studies approach for the broader stu... more This chapter outlines the benefits of a linguistic landscape studies approach for the broader study of language and sexuality. Chinese martial arts films, often described as highly masculine and dominated by male heroes and male characters, are a rich site for the analysis of the social construction of gender and sexuality, particularly in the way they portray an idealized male dominance through Confucian ideologies. These films are thus viewed as a legitimate space, albeit fictional and mediatized, for the application of a linguistic landscape perspective. Based on samples of over 200 films, the analysis argues that features in the linguistic landscapes of these films—among them referential names of landmarks and material constructions of settings and costumes—semiotically mark the gender and sexuality of the martial arts practitioner characters. Most notably, the linguistic landscapes in these films glorify celibacy—or controlled asexuality—as an ideal practice that goes along wit...

International Journal of TESOL Studies, 2021

Workshop 6: Synchronic transfers in Colloquial Singapore English: Case studies based on text mess... more Workshop 6: Synchronic transfers in Colloquial Singapore English: Case studies based on text message data

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique

Gender and Language

Acknowledgements This special issue presents articles based on presentations at the Sociolingui... more Acknowledgements This special issue presents articles based on presentations at the Sociolinguistics of Globalization conference that was held in Hong Kong in June of 2015. The conference was hosted by the Department of English at the University of Hong Kong. We thank the conference participants for useful feedback. Our sincere thanks also go to Tommaso Milani and Michelle Lazar for their invaluable assistance.

The Japanese word kawaii means ‘cute’, ‘lovable’ or ‘adorable’ and is used to express the quality... more The Japanese word kawaii means ‘cute’, ‘lovable’ or ‘adorable’ and is used to express the quality of cuteness or kawaii aesthetics in the general context of Japanese culture. This concept has become prominent in many aspects of Japanese modern culture, including clothing, personal appearance, food, toys, behaviour and mannerisms. While entities culturally characterized as kawaii are considered adorable and delicate, they also tend to appeal to people’s deep inward affections in a visceral manner. Scholarly discussions of kawaii have tended to focus on speciﬁc entities like commodiﬁed objects or school children, and these target entities are treated as relatively isolable units that happen to be imbued with kawaii attributes. Concomitantly, this also means that the question of how kawaii entities or other features associated with kawaii aesthetics might be integrated into the broader sociocultural environment has tended to remain relatively underexplored. Drawing attention to kawaii as a key component of Japanese material culture, this paper investigates selected kawaii data taken from banal civic signs in Tokyo’s semiotic landscapes. We then analyse the role of kawaii in matters traditionally not associated with kawaii through the lens of affection and viscerality.

The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology

Language Standardisation and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts

Gendered speech in contemporary standard Japanese has been well-researched (e.g., Ide 1982; Okamo... more Gendered speech in contemporary standard Japanese has been well-researched (e.g., Ide 1982; Okamoto 1995a; McGloin 1990; Reynolds 1985; Shibamoto 1985). Studies of Japanese gendered speech reveal that women and men differ in their use of interactional particles, pronouns, lexical items,