Identity and Affiliation: Exploring Chinese Lexicographers’ Communal Identification in the 1970s

Abstract

This paper explores how discursive and language resources were appropriated by bilingual lexicographers to establish solidarity with the powerful linguistic community and to create affiliation with members of their community. Informed by critical discourse studies and systemic functional linguistics, it showcases how Chinese lexicographers in the 1970s, constrained by the social context of the Cultural Revolution, accommodated to the revolutionary group by appropriating the dominant ‘classism’ discourse and ‘revolutionary’ language in their lexicographic text. The appropriation and subsequent linguistic convergence led to a change in the English language and the dictionary as a genre, projected the lexicographers’ revolutionary identities, helped them co-identify with the dominant revolutionary group and saved them from possible political consequences. It is argued that linguistic convergence serves to create affiliation and that identities are patterns of meaning inflected by membership. Additionally, the dictionary is never an instrument neutrally and objectively conveying information, but is a site of ideological struggle.