Tongzhi, ideologies, and semantic change (China)

Based on interviews, archival research, and participant-observation, this dissertation examines the on-going change in meaning of the Chinese term tongzhi from ‘comrade’ to ‘sexual minorities’ and addresses two central issues in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics: the actuation and the transmission of linguistic change. Emphasizing speakers' agency in semantic change, it focuses on the labeling practices of three social groups in Hong Kong—namely, gay rights activists, other lesbians and gay men, and journalists of Oriental Daily News (the most widely circulated newspaper in Hong Kong). A popular address term in Communist China, tongzhi was appropriated by gay rights activists in Hong Kong in the late 1980s to refer to sexual minorities. This dissertation argues that what underlies a label such as tongzhi is not so much a definition but rather a set of ideologies about the concept that the label denotes. Semantic change often occurs when speakers exploit and rework old ideologies associated with a given label and use the label in novel ways to achieve expressive and social goals. Yet the extent to which semantic change spreads depends on whether the reworked ideologies are compatible with other speakers' ideologies about the same concept. Given the polysemous nature of words and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meanings can never be fixed and can always be contested. Depending on their ideologies, other speakers may attach competing meanings to the same label. Thus, langue, as a system of values and differences, is more of a process than a product, and ideology plays an important role in this process. The struggle over the meaning of tongzhi is a prime example of meaning contestation. Meaning contestation is a process through which speakers occupying different social positions attempt to inscribe their own ideologies to a given linguistic form, so as to legitimize their self-interests. Never solely about language or meaning per se, it often operates at the level of use rather than through explicit discussion. Meaning contestation is a form of power struggle, and semantic variation and change is, in a sense, a product of that power struggle.