Joseph Sung‐yul Park
Biographic Data
| ID | 99665 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joseph Sung‐yul Park |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joseph Sung‐yul |
| FAMILY NAME | Park |
| SIGNATURE | PARK J S Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2903-4813 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 352 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
On the interculturality of Konglish: Language labels, perceiving subjects, and metadiscursive regimes
10.1080/14708477.2025.2518389
Personality as technology of self: MBTI and English language learning in South Korea
This paper considers how a particular understanding of personality, as manifest in the way discourses about personality types are circulated and employed, may serve as a foundation for rationalizing the logic of human capital and its concomitant inequalities. Focusing on the recent popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in South Korea and the way it is adopted in online content offering advice on English language learning, this pape…
Naturalization of Competence – Coloniality, Collusion, and Intersectionality: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguist…
On saying “enough”: Decolonizing subjectivities in English language learning
Foreign language education at the nexus of neoliberalism and coloniality: Subjectivity in South Korean discourses of education reform
This paper discusses how critiquing the convergence of neoliberalism and coloniality can become a crucial juncture for imagining alternatives to neoliberal foreign language education. Neoliberalism and coloniality are both mediated by aspects of subjectivity, which not only obscures their co-dependence, but also naturalizes their logic as they become embedded in dimensions of affect, desire, and morality. Discourses of educational reform that do …
Introduction reframing framing: Interaction and the constitution of culture and society
This special issue revisits the notion of framing based on several recent developments in the fields of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology, particularly the current interest in the notions of stance, style, metalinguistics and language ideology. In doing so, the contributions highlight the importance of framing not only in the management of micro-level interactional practices but also in the reproduction of cultural…
Framing, stance, and affect in Korean metalinguistic discourse
Studies on language and affect have identified displays of emotions and feelings as important means through which speakers negotiate their social relations and cultural positions. Extending the findings of those studies, this paper discusses how affect must be seen as an important building block for framing, a resource that allows participants to construct frames that have specific grounding in identifiable social meaning. I make this point by il…
Why linguistic entrepreneurship
This introduction builds on De Costa et al.’s (2016], [2019) notion of linguistic entrepreneurship, which is defined as “the act of aligning with the moral imperative to strategically exploit language-related resources for enhancing one’s worth in the world” (2016: 696). The four empirical studies and two critical commentaries that constitute this special issue explain the relevance of this construct and explore how it is instantiated in a range …
Figures of personhood: Time, Space, and Affect as Heuristics for Metapragmatic Analysis
Figure of personhood, or set of indexicals that are linked with a performable person type, occupies a key role in contemporary metapragmatic analysis. But how can the concept be operationalized so that it can be used to link metapragmatic analysis to critical investigation of the political processes underlying society? In this paper, I suggest that focusing on how figures of personhood in metapragmatic discourse are organized along dimensions of …
For an international journal in transnational times
Academic journals are a site of tension between the perspective of the transnational and international - between an emphasis on the agency and creativity of linguistic practice that transcends boundaries of nations and languages and a focus on the enduring relations of colonial capitalism that impose bounded and hierarchized order upon our social and linguistic life. Being an international journal in transnational times comes with the challenge o…
Investing in the future: Korean early English education as neoliberal management of youth
This paper examines how entrepreneurial visions of the future contribute to neoliberalism’s appropriation of language learning as a strategy for capital accumulation. Taking as an example South Korea’s heavy investment in children’s English language learning – commonly known as early English education ( yeongeo jogi gyoyuk ) – it discusses how affective conditions of anticipation (Adams, Murphy and Clarke. 2009. Anticipation: Technoscience, life,…
Translating Culture in the Global Workplace: Language, Communication, and Diversity Management
In the highly multicultural workplace of today’s multinational corporations (MNCs), translating across different cultures becomes a crucial issue. But what precisely counts as culture in the global workplace of the MNC? What does it exactly mean to be able to translate across cultures under the regimes of evaluation adopted by MNCs? In this article, I consider these questions through a discussion of the corporate discourse of diversity management…
Translating Culture in Global Times: Dialogues
As a way of concluding this thematic issue, we have created a space for our contributors to read each other’s articles and to reflect on the main theme, i.e. translating culture in global times. We invited their response to four questions that we believe are not only central to the aims of the special issue, but also encourage further dialogues on the role of translation in applied linguistics and translation as mission and practice. ... The cont…
The Politics of Emotions in ELT: Structure of Feeling and Anxiety of Korean English Teachers
Using the notion of structure of feeling by Raymond Williams, this article seeks to illuminate an ideological understanding of Korean English teachers’ anxiety and deep sense of insecurity in English language teaching (ELT). Through a discussion of how their anxiety is grounded deeply within unequal social relations and how they reframe their anxiety through critical reflection on the cultural and ideological bias of their own anxiety, it points …
Digital media communication, intellectual property, and the commodification of language: The discursive construction of fansub work
Focusing on fansubbing, the production of unauthorized subtitles by fans of audiovisual media content, this paper calls for a more serious sociolinguistic analysis of the political economy of digital media communication. It argues that fansubbing’s contentious position within regimes of intellectual property and copyright makes it a useful context for considering the crucial role of language ideology in global capitalism’s expanding reach over co…
Rethinking class in sociolinguistics: Series introduction
Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement
Using the keyword movement, this essay reviews linguistic anthropological research that appeared in 2018 (November 2017 to October 2018) to highlight how linguistic anthropology continues and extends the discipline's traditional focus on the deep embeddedness of language in the dynamism of sociocultural practice. Based on an overview of works on (1) itineraries of people, (2) tensions with the nation-state, (3) shifts in the political economy, (4…
Linguistic entrepreneurship as affective regime: Organizations, audit culture, and second/foreign language education policy
Mediatizing neoliberalism: The discursive construction of education’s ‘future’
This paper discusses how the chronotopic nature of media representations serves as an important site for naturalizing a neoliberal vision of the future. Through an analysis of two media texts—first, the Korean television documentary series Myeonggyeon Manli, and second, a promotional video for a student career center at a Singaporean university—it shows how they both rely on a representation of the future as a time-space that radically breaks fro…
Nation-state, transnationalism, and language
This chapter offers a critical review of the relationship between language, nation-state, and transnationalism, and its implications for the research on migration and language. It begins with an overview of the concepts of nation-state and transnationalism, how they both become crucial issues and sites of tension in the context of globalization. The chapter reviews the issues surrounding the debate on whether and how transnationalism undermines t…
Metapragmatics of mobility
This introduction presents a framework for analyzing the semiotic dimensions of mobility. Drawing upon the notion of pathway (Wortham & Reyes 2015), it examines how mobility is facilitated by semiotic processes that link linguistic emblems with speaker images across time and space (Agha 2007). It focuses on the circulation of discursive forms, facilitated by media technologies and complex patterns of transnational interaction, which ascribe ident…
Transnationalism as interdiscursivity: Korean managers of multinational corporations talking about mobility
This article explores how transnationalism can be understood as an interdiscursive process. By making connections with chronotopes of past places along a transmigrant's trajectory, interdiscursivity allows for the emergence of complex indexical meaning associated with different speakers and different ways of speaking, imbuing the transmigrant's mobility with specific social significance. This article demonstrates this point through an analysis of…
Language Learning as Linguistic Entrepreneurship: Implications for Language Education
Researching language and neoliberalism
This special issue aims to develop a research agenda that brings language to the centre of our inquiry and critique of neoliberalism. Based on empirical case studies from across diverse contexts in Europe, North America, and East Asia, contributors to this special issue address two issues: (1) What can be said about the nature of neoliberalism when we approach it from the perspective of language as social and political process? (2) How does langu…
Language as pure potential
Language occupies a crucial position in neoliberalism, due to the reimagination of language as commodified skill. This paper studies the role of language ideology in this transformation by identifying a particular ideology that facilitates this process, namely the ideology which views language as pure potential. Neoliberalism treats language as a neutral and abstract tool for communication that can convey information in a transparent, unadulterat…
Naturalization of Competence and the Neoliberal Subject: Success Stories of English Language Learning in the Korean Conservative Press
This article analyzes “success stories” of English language learning in the Korean conservative press as tales of neoliberal personhood, locating the stories within South Korea's neoliberal transformation and its concomitant “English frenzy.” In these texts, the semiotic process of leveling—the simultaneous work of erasure and highlighting—naturalizes the successful learner's competence in English by grounding that competence in the subjective, h…
Transnational South Korea as a site for a sociolinguistics of globalization: Markets, timescales, neoliberalism1
This special issue seeks a new direction for the sociolinguistics of globalization in the process of transnationalism, using as a case study new modes of Korean migration that are changing the face of Korean transnationalism, including short-term early study abroad and return migration. Through a discussion of the historical and sociolinguistic context of South Korea, this paper demonstrates how transnational Korea is a relevant site for refining…
Introduction. Public transcripts: Entextualization and linguistic representation in institutional contexts
The articles in this special issue argue that entextualization—the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context and reifying it as a bounded object—is an indispensable mechanism for the construction of institutional authority. More specifically, they demonstrate that one particular mode of entextualization, that involving the inscription of speech into writing, plays an especially important role…
Language as pure potential
Language occupies a crucial position in neoliberalism, due to the reimagination of language as commodified skill. This paper studies the role of language ideology in this transformation by identifying a particular ideology that facilitates this process, namely the ideology which views language as pure potential. Neoliberalism treats language as a neutral and abstract tool for communication that can convey information in a transparent, unadulterat…
Linguistic entrepreneurship as affective regime: Organizations, audit culture, and second/foreign language education policy
Researching language and neoliberalism
This special issue aims to develop a research agenda that brings language to the centre of our inquiry and critique of neoliberalism. Based on empirical case studies from across diverse contexts in Europe, North America, and East Asia, contributors to this special issue address two issues: (1) What can be said about the nature of neoliberalism when we approach it from the perspective of language as social and political process? (2) How does langu…
Metadiscursive regimes of diversity in a multinational corporation
Informed by recent work on the commodification of language and identity, this article offers a critique of the neoliberal corporate discourse of "diversity management," in which the diversity of the workforce is conceived as a resource for maximizing profit. Through a close analysis of the language ideologies deployed in an interaction between three mid-level managers at a multinational corporation and a researcher, this article shows how the dis…
Figures of personhood: Time, Space, and Affect as Heuristics for Metapragmatic Analysis
Figure of personhood, or set of indexicals that are linked with a performable person type, occupies a key role in contemporary metapragmatic analysis. But how can the concept be operationalized so that it can be used to link metapragmatic analysis to critical investigation of the political processes underlying society? In this paper, I suggest that focusing on how figures of personhood in metapragmatic discourse are organized along dimensions of …
Transnationalism as interdiscursivity: Korean managers of multinational corporations talking about mobility
This article explores how transnationalism can be understood as an interdiscursive process. By making connections with chronotopes of past places along a transmigrant's trajectory, interdiscursivity allows for the emergence of complex indexical meaning associated with different speakers and different ways of speaking, imbuing the transmigrant's mobility with specific social significance. This article demonstrates this point through an analysis of…
Metapragmatics of mobility
This introduction presents a framework for analyzing the semiotic dimensions of mobility. Drawing upon the notion of pathway (Wortham & Reyes 2015), it examines how mobility is facilitated by semiotic processes that link linguistic emblems with speaker images across time and space (Agha 2007). It focuses on the circulation of discursive forms, facilitated by media technologies and complex patterns of transnational interaction, which ascribe ident…
Appropriating the language of the other: Performativity in autonomous and unified markets
Mediatizing neoliberalism: The discursive construction of education’s ‘future’
This paper discusses how the chronotopic nature of media representations serves as an important site for naturalizing a neoliberal vision of the future. Through an analysis of two media texts—first, the Korean television documentary series Myeonggyeon Manli, and second, a promotional video for a student career center at a Singaporean university—it shows how they both rely on a representation of the future as a time-space that radically breaks fro…
Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space
Preview this article: Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.1.2.00int-1.gif
Why linguistic entrepreneurship
This introduction builds on De Costa et al.’s (2016], [2019) notion of linguistic entrepreneurship, which is defined as “the act of aligning with the moral imperative to strategically exploit language-related resources for enhancing one’s worth in the world” (2016: 696). The four empirical studies and two critical commentaries that constitute this special issue explain the relevance of this construct and explore how it is instantiated in a range …
Cartographies of language: Making sense of mobility among Korean transmigrants in Singapore
Investing in the future: Korean early English education as neoliberal management of youth
This paper examines how entrepreneurial visions of the future contribute to neoliberalism’s appropriation of language learning as a strategy for capital accumulation. Taking as an example South Korea’s heavy investment in children’s English language learning – commonly known as early English education ( yeongeo jogi gyoyuk ) – it discusses how affective conditions of anticipation (Adams, Murphy and Clarke. 2009. Anticipation: Technoscience, life,…
A practice-based critique of English as a Lingua Franca
This paper identifies several key issues that have emerged through the debate over English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and suggests a practice-based perspective-which treats language not as a fixed system but as an emergent product of speakers' practices-as a guide for reconsidering some fundamental assumptions of the ELF research project. In particular, this paper suggests viewing ELF not as a variety, but as an activity type, where the goal of in…
Stance, style, and vocal mimicry
Two processes of reproducing monolingualism in South Korea
Using the notion of language ideology as a primary tool, this article identifies mono-lingualism as an ideological construct. It demonstrates how language ideologies may reproduce monolingualism by erasing elements of the sociolinguistic field that do not fit with the monolingual vision of a society, a process that has particular significance in the context of globalization, in which the spread of global languages and transnational movement of sp…
On the interculturality of Konglish: Language labels, perceiving subjects, and metadiscursive regimes
10.1080/14708477.2025.2518389
Imagining Self: Diversity of Bilingual Identity Among Students of an Enrichment
In any language education program, there are both commonalities and divergences in the ways in which students negotiate and form their identities. While work on bilingual education has revealed important similarities that students come to share, fewer studies have focused on explaining variation. In this paper, we explore individual differences by considering the unique sets of discourses and everyday lived experiences that surround 3 students at…
Personality as technology of self: MBTI and English language learning in South Korea
This paper considers how a particular understanding of personality, as manifest in the way discourses about personality types are circulated and employed, may serve as a foundation for rationalizing the logic of human capital and its concomitant inequalities. Focusing on the recent popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in South Korea and the way it is adopted in online content offering advice on English language learning, this pape…
Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement
Using the keyword movement, this essay reviews linguistic anthropological research that appeared in 2018 (November 2017 to October 2018) to highlight how linguistic anthropology continues and extends the discipline's traditional focus on the deep embeddedness of language in the dynamism of sociocultural practice. Based on an overview of works on (1) itineraries of people, (2) tensions with the nation-state, (3) shifts in the political economy, (4…
Cognitive and interactional motivations for the intonation unit
While the intonation unit (IU) has been characterized as a cognitive unit in earlier research, recent studies have revealed its interactional aspects as well. Using data from spoken Korean, this study presents evidence which shows that the IU is motivated both cognitively and interactionally, and proposes an interpretation of the IU that incorporates both of these bases, arguing that the IU serves as an interactional resource that speakers and li…
Two processes of reproducing monolingualism in South Korea
Using the notion of language ideology as a primary tool, this article identifies mono-lingualism as an ideological construct. It demonstrates how language ideologies may reproduce monolingualism by erasing elements of the sociolinguistic field that do not fit with the monolingual vision of a society, a process that has particular significance in the context of globalization, in which the spread of global languages and transnational movement of sp…
Appropriating the language of the other: Performativity in autonomous and unified markets
The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea
In South Korea, English is a language of utmost importance, sought with an unprecedented zeal as an indispensable commodity in education, business, popular culture, and national policy. This book investigates how the status of English as a hegemonic language in South Korea is constructed through the mediation of language ideologies in local discourse. Adopting the framework of language ideology and its current developments, it is argued that Engl…
Language ideologies in educational migration: Korean jogi yuhak families in Singapore
The Three Circles Redux: A Market-Theoretic Perspective on World Englishes
While Kachru's Three Circles model of World Englishes (Kachru 1985, 1986; Kachru and Nelson 1996) has been highly influential in highlighting the changing distribution and functions of English, it has also been criticized for its inability to account for the heterogeneity and dynamics of English-using communities, and for perpetuating the very inequalities and dichotomies that it aims to combat. By combining Bourdieu's (1984, 1986, 1990) notion o…
Regimenting languages on Korean television: Subtitles and institutional authority
10.1515/TEXT.2009.029
Introduction. Public transcripts: Entextualization and linguistic representation in institutional contexts
The articles in this special issue argue that entextualization—the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context and reifying it as a bounded object—is an indispensable mechanism for the construction of institutional authority. More specifically, they demonstrate that one particular mode of entextualization, that involving the inscription of speech into writing, plays an especially important role…
Images of “good English” in the Korean conservative press: Three processes of interdiscursivity
In South Korea, English as a symbolic resource frequently mediates relations of class, privilege, and authority, and the Korean media play a significant role in the negotiation of the place and meaning of English in the country. This paper identifies interdiscursivity (Agha and Wortham 2005) as an important semiotic mechanism for this process, and illustrates this through texts of the conservative print media which rationalize the privileges of K…
Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space
Preview this article: Media intertextualities: Semiotic mediation across time and space, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.1.2.00int-1.gif
Naturalization of Competence and the Neoliberal Subject: Success Stories of English Language Learning in the Korean Conservative Press
This article analyzes “success stories” of English language learning in the Korean conservative press as tales of neoliberal personhood, locating the stories within South Korea's neoliberal transformation and its concomitant “English frenzy.” In these texts, the semiotic process of leveling—the simultaneous work of erasure and highlighting—naturalizes the successful learner's competence in English by grounding that competence in the subjective, h…
The promise of English: Linguistic capital and the neoliberal worker in the South Korean job market
English is often assumed to be a key to material success and social inclusion, and this belief commonly works to justify the global dominance of English, glossing over and rationalizing broader social inequalities. This paper extends the discussion of this fallacy of ‘the promise of English’ to the domain of the South Korean job market, where skills in the English language play a major role in determining one's access to white-collar jobs. Since …
A practice-based critique of English as a Lingua Franca
This paper identifies several key issues that have emerged through the debate over English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and suggests a practice-based perspective-which treats language not as a fixed system but as an emergent product of speakers' practices-as a guide for reconsidering some fundamental assumptions of the ELF research project. In particular, this paper suggests viewing ELF not as a variety, but as an activity type, where the goal of in…
Transnational South Korea as a site for a sociolinguistics of globalization: Markets, timescales, neoliberalism1
This special issue seeks a new direction for the sociolinguistics of globalization in the process of transnationalism, using as a case study new modes of Korean migration that are changing the face of Korean transnationalism, including short-term early study abroad and return migration. Through a discussion of the historical and sociolinguistic context of South Korea, this paper demonstrates how transnational Korea is a relevant site for refining…
Linguistic Baptism and the Disintegration of ELF
There is growing recognition that language cannot be seen as a pregiven system that correlates with and simply manifests itself in social context, but as a form of social practice. However, this perspective has not yet made a serious impact on applied linguistic research, where dominant modern ideologies of language that tend to conceive of language as an entity with clear boundaries and autonomous structure still prevail. We argue that this prob…
Stance, style, and vocal mimicry
Metadiscursive regimes of diversity in a multinational corporation
Informed by recent work on the commodification of language and identity, this article offers a critique of the neoliberal corporate discourse of "diversity management," in which the diversity of the workforce is conceived as a resource for maximizing profit. Through a close analysis of the language ideologies deployed in an interaction between three mid-level managers at a multinational corporation and a researcher, this article shows how the dis…
Cartographies of language: Making sense of mobility among Korean transmigrants in Singapore
Imagining Self: Diversity of Bilingual Identity Among Students of an Enrichment
In any language education program, there are both commonalities and divergences in the ways in which students negotiate and form their identities. While work on bilingual education has revealed important similarities that students come to share, fewer studies have focused on explaining variation. In this paper, we explore individual differences by considering the unique sets of discourses and everyday lived experiences that surround 3 students at…
Language Learning as Linguistic Entrepreneurship: Implications for Language Education
Researching language and neoliberalism
This special issue aims to develop a research agenda that brings language to the centre of our inquiry and critique of neoliberalism. Based on empirical case studies from across diverse contexts in Europe, North America, and East Asia, contributors to this special issue address two issues: (1) What can be said about the nature of neoliberalism when we approach it from the perspective of language as social and political process? (2) How does langu…
Language as pure potential
Language occupies a crucial position in neoliberalism, due to the reimagination of language as commodified skill. This paper studies the role of language ideology in this transformation by identifying a particular ideology that facilitates this process, namely the ideology which views language as pure potential. Neoliberalism treats language as a neutral and abstract tool for communication that can convey information in a transparent, unadulterat…
How to get published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics
Nation-state, transnationalism, and language
This chapter offers a critical review of the relationship between language, nation-state, and transnationalism, and its implications for the research on migration and language. It begins with an overview of the concepts of nation-state and transnationalism, how they both become crucial issues and sites of tension in the context of globalization. The chapter reviews the issues surrounding the debate on whether and how transnationalism undermines t…
Metapragmatics of mobility
This introduction presents a framework for analyzing the semiotic dimensions of mobility. Drawing upon the notion of pathway (Wortham & Reyes 2015), it examines how mobility is facilitated by semiotic processes that link linguistic emblems with speaker images across time and space (Agha 2007). It focuses on the circulation of discursive forms, facilitated by media technologies and complex patterns of transnational interaction, which ascribe ident…
Sociology (41 works) · Linguistics (36 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (31 works) · Political science (29 works) · Politics (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works)