Holly HK Didi-Ogren, PhD
Assistant Professor of Japanese
Japanese Program Coordinator
Modern Languages Department
Bliss Hall 328
P.O. Box 7718
The College of New Jersey
2000 Pennington Road
Ewing, NJ 08628
email:
ogren@tcnj.edu
TEL: (609)771-2890
FAX: (609)637-5139
site last updated January, 2008
Research interests
My research program investigates gender, politeness and power in rural Japanese women’s language usage, and directly contributes to a growing body of work in linguistics and anthropology that addresses how gender is instantiated, negotiated and molded through its place in a constellation of mutually-operating features, and across utterances in face-to-face interactions. This program addresses how women in a rural Japanese community negotiate role and status through shifts between three sets of linguistic features: 1) social deictic markers (linguistic features that encode particular social relationships) such as desu/-masu and plain verb and adjective endings; 2) gender-neutral and gender-marked linguistic forms; and 3) the standard variety of Japanese and local language varieties (LLV).
I have also been working on a project with colleague Joseph Goebel that examines input in Japanese language education materials.
I am becoming increasingly interested in language and pragmatics, as a means of connecting my work as a linguistic anthropologist and as a teacher of Japanese language to non-native speakers.