Generating better understandings of linguistic dissociation using multiscalar temporal accounts

Linguistic dissociation is “a relatively enduring psychosocial process in which an individual or group distances themselves from a set of linguistic practices already within their repertoire because those practices have come to connote a state of significant intersubjective disharmony, or contrasubjectivity” (Moore, 2023, p. 1152). Generating data to theorise the nature and causes of linguistic dissociation among particular kinds of language users represents a methodological challenge; as intersubjective phenomena, linguistic dissociation and contrasubjectivity emerge across multiple converging, connected temporal scales.

With reference to data generated with two participants from a larger critical realist grounded theory method investigation into the nature and causes of L1 dissociation among some Japanese-English late plurilinguals, I show how I combined two data generation activities with distinct temporal scales—a multimodal timeline through which participants constructed an account of their affective relationship to Japanese over their lifespan and a two-day language use journal—with follow-up interviews to produce different types of data about linguistic dissociation, which in turn made it possible for the participants and me to construct different forms of knowledge about the phenomenon. Further, I contend that we used those knowledges to arrive at better (i.e., more verisimilitudinous) understandings of the nature and causes of the L1 dissociation they had experienced. I finish by sharing methodological implications for applied linguists investing various intersubjective phenomena that shape the linguistic repertoire and reflecting on the limits of my own knowledge of linguistic dissociation.