"Language, globalization, and transnational mobility: Metapragmatic talk by Korean managers at multinational corporations"

This presentation addresses this question by considering the way metapragmatic talk about languages and speakers can attribute meaning to mobility in transnational space. Using data in which South Korean mid-level managers working at multinational corporations in Singapore narrate their experience of transnational work in their interaction with a researcher, it analyzes how the managers accounted for their relatively successful but limited careers in the corporate hierarchy by deploying in the present narrating event speaker images associated with different time-spaces along the managers' trajectory of global work. Based on this, it suggests that metapragmatic talk in interaction occupies a key role in our imagination of transnational mobility, serving as a crucial resource that allows us to make sense of the conditions and constraints for cross-border movement of people in globalization.