Immigrant narratives and hybrid identities

As one of the primary means for identity construction (see DE FINA, 2015), narrative has recently been examined in relation to immigrant and refugee movements. Having at our disposal elicited, written autobiographical narratives of immigrant students living in Greece, we investigate the identities they construct therein. Our sample consists of 118 essays collected from 8 different lyceums situated in different parts of the Peloponnese, Greece. The students who wrote the essays were bilingual immigrants of various origins (mostly from Albania). The broader theoretical framework of our study is that of Critical Discourse Analysis. One of the most important research issues within Critical Discourse Analysis concerns the investigation of the relationship between the macro-level of dominant discourses and the micro-level of the individual (in the present case, narrative) positionings towards dominant discourses (see VAN DIJK, 2008). For the analysis of the narrative positionings of the immigrant students we employ the model of three dilemmas proposed by Bamberg (2011) in combination with the concept of face threat (BROWN and LEVINSON, 1987). The analysis shows that the decision of some immigrant students to reveal their victimization, due to racist behaviors by majority people, constitutes a threat against the collective face of majority people. We support the claim that these immigrant students position themselves in a complex manner towards the national, xenophobic and homogenizing discourse by projecting themselves as victims and victimizers simultaneously, and thus constructing hybrid resistance identities

From the illegal migrant-criminal to the illegal migrant-invader: Critical analysis of the semantic change of the Greek term λαθρομετανάστης 'illegal migrant'

Following a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, the present study reports on the analysis of 49 texts from the Hellenic Parliament Proceedings, where the term λαθρομετανάστης “illegal migrant” is used. The texts under scrutiny date back to 2015 (i. e., the year the migration crisis reached its peak) and reveal the recontextualized use of this term, which is identified with the hegemonic national-racist discourse of the 1990s perceiving migrants as criminals. Since the 1990s, the term has been stigmatized by political correctness as racist and inaccurate. We consider political correctness as a type of corrective practice, since it detects naturalized language uses reproducing stereotypes and power relationships. We will examine how the re-emergence of the older, racist use of the term in question as a reaction against the guidelines of political correctness is anew connected with national-xenophobic discourse and, in particular, with framing migrants as invaders and a national threat. Overall, tracing the semantic trajectory of the term λαθρομετανάστης “illegal migrant” allows us to explore how language use at the micro-level is dialectically connected with discourses at the macro-level

Sociolinguistic Features for Author Gender Identification: From Qualitative Evidence to Quantitative Analysis

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Quantitative Linguistics on 7 October 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09296174.2016.1226430. The Accepted Manuscript is under embargo. Embargo end date: 7 April 2018.Theoretical and empirical studies prove the strong relationship between social factors and the individual linguistic attitudes. Different social categories, such as gender, age, education, profession and social status, are strongly related with the linguistic diversity of people’s everyday spoken and written interaction. In this paper, sociolinguistic studies addressed to gender differentiation are overviewed in order to identify how various linguistic characteristics differ between women and men. Thereafter, it is examined if and how these qualitative features can become quantitative metrics for the task of gender identification from texts on web blogs. The evaluation results showed that the “syntactic complexity”, the “tag questions”, the “period length”, the “adjectives” and the “vocabulary richness” characteristics seem to be significantly distinctive with respect to the author’s gender.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio