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

Telling the collective story? Moroccan-Dutch young adults’ negotiation of a collective identity through storytelling

Researchers taking a social constructionist perspective on identity agree that identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. However, empirical studies in this field are often based on interviewer–interviewee interaction or focus on interactions with members of a socially dominant out-group. How identities are negotiated in interaction with in-group members remains understudied. In this article we use a narrative approach to study identity negotiation among Moroccan-Dutch young adults, who constitute both an ethnic and a religious (Muslim) minority in the Netherlands. Our analysis focuses on the topics that appear in focus group participants’ stories and on participants’ responses to each other’s stories. We find that Moroccan-Dutch young adults collectively narrate their experiences in Dutch society in terms of discrimination and injustice. Firmly grounded in media discourse and popular wisdom, a collective narrative of a disadvantaged minority identity emerges. However, we also find that this identity is not uncontested. We use the concept of second stories to explain how participants negotiate their collective identity by alternating stories in which the collective experience of deprivation is reaffirmed with stories in which challenging or new evaluations of the collective experience are offered. In particular, participants narrate their personal experiences to challenge recurring evaluations of discrimination and injustice. A new collective narrative emerges from this work of joint storytelling

Greek migrant jokes online: A diachronic-comparative study on racist humorous representations

This study adheres to critical humor studies investigating how humor targeting the migrant ‘Other’ may reproduce social inequalities in the form of racist stereotypes. We examine two datasets of online migrant-targeting jokes from two different time periods in Greece. Our first collection of jokes comes from the period 1990–2010, i.e., when Greece, enjoying financial prosperity, received mostly Albanian migrants, while the second one comes from 2014 onwards, i.e., when Greece, facing a severe financial crisis, received mostly Muslim migrants. Our analysis shows that the local sociopolitical context plays a significant role in shaping the ways migrants are humorously represented and targeted: the incongruities identified in the first dataset are different from those of the second. In both cases, however, migrant-targeting jokes seem to reinforce national homogenization by circulating racist stereotypes for migrants in a light-hearted manner and by naturalizing the latter’s marginalization and/or assimilation. © John Benjamins Publishing Compan

Narrative positioning and the construction of situated identities: Evidence from conversations of a group of young people in Greece

The present paper is a study of narrative its relation to the construction of conflicting identities in interaction. The paper is concerned with a group of young Greeks who categorise themselves as members of a particular subculture, but also construct a number of other, often conflicting, identities through the stories they tell in the course of their conversations with two researchers. By focusing on the many narratives these people volunteer to recount to the researchers, the paper aims to delve into narrative positioning and its relation to the plurality of emerging identities in the specific encounters. Particular emphasis is placed on the young people's attempt to delegitimate established figures of power and authority in order to legitimate their own group and present a positive image of themselves. By providing a detailed discussion of identities as constructed in situated discourse, the paper also aims to stress the dynamics of identity construction in context. © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Analyzing conversational data in GTVH terms: A new approach to the issue of identity construction via humor

The central aim of this paper is to apply the General Theory of Verbal Humor (henceforth GTVH; Attardo 2001) to conversational narratives and to integrate it with sociopragmatic approaches. We consider script opposition as a necessary prerequisite for humor and its perlocutionary effect (i.e. eliciting laughter) as a secondary criterion for the characterization of a narrative as humorous. Despite the fact that one of the most common social functions of humor is the construction of solidarity and in-group identity, there is relatively little sociolinguistic research on this issue. Thus, a more particular aim of this paper is to illustrate how humor can be a flexible discourse strategy to construct particular aspects of social identities by focusing on a particular aspect of humor encoded in GTVH terms as the knowledge resource of “target”. It will be shown that, in our conversational data coming from a cohesive group of young Greek males, interlocutors select targets either outside or inside their group and that, while in the first case humor criticizes the “other” behavior, in the latter case it serves as a correction mechanism of in-group behavior in a rather covert manner. In both cases, the target of humor reinforces the already existing bonds among group members, while bringing the evaluative dimension of humor to the surface. It is therefore suggested that the target of humor is an important heuristic tool for describing its social function, revealing how it is exploited by conversationalists to project their shared beliefs and values, i.e. their social identity

Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes

One of Davies' significant contributions to the sociology of humor involves the exploration of the relation between jokes and the social order. He particularly argues that jokes seem to work like a "thermometer" conveying truths for the sociopolitical system. In our study, we aim to analyze jokes related to the migration crisis and circulated online since 2014 following Davies' methodological guidelines. During the past few years, the number of migrants arriving at Greek shores has significantly increased. The prospect of Greece becoming a permanent base for these people has evoked diverse reactions. Migrant jokes seem to be part of Greek majority's response to the migration 'threat' against national sovereignty and linguocultural homogeneity. They (re)produce and perpetuate xenophobia and racism by portraying migrants as 'dangerous invaders' in the Greek territory and as 'culturally inferior' people. Hence, such jokes align with dominant values and standpoints circulating in the Greek public sphere via underscoring the inequality between the Greek majority and migrants and via naturalizing the latter's assimilation to majority norms and values. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2019

'The wolf wakes up inside them, grows werewolf hair and reveals all their bullying': The representation of parliamentary discourse in Greek newspapers

The present paper investigates how journalists create dialogical networks involving parliamentary discourse and newspaper articles via the reproduction of extracts coming from MPs' speeches. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and assuming that news is a value-laden construction of facts through language, a comparative analysis of parliamentary proceedings and related newspaper articles is conducted. The articles collected cover a specific parliamentary debate on a particularly 'hot' issue in Greek society, namely a new bill introducing the interview as part of the procedure for the selection and recruitment of civil servants. The analysis shows that the facts reported seem to be selected not on the basis of their political or legal significance, but on the basis of their unusual consequences on parliamentary procedures. Special emphasis is given to the reconstruction of direct speech in newspaper narratives and to the use of metaphor as a conversational resource employed by MPs and reproduced by journalists in an attempt to attract their readers' interest and arouse their emotions. Rather than informing the public on the actual parliamentary work, journalists mostly aim at creating and/or maintaining solidarity between readers and newspapers of the same political and ideological orientation. © 2009

“It Is Necessary to Try Our Best to Learn the Language”: a Greek Case Study of Internalized Racism in Antiracist Discourse

Greek national discourse promotes linguistic and cultural homogenization within Greek borders often through racism against migrants. Racist homogenizing practices are not always explicit but are quite often “liquid,” namely, covert, ambiguous, and hard to trace. The effective promotion of national homogenization not only naturalizes linguistic and cultural assimilation but may also infiltrate antiracist discourse and eventually lead to migrants’ internalization of racism. Within the framework of critical discourse analysis, we investigate how and why migrants may align themselves with national discourse and internalize discrimination against themselves. To this end, this case study analyzes an article written by a young migrant in Greece and published in a newspaper of leftwing and antiracist orientation. By exploiting the problem-solution pattern and the concept of face, our analysis reveals that the migrant author appears to accept the expectations and impositions of national homogenizing discourse. Concurrently, racism emerges as liquid, since the text expressing the author’s internalized racism is published in an antiracist newspaper. The article reproduces racist standpoints typical of the dominant national discourse in a way (and in a context) that disguises such standpoints and deflects any antiracist criticism potentially raised against them. Thus, the hegemony of Greek national discourse is further reinforced. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V

Liquid racism in the Greek anti-racist campaign #StopMindBorders

This study examines the opaque reproduction of racism in an online, anti-racist campaign officially aiming to denounce hate speech and challenge widespread stereotypes concerning migrants. In particular, we investigate the video clips of the #StopMindBorders campaign launched by the Greek branch of the International Organization for Migration. We specifically concentrate on the liquid racism attested in these video clips, namely a highly ambivalent form of racism encouraged in the mass media and usually hard to detect, as it involves multiple interpretations, some of which may not be assessed as racist (Weaver 2016). The multimodal critical analysis of the representation of migrants reveals that these video clips tacitly promote migrants' linguocultural assimilation as a prerequisite for their acceptance in the host country. In this sense, although the anti-racist campaign under scrutiny attempts to refute discourses of aggression and mainstream stereotypes against migrants, it ends up naturalizing hate speech and reproducing assimilative and monoculturalist ideologies. © John Benjamins Publishing Compan