The category (Greek) ‘woman’: Some current predicates

Τhis study applies the concept of Membership Categorization Device (MCD), as proposed by Sacks (1992), to the study of authentic data culled from a variety of contexts. It looks for category-bound activities and other related predicates, such as rights, entitlements, obligations, knowledge, attributes and competencies that the (female) incumbents invoke themselves or are imputed to them by other members. The aim is to, hopefully, offer a view on the current categorization of (Greek) femininity, and detect any changes that might have occurred in actual interaction, against the purportedly prevailing gender norms

(Greek) Im/politeness: Predication and evaluation practices

This ethnomethodological study combines CA and MCA to explore the social practices of predicating and evaluating real instances of (non-)linguistic im/politeness, witnessably produced by (Greek) members in a variety of contexts. It locates category-bound predicates that the incumbents themselves invoke or are imputed to them by others, as instances of first-order (im)politeness (Watts 2003) or (im)politeness1 (Eelen 2001). As depositories of common-sense knowledge, MCDs/categories offer a glimpse of the native practices/concepts of im/politeness, but are indexically and occasionedly accomplished by members, consonantly with their mutual accountability and the ‘moral order’ of society (Garfinkel 2002)

The Gender of άνθρωπος: An Excercise in False Generics

Greek has been described as a language which possesses grammatical gender that is a syntactic category which classifies nouns into three classes (masculine/feminine/neuter) for the sole purpose of agreement. As gender assignment is generally believed to be arbitrary, no direct correlation seems to hold between biological gender or sex and grammatical gender, with the exception of animates or more strictly humans since as a rule, males are referred to by masculine nouns and females by feminine nouns. Additionally, nouns marked for masculinity may be used generically, i.e. refer to both males and females, on the ground that the masculine is “semantically unmarked” when referring to persons. This paper looks into the use of “generic” άνθρωπος in real life situations i.e. in addressing and/or referencing real human beings rather than in grammar book representations, with the intent to reveal its true sexual identity which more often than not – in 80% of the cases examined as a matter of fact - bears the mark of maleness and so excludes women from their fair share in humanity

Laughter as an Official Conversational Activity

More than simply being an expression of uncontrollable emotion, laughter appears to be a highly organized conversational activity in that it can constitute a relevant consequential next action which participants - both as producers and recipients of some laughable - methodically construct by employing a number of relevant techniques. As such, it can be the vehicle of affiliative / disaffiliative functions which might also work in intensifying or mitigating ways