Papers by Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Livre: Analyzing narrative: discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives FINA Anna De, GEORGAKOPOUL... more Livre: Analyzing narrative: discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives FINA Anna De, GEORGAKOPOULOU Alexandra.
Quantified Storytelling, 2020
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Quantified Storytelling, 2020
The chapter explores how quantification is important for storytelling on social media through act... more The chapter explores how quantification is important for storytelling on social media through acts of self-measurement in posts shared by cancer patients. These self-measurements are aimed at positioning the self in a progressive time of hope and at inviting followers to support the patient’s movement towards a cure—and even to keep the teller in sync with the ideal of recovery. This logic of ‘teleological counting’ can be disturbed by various forms of ‘frustrated counting’ when progression is stalled or by the ‘tellability crisis’ occurring when the counting process reaches its goal and the narrative contract between teller and followers must be renegotiated. The chapter concludes that counting practices can be analytically approached as a way of adapting cancer storytelling to the affordances of Instagram.
Linguistics, 1998
... In this case, what is prominent in the relation is not the propositional or logical content b... more ... In this case, what is prominent in the relation is not the propositional or logical content but the perlocutionary effect of the ... Table 4. At the level of clausal positioning, omos exhibits an unmarked place-ment, common to all discourse genres, namely, that of second position, ...
Citation for published version (APA): Georgakopoulou-Nunes, A. (2016). Friendly comments: Interac... more Citation for published version (APA): Georgakopoulou-Nunes, A. (2016). Friendly comments: Interactional displays of alignment on Facebook and YouTube. In Leppänen, S., Kytölä, S. & Westinen, E. (eds.) Discourse and identification: diversity and heterogeneity in social media practices. London: Routledge. In Discourse and identification: diversity and heterogeneity in social media practices. (pp. 178-207)
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2022
This paper explores (re)configurations in new media communication practices, as they relate to th... more This paper explores (re)configurations in new media communication practices, as they relate to the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic. We anchor our reflections onto the notion of 'context', which, following Hanks (2006), we understand as both emergent and embedded. Foregrounding context allows for a probing of any perceptible shifts and (dis)continuities in the entanglements of time, space, technological environments, and language and semiotic choices online.We thereby engage with context from two vantage points, following Georgakopoulou's (2007) practice-based heuristic of contextual analysis, that of 'sites' and 'ways of telling'. With regard to the former, we specifically focus on the online/offline nexus. We attest to a process of increasing blurring of online and offline contexts, which involves the material and physical worlds framing people's online interactions. As we argue, the pandemic reinforces the need to recognize the material and physical in the constitution of context online, by adding the dimension of "compression" (Bolander and Smith 2020). The physical confinement and regulation of bodies and everyday lives during lockdown has impacted online sites, not least because it led to many previously offline activities being compressed into or occurring online instead. This leads to our second major perspective, that of ways of telling. We argue that many of our established, normative communicative practices that were well-suited to pre-pandemic lives in mobility, have changed during the pandemic. These changes are mainly by way of adapting and repurposing existing formats rather than coming up with completely novel ones. Overall, our discussion is partly reflective and partly programmatic, in that we attempt to tease apart some of the ongoing reconfigurations of context, with an eye to trying to understand the effect they are having on where and what we do through discourse online. In this spirit, we also offer suggestions for what we might study as discourse analysts, sociolinguists and scholars interested in new media. We have chosen to include this programmatic perspective, since, judging by previous experience and research on (dis)continuities in language and media (e.g. Herring 2007), it is likely that some of these reconfigurations will 'stick' and become consolidated (cf. 'enregistered'), such that they continue to have an impact on our online encounters with one another, even if and as the global pandemic continues to change.
Narrative Works, 2011
The Centre for Narrative Research was founded at the turn of the millenium. To commemorate its te... more The Centre for Narrative Research was founded at the turn of the millenium. To commemorate its tenth anniversary, we organised an event which took place on November 10, 2010, at the Marx Memorial Library in London. The day had a very flexible format. We began with a few opening words from the three co-directors (Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou) and the Research Fellow (Cigdem Esin) of CNR. This was followed by contributions from six leading narrative scholars (Jens Brockmeier, Michael Erben, ...
Linguistics & Education, 2019
At a time of increased monetization of social media, there is scope and need for critical-linguis... more At a time of increased monetization of social media, there is scope and need for critical-linguistic perspectives to go beyond the focus on users’ linguistic and multi-modal resources. Drawing on the project ‘Life-writing of the moment: The sharing and updating self on social media’ (www.ego-media.org), in this article, I make a case for a corpus-assisted critical perspective which allows the scrutiny of media companies’ design of stories as communication features in their apps. What definitions and views of stories underpin such story-features? What facilities are on offer for posting stories, how are they branded, and why? Who is positioned as an ideal story-creator and audience of those stories and why? I address these questions with reference to the recent story-designing spree on Snapchat and Instagram. The corpus analysis of how stories as an app feature are launched and discussed on online media, incl. keyword analysis and lexical and thematic associations of the term ‘story’, has brought to the fore three mismatches between the marketing rhetoric or branding of stories as a feature and the actual affordances offered for them. These involve tensions and trade-offs between: continuity of self and ephemerality; textuality and visuality; creativity and control for the user vs. pre-selection templates and customization. These mismatches are revealing of a re-designation of key-ingredients of stories, in particular time, memories and audience engagement, so as to suit the apps’ agenda of metricization of users’ lives and their ever closer links with advertising.
Pragmatics, 2009
ABSTRACT Since the early 90s, Greece has witnessed an unprecedented population movement: Members ... more ABSTRACT Since the early 90s, Greece has witnessed an unprecedented population movement: Members of indigenous linguistic minorities have moved from the periphery to urban centres and large numbers of people have moved to Greece, primarily from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This “flow of bodies” (Appadurai 1990) has disrupted the country’s monolingual and monocultural image (even if, in historical terms, this was in itself a construction) and in its place an awareness and sensibility of a multilingual and multicultural society has emerged.
Pragmatics, 2009
... sociolinguistic studies have shown that the picture of language use is a highly complex one i... more ... sociolinguistic studies have shown that the picture of language use is a highly complex one involving processes of tri-glossia involving 'Katharevousa' (Puristic Greek), Standard Modern Greek, and Greek Cypriot (Pavlou 1992 ... 472 Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Katerina Finnis ...
Pragmatics, 2000
ABSTRACT Abstract Based on a case study, this paper explores the interaction between the act of d... more ABSTRACT Abstract Based on a case study, this paper explores the interaction between the act of disagreeing and the contextual parameters of Greek television panel discussions. The analysis of the data reveals that in contrast to previous literature on disagreements in TV interview situations, the disagreements at hand are both (host)-unmediated and rendered less dispreferred by being delayed, indirectly posed, and/or mitigated. The discussion sheds light on the systematic ways in which the above is sequentially achieved so as to suit the parameters of the given context. It is argued that the preference features that accompany disagreements attend to the specialized floor-holding and turn-taking rights as well as to the public occasion of the interactions. As such, they index the participants' management and negotiation of their roles and identities as interviewees, interlocutors, and public speakers. Keywords: Disagreements, Mediated/institutional context, (Dis)preference, Face, Participant roles and identities
Pragmatics, 2000
ABSTRACT Abstract Based on a case study, this paper explores the interaction between the act of d... more ABSTRACT Abstract Based on a case study, this paper explores the interaction between the act of disagreeing and the contextual parameters of Greek television panel discussions. The analysis of the data reveals that in contrast to previous literature on disagreements in TV interview situations, the disagreements at hand are both (host)-unmediated and rendered less dispreferred by being delayed, indirectly posed, and/or mitigated. The discussion sheds light on the systematic ways in which the above is sequentially achieved so as to suit the parameters of the given context. It is argued that the preference features that accompany disagreements attend to the specialized floor-holding and turn-taking rights as well as to the public occasion of the interactions. As such, they index the participants' management and negotiation of their roles and identities as interviewees, interlocutors, and public speakers. Keywords: Disagreements, Mediated/institutional context, (Dis)preference, Face, Participant roles and identities
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 1994
Greek, a little explored discourse type, yet particularly vital and salient in the culture. Using... more Greek, a little explored discourse type, yet particularly vital and salient in the culture. Using as its data a corpus of naturally occurring stories in companies of intimates as well as a corpus of adults' stories for children, the study presents their major evaluative resources. The aim of the discussion is to look into the contextualisation aspects of these resources, that is, to establish interpretive links between the stories' formal choices and their situational and cultural context. At the textual level, it is shown that the category prevailing in the affective component of Greek stories between adults is what will be called the proximal evaluation. This serves the creation of a global performed mode which, contextually speaking, invokes and is shaped by the cultural agenda of functions underlying everyday narrative construction. By contrast, evaluation in stories to children proves to be less internalised, by heavily relying on "markers of intensity" and a specific case of audience-adaptation devices named "schema-driven". The motivations for this choice are traceable to the change of the stories' narrative purposes shaped by their culturally constrained "recipient design". In addition to shedding light on the contextsensitivity of Greek stories' evaluative "grammar", the above findings prove to be immediately relevant to the ways in which the society's continuum of oral-and literate-based discourse practices is shaped. (
Text & Talk - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies, 2000
The point of departure for this special issue is the recent shift within discourse and sociolingu... more The point of departure for this special issue is the recent shift within discourse and sociolinguistic narrative analysis from a long-standing conception of (oral, cf. natural, nonliterary) narrative as a well-defined and delineated genre with an identifiable structure toward the exploration of the multiplicity, fragmentation, and irreducible situatedness of its forms and functions in a wide range of social arenas. We can refer to this shift as a move away from narrative as text (i.e., defined on the basis of textual criteria and primarily studied for its textual make-up) to narrative as practice within social interaction. For a lot of the work here, context remains a key concept and although there is an undeniably long-standing tradition of contextualized studies of narrative (e.g., ethnography of communication in studies such as Bauman 1986 and Hymes 1981, among others) there are distinct elements in this latest shift that in our view qualify it as a 'new' turn to narrative:
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 2000
... So far, the under-lying assumption of discourse linguistic studies of narrative has been that... more ... So far, the under-lying assumption of discourse linguistic studies of narrative has been that the prototypical narrative text is that of storytelling. ... As a result, the entries into and exits from or responses to narrative within a conversational context have been adequately ...
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2009
Journal of Pragmatics, 1996
... relevant to childhood" and what Coupland (1983: 40) referred to as "childoriented&q... more ... relevant to childhood" and what Coupland (1983: 40) referred to as "childoriented" language. ... for the second integral part of the global performed mode in Modern Greek: this is a ... of repetition, parallelism and paraphrase) mode which interweaves its symmetrical patterning in the ...
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Papers by Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Transcript Conventions vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Part I Narrative Foundations: Knowledge, Learning, and Experience 19
1 Narrative as a Mode of Understanding: Method, Theory, Praxis 21
Mark Freeman
2 Story Ownership and Entitlement 38
Amy Shuman
3 Narrating and Arguing: From Plausibility to Local Moves 57
Isolda E. Carranza
4 Narrative, Cognition, and Socialization 76
Masahiko Minami
5 Narrative Knowledging in Second Language Teaching and Learning Contexts 97
Gary Barkhuizen
Part II Time ]Space Organization 117
6 Narrative and Space/Time 119
Mike Baynham
7 Chronotopes: Time and Space in Oral Narrative 140
Sabina Perrino
8 Narratives Across Speech Events 160
Stanton Wortham and Catherine R. Rhodes
9 Analyzing Narrative Genres 178
Matti Hyvarinen
Part III Narrative Interaction 195
10 Narrative as Talk-in-Interaction 197
Charles Goodwin
11 Entering the Hall of Mirrors: Reflexivity and Narrative Research 219
Catherine Kohler Riessman
12 The Role of the Researcher in Interview Narratives 239
Stef Slembrouck
13 Small Stories Research: Methods – Analysis – Outreach 255
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Part IV Stories in Social Practices 273
14 Narratives and Stories in Organizational Life 275
Yiannis Gabriel
15 Narrative, Institutional Processes, and Gendered Inequalities 293
Susan Ehrlich
16 Narratives in Family Contexts 311
Cynthia Gordon
17 The Narrative Dimensions of Social Media Storytelling: Options for Linearity and Tellership 329
Ruth Page
Part V Performing Self, Positioning Others 349
18 Narrative and Identities 351
Anna De Fina
19 Positioning 369
Arnulf Deppermann
20 Narrative and Cultural Identities: Performing and Aligning with Figures of Personhood 388
Michele Koven
21 Social Identity Theory and the Discursive Analysis of Collective Identities in Narratives 408
Dorien Van De Mieroop
22 Narrative Bodies, Embodied Narratives 429
Emily Heavey
Index 000
Keywords: me selfie, significant other selfie, group selfie, small stories & positioning analysis, ritual appreciation, knowing participation.
in context has not only spurred the turn to issues of context in language and new media research but it has also led to numerous methodological and analytical deliberations, for instance regarding the roles and nature of digital ethnography and the need for an adaptive, ‘mobile’ sociolinguistics. Such discussions center around social media affordances and constraints of wide distribution, multi-authorship and elusiveness of audiences which are often described with the term ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd 2011; Wesch 2008). In this article, I argue that, however helpful the insights of such studies may have been for linking social media affordances and constraints with users’ communication practices, the ethical questions of where context collapse leaves the language-in-context analysts
have far from been addressed. I single out certain key challenges, which I view as ethical clashes, that I experienced in connection with context collapse in my data of the social media circulation of news stories from crisis-stricken Greece. I argue that these ethical clashes are linked with context collapse processes & sociolinguistic contextual analysis priorities on the other hand. I put forward certain proposals for resolving these clashes arguing for a discipline-based
virtue ethics that requires researcher reflexivity and phronesis.
Drawing on sociolinguistic studies of language and place and on small stories insights and methods, I put forth rescripting as a social media-enabled practice of sharing that systematically exploits visual and/or verbal manipulations of the taleworld place of already circulated stories, so as to present the new tales as parody or satire of the originals. YouTube videos such as spoofs, memes, remixes, and mashups, form typical instances of rescripting, but other verbal activities should also be recognized as part of this practice, e.g. circulars of jokes about an incident on online blogs. Using as a case study a critical moment incident related to the Greek crisis that was repeatedly shared in social media, I examine rescripting as it occurs in the intersections between story making and social media affordances, arguing that it can productively open up the current sociolinguistic focus on resemiotizations of circulated activities. I show how changes in the place of the taleworld ultimately lead to changes in emplotment on the basis of the spatial semiotic repertoires associated with the new settings. Participation frameworks are decisively shaped by these changes, as commenters mainly engage with the current tale and telling, going along with the ostensibly 'fictional’ scenarios and engaging in active storytelling, that is, creating further plots on their basis. I discuss the implications of rescripting place for the study of sharing practices and vernacular participation as well as for the study of place as constitutive of narrative plots.
Keywords
Rescripting; Taleworld place; Mashups; Spoofs; Participation frameworks; Resemiotization
drastic redefinitions of time and space/place experience impact on communication choices. This
is despite extensive theorizing of time and space/place in media & cultural studies on the one hand and,
on the other hand, despite a thriving line of (socio)linguistic inquiry into how physical time and space/
place are made socio-culturally meaningful in specific communication acts. In the light of this, I outline
the main aims and motivations for bringing together emerging discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives
on communicating time and space/place in digital media, with this collection of papers. In
discussing the seven contributions and their methodological and analytical commonalities but also
diversity, I show how they attend to the linguistic and multi-modal choices with which digital media
users and producers orient to, negotiate, foreground or challenge aspects of the here & now as well as of
any other places and times invoked in their communication. In addition to this, all contributions
interrogate the ways in which semiotic choices related to time and place shape and are informed by
individuals’ identities, audience assumptions & the (re)formation of online communities. The main
themes in this respect include:
– Communicating time and place of private experiences in (semi)-public forums with a potential for
unknown and multiple audiences to tune in and become part of the communication;
– Creating co-presence and reaffirming relationships and communities through discourse activities of
marking or evoking time and place;
– The often competing inter-relations between online and offline time and place;
– The interdependence between the spatial architecture of digital media environments and any
communication acts in them, which often involves a process of turning online spaces into inhabited
places.
I claim that all contributions demonstrate the need for conceptual and analytical tools and methods
that are well-suited to capturing multi-layered arrangements of communicating time and place in digital
environments.