Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1271

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Constructing collective identities through place in interaction

Authors: Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula
Submitted by: Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

The aim of the paper is to explore how collective identities are constructed in Greek talk-in interaction through the deployment of geographic place formulations. As Johnstone (2010) has pointed out, «[L]ocalities are products of experience and discourse» and «[D]ifferent ways of interacting with space lead to different ways of delimiting and describing places». Moreover, the choice of a term for referring to ‘place’ is sensitive to the particularities of an interaction (Schegloff 1972); these include not only the ‘here-and-now’, i.e. the place and time coordinates of the interaction, but also its membership composition, the activity being done, etc. In this paper, I would like to argue that particular place formulations function as ‘recognitionals’ (Sacks & Schegloff 1979) –based on participants’ common experience– that allow them to invoke geographically defined membership categories (Sacks 1992, Schegloff 2007) and corresponding category-bound activities/properties.

Based on (audio-taped and fully transcribed) informal conversations among friends and relatives (about 500.000 words) from the Corpus of Spoken Greek, I first examine the means employed in the data to denote geographical location. These include indexicals (‘here’, ‘down there’), prepositional phrases (‘in Crete’), etc., and related collectivities, such as ‘we here’, ‘the Athenians’, ‘we in Crete’. The category-bound properties and activities –implied or explicitly brought up– are then explored, with particular attention to intersubjective meanings as signaled by the use of ‘we’ (Pavlidou 2008) and the topicalization of linguistic behavior and dialect characteristics that are associated with such collectivities. It is shown that, against the background of such geographically delineated categories, different levels of collective identity (Brewer & Gardner 1996) are constructed and negotiated –from very local ones, involving all participants (or subsets of them), to more global ones pertaining at first glance to geography but also to nationality, class, etc. (e.g. province vs. the capital, south vs. north, at home vs. abroad, Greeks vs. Germans).

References

Brewer M. & Gardner, W., 1996. Who is this ‘we’? Levels of collective identity and self reresentations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 83-93.

Corpus of Spoken Greek Institute of Modern Greek Studies. Thessaloniki.

Johnstone B., 2010. Indexing the local. In: The Handbook of Language and Globalization, N. Coupland (ed.), 386-405.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pavlidou Th.-S., 2008. Εμείς και η συγκρότηση (έμφυλων) συλλογικοτήτων [We and the construction of (gendered) collectivities]. In: Light and Warmth: In Memory of A.-Ph. Christidis, M. Theodoropoulou (ed.), 437-453. Thessaloniki: Center for the Greek Language.

Sacks H., 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. I & II, ed. G. Jefferson, introduction E.A. Schegloff. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sacks H. & E.A. Schegloff, 1979. Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. In: Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, G. Psathas (ed.), 15-21. New York: Irvington.

Schegloff E.A., 1972. Notes on a conversational practice: formulating place. In: Studies in Scocial Interaction (ed.), 75-119. New York: MacMillan, The Free Press.

Schegloff E., 2007. A tutorial in membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 39(3): 462-482.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Constructing collective identities through place in interaction