Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
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Apostolos Poulios
Abstract
Drawing on tools from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, this article shows how age identities are constructed through talk-in-interaction. The data analyzed come from a Greek television reality show and involve two participants: a 53-year-old woman and a 63-year-old man. Although their chronological age would not strictly classify them as old people, the identity old person actually becomes relevant for them on various occasions. This identity is either invoked by the two participants themselves or by younger participants and is argumentatively exploited as a means to various ends: to construct their own arguments or have arguments with other participants, and in defending themselves or accusing others of certain behaviors. The data analysis shows how speakers can distance themselves from an age category (most often the category old person) and, on a di¤erent occasion, endorse the same category if this is required by the context of the interaction or helps them evoke specific identity features. Broadly, this article will show that chronological age alone does not determine a speaker's age identity: age identities are collaboratively negotiated or resisted by conversationalists and/or attributed to them in specific contexts during social interaction. Thus, aging is largely a socially established process, a contextualized interactional achievement.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Preface: commemorating the 200th issue of IJSL
- Introduction: aging and language
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- Gaelic on the Isle of Skye: older speakers' identity in a language-shift situation
- Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth
- Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
- First language attrition and reversion among older migrants
- Managing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly: humor as a mitigating resource
- Beyond stereotypes of old age: the discourse of elderly Japanese women
- The multifaceted category of “generation”: elderly French men and women talking about May '68
- Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
- Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
- The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe, by Tomasz Kamusella
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface: commemorating the 200th issue of IJSL
- Introduction: aging and language
- Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?
- Gaelic on the Isle of Skye: older speakers' identity in a language-shift situation
- Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth
- Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
- First language attrition and reversion among older migrants
- Managing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly: humor as a mitigating resource
- Beyond stereotypes of old age: the discourse of elderly Japanese women
- The multifaceted category of “generation”: elderly French men and women talking about May '68
- Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
- Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
- The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe, by Tomasz Kamusella
