Volume 14, Issue 2

Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis , we aim to tease out how narrators talk into being the social group constellations in their storyworlds and how these – potentially shifting – constellations can be related to the narrator’s identity constructions. We investigate two World War II-testimonies narrated by Belgian concentration camp survivors and scrutinize whether the expected Standardized Relational Pair of victim-perpetrator – viz. the camp prisoners versus the Nazis – is in operation, how these two categories are talked into being, whether other social groups are mentioned and how all these processes affect the narrators’ identity work. It proved to be the case that, even though the victim-perpetrator Standardized Relational Pair is indeed present in both testimonies, it functions very differently in both stories, resulting in almost opposing identity work by the two narrators.

It is a study of the discursive construction of high achievers’ identities in American culture. A corpus of 100 commencement speeches delivered during 2016 and 2017 graduation ceremonies in American universities has been used to analyse how commencement speakers, as a rule highly successful individuals, construct their identities through discourse. Besides celebrating academic achievements, one of the communicative purposes of the commencement speech is giving the graduates advice for the future. It has been investigated how the speakers legitimize their qualifications as a role model and the source of life wisdom. Due to the specificity of the discourse to be investigated, based on the foundations of American ethos of hard work and drive for success, Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk 2002, 2009; Wodak 2002; Wodak et al. 2009) has been chosen as a methodological approach which can most adequately help analyze the discursive formation of identity. As the discourse to be analyzed is agentive discourse, culture-specific both in its form and content, I have decided to combine Critical Discourse Analysis with cultural studies (Hall 1990, 1996a, 1996b; Barker and Galasiński 2001).

The unexpected resounding NO of the Greek referendum of the 5 th July to continued austerity echoed a great disapproval and rejection of a ‘Germany-dominated Europe’ and a strong claim for radical change in Europe while fuelling reactions, which in social networks were discursively and symbolically constructed to express and intensify anti-Brussels and anti-Germany sentiments and to mobilise resistance. The present paper sets out to investigate how discursive constructions and representations of the Self and the Other contributed to bringing closer the NO partisans and to reinforcing a discourse of resistance for political, economic and social change. Relying on comments from Tsipras’ Facebook page, this study lies within Critical Discourse Studies and uses corpus-based methodologies to detect the most frequent words and semantic fields, which seemed to be building a dichotomous discourse between US and THEM while enhancing an in-group cohesiveness around the pre-referendum charismatic personality of Alexis Tsipras.

The paper offers a critical discursive and pragmatic analysis of a corpus of hateful Facebook and Twitters status updates of politicians, political activists and voters in the 2016 pre-and-post election period, in Macedonia. Aiming to determine how power is exerted on social media, the paper focuses on identifying the stance social media users take when posting messages with political content. The analysis first attempted to unveil what speech acts the hateful posts are predominantly composed of (e.g. assertive, directives, expressives), what roles the authors of the posts normally assume, who the hateful political discourse in the given socio-political context is directed to, as well as what are some of the predominant linguistic strategies underlying the analysed hateful comments. The results show that, by using mostly assertive and expressive speech acts, social media users assume mainly the roles of analysts and judges and only subsequently the one of activists, they mostly address politicians directly and they use a lot of negative lexis, rhetorical figures and boosters as interpersonal metadiscourse markers to express their negative stance and exert power and dominance.