Language and Dialogue - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015

Identity has been investigated from different perspectives and there are therefore numerous ways of interpreting this concept. Basically it seems to be a method of categorizing people. We are however not only a slot in a bureaucratic system but social and dialogic human beings. As social individuals we can think about social consequences, and as dialogic individuals we can demonstrate our own supposed identity and evaluate the alleged identity of our fellow human beings in dialogue. ‘The side we are on’ leaves its mark not only on how we evaluate actions and events but also on how we refer to people. In this way identity is constructed and negotiated in dialogue. The paper analyses various authentic texts in order to demonstrate the dialogic nature of the concept.

Starting from the pragmatic descriptions of lying and the most influential theories concerning social identity, this paper explores, on the basis of authentic examples, the relationship between identity construction and the rhetoric of lying in Romanian political discourse. We are interested in presenting, on the one hand, the strategies used to denounce a political leader as a liar and to fix this negative image in the collective imagination and, on the other hand, the strategy used by the politician to refute these accusations and rebuild his credibility ethos. Through this analysis, the paper also addresses the questions of the social and moral implications of lying in Romanian public space.

Speakers construct their identities by careful choice of the appropriate linguistic features that will convey the specific social information that identifies them as part of a particular speech community (cf. Riley 2007, Joseph 2004). The social constructionist approach focuses on how social actors use linguistic and other cultural resources in the ongoing construction and re-construction of personal and group identity in interaction. Under such a view, identity (and hence ethnicity) is necessarily dynamic (Schilling-Estes 2004). Recent research on fictional characters and scripted discourse has proved the legitimacy of this scholarly area among language studies (Kozloff 2000, Culpeper 2001, Walshe 2009, Eder et al. 2010, Dynel 2011, Furkó 2013). This paper investigates several possibilities for the dialogic construction of the British and Irish ethnic stereotype. Drawing the distinction between real and fictional characters (Culpeper 2010), the micro-sociolinguistic, pragmalinguistic analysis of my corpora, taken from contemporary cinematographic representations of Britishness and Irishness, aims to compare some of the strategies that interactional partners employ, and which reveal several facets of their identities.

In a previous paper (Philip et al. 2013) we presented the analysis of the main characters’ identities, as they emerge from the dialogues in Chapter 10 of the seventh book of the Harry Potter series, in relation to their Knowing, Unknowing, and Believing epistemic stances. The aim of the present study is to expand this analysis to all seven books of the same saga, in particular focusing on how Harry and Lord Voldemort negotiate, construct, and develop their identities and how they evolve in what they know, believe, and do not know through the dialogues in the seven books. This study also aims to compare this linguistic analysis to a literary one. The results show that the epistemic roles in the dialogues support the characters’ identities in the narrative.

Humour displayed by today’s media targets both individuals and communities and the degree to which it is perceived as a mere humoristic act or, more seriously, as an insult depends on a series of factors which point to: its creator (the goal he/she (c)overtly assumes to reach), its addressee (whether he/she is a witness or a target), and the context in which the act is performed (institutionalized vs non-institutionalized). This study takes into account several examples from the French show Les Guignols de l’Info in order to bring forth the language tools and discourse strategies by means of which the creators of the show build up a negative image of the Romanian people.

This article presents an analysis of conversational humour (Attardo 1994) occuring in two Romanian television shows with the purpose of demonstrating that journalists use humour to build their own identity in relation to their interlocutors and to their audience. The types of strategic moves identified in media situational humour are two-fold: one directed at a participant in the conversation, having the potential of biting; the other that is directed at an absent other (in this case, the audience), having the potential of bonding (Boxer and Cortes-Conde 1997, 275). A relational identity is developed among participants in conversational joking which can be identified and described in accordance with the communicative norms and expectations that are considered appropriate in the media context in which individuals interact.

Ethnic humour research has mostly conceived and studied ethnic humour as a humour that sets boundaries between jokers and joke targets and that ridicules the targeted ethnicities by assigning them (non) ethnic, universal qualities like stupidity, cunningness or asexuality. By relying on such universal categories this approach has not produced a satisfactory account of how humour can function as a mode of expressing, negotiating and even questioning ethnic identity. This can be accomplished by considering ethnically specific joke texts and focusing on the discourse of the joke target and his response to joking, rather than the joke text itself. To validate the claim, the study will first draws on theories of ethnic and national identity as to establish a workable understanding of ethnic identity constituents to be able to recognize and discuss their emergence in the material selected. It will then examine how and to what success the question of ethnic identity enactment through humour has been dealt by the ethnic humour theory and by some newer studies of the identity humour relation. After which, I will present the research carried out towards testing the hypothesis that is the discourse of the joke target that provides a more comprehensible insight into the question of ethnic identity display through humour. For this purpose, a corpus of little over than two hundred ethnic jokes coming from several Balkan countries was collected and two questionnaires were conducted in the neighbouring countries of Macedonia and Bulgaria.

A total of 316 cases of forensic psychological assessment for sexual assaults were analyzed for plaintiffs over 15 years of age. The assessments were conducted between 2008 and 2014 in the presence of the same expert psychologist. The analyses clearly highlight the role of others in the act of filing a complaint. Therefore, the enunciations of the complaint were carefully examined in order to clarify the status of others. The Alterity can be observed in the speech of victims. The psychological assessment interview cannot be reduced to a dialogue in praesentia; in fact, another dialogue is brought to light. The latter falls within internal processes which, in turn, distinguish between two main types of plaintiffs: those who present themselves spontaneously to judicial authorities and the others.

Collective identity construction as a discursive action is highly dependent on language use. Migration settings offer a wide range of linguistic repertoires to fall back upon in order to mark identity. While the ‘majority’ language is usually neutral in this sense, the use of the ‘minority’ or the heritage language, defined as a language “other than the dominant language (or languages) in a given social context” (Kelleher 2010, 1), can act as a specific means of identity construction. Moreover, the heritage language acts as a vehicle for transmission of collective memory which is also central in the process and will thus be discussed in this paper. These questions will be analysed by drawing on the results of an empirical study carried out in 2010 in Volga German communities in Argentina.