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Part of
Greece in Crisis: Combining critical discourse and corpus linguistics perspectives
Edited by Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 70] 2017
► pp. 223–262

Chapter 7
Taking stances on the Greek crisis

Evidence from Facebook interaction

In this paper I explore informal conversations about the Greek crisis on the social network site of Facebook, drawing on Du Bois’ (2007) theory on stance, as well as on methods of discourse-centred online ethnography and corpus linguistics. I closely analyse a particular discursive episode between three Greek Facebook users (two male students of International and European Studies and one female Law student) and investigate how they take stances towards austerity and towards one another. Focusing on two interactional stance-taking activities, positioning and (dis)alignment, I argue that while the participants express divergent stances, they also show heightened awareness and criticality of both the crisis context and Facebook’s generic context.

Keywords: alignment, collocation analysis, disalignment, ethnography, Facebook, stance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Crisis, discourse and reflexivity
  • 3.Stance
  • 4.Facebook affordances and stance-taking
  • 5.Data and methods
  • 6.Analysis
    • 6.1Positioning
      • 6.1.1Expressing beliefs
      • 6.1.2Invoking sources of knowledge
      • 6.1.3Claiming ignorance
    • 6.2(Dis)alignment
      • 6.2.1Direct challenging
      • 6.2.2Indirect challenging
      • 6.2.3Delaying criticism
      • 6.2.4Making denials
      • 6.2.5Recycling linguistic elements
    • 6.3Conclusions on stance-taking strategies
    • 6.4Stance-taking patterns
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.70.07geo
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