Constructing social identities through story- telling

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with the narratives produced in the conversations of six young people in Greece. Drawing on the broader framework of Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics as well as on the Social Constructionist paradigm, our paper follows the line of research that focuses on situated analysis of identities. Initially, the paper sets out to examine the identity(ies) constructed through the stories these people tell in the specific encounters. The overall aim of the paper is to relate these locally constructed identities to the larger socio-cultural identity of the participants and to examine whether they can be seen as indices of Greekness. Our analysis shows that, in the course of their story-telling, the participants construct ‘in-group’ identities mainly by co-constructing their narratives and by performing successive narratives with a similar point. The interactants’ foregrounding and cultivation of their in-group identity is probably an indication of their Greekness, namely of the attested tendency of Greek people to value and thus cultivate in-group relations of intimacy and solidarity in interaction.