Τεύχος 28 (2020)


Γεωργία Φραγκάκη: Αναπαραστάσεις του Ζακ Κωστόπουλου στο Twitter: Στρατηγικές και αξιολόγηση


This paper is part of a project on the representations of processes and participants concerning the death of Zak Kostopoulos, an activist for LGTB and HIV-positive people, in 2018. My focus here is on the representations of Kostopoulos in a corpus from Twitter (210,000 words approx.) including data from the first five days after his death, while the approach followed combines (critical) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. In the data studied Twitter users are distinguished into two main groups, the supporters and opponents of Kostopoulos, who are represented by their respective out-groups through the use of negatively evaluated words. The groups are found to follow different strategies in the representation of Kostopoulos. Supporters use positive representation, involving his functionalization as an activist and his appraisement, as well as the denial of negative representations. His opponents’ main strategies include his negative representation, with an emphasis on his functionalization in the alleged robbery and his classification as a gay and drug addict, along with the recurrent use of conditionals and the comparison with other events. It is suggested that the study of how representations contribute to evaluation can be helpful in the investigation of the notions involved, and especially positioning, which is paramount in the analysis of social media corpora.


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