Villy Tsakona
Biographic Data
| ID | 138262 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Villy Tsakona |
| GIVEN NAMES | Villy |
| FAMILY NAME | Tsakona |
| SIGNATURE | TSAKONA V |
| AFFILIATIONS | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9692-1706 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 151 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Turning lesser-known paintings into Covid-19 memes as a means of humorous criticism
Meme producers draw on diverse semiotic resources to create humorous memes and expect that their addressees will recognize the intertextual references and reconstruct the intended humorous meanings (at least to a certain extent). This study investigates what happens when the semiotic resources employed in memes are not particularly famous and thus cannot be expected to be shared knowledge among social media participants. Through the analysis of a…
Semiotics of humor
The meaning-potential of humor – whatever traditional or modern forms it takes – is inseparably linked to the social context, which not only provides the background for the un/successful deployment of humor, but also ends up being shaped by the humor used therein. From a semiotic perspective, humor involves both the handling of complex socially embedded and publicly shared meanings as well as individualized personal motivations that underlie inte…
“Who to save?”
The present study aims to put forward a critical analytical schema for discriminatory humor, taking into consideration the incongruity and aggression/superiority theories of humor and the notion of social critique as conceptualized by Reisigl and Wodak (2001). Emphasis is placed on how humorous texts, which appear to criticize racist practices and values, turn out to be ambiguous by also reproducing them, thus constituting instances of liquid rac…
Exploring primary school immigrant students’ soft hate speech
Watching humor traveling across languages, cultures, and media
By: Villy Tsakona ARTICLE INFO: Volume: 10 Issue: 01:Summer 2024 ISSN: 2459-2943 DOI: 10.18680/hss.2024.0016 Pages: 265-272 Lic.: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Loukia Kostopoulou and Vasiliki Misiou, 2024 Transmedial Perspectives on Humor and Translation New York: Routledge, 2024, 264 pp. ₤ 104.00 (hbk, ISBN 9781032328713), ₤ 31.19 (ebook, ISBN 9781003317104) Download full text: PDF
Majority and Immigrant Students’ Positionings towards Refugees as Represented in Media Texts
The recent immigrants’ and refugees’ movements towards western nation-states undermine symbolic national boundaries. Such movements are perceived as a threat to linguistic and cultural homogeneity, and reinforce the reproduction of national discourse. The present study focuses on how majority and immigrant students attending a Greek elementary school position themselves towards the Greek national discourse concerning refugees. Using analytical to…
Interesting but incongruous”
The goal of this case study is to explore the attitudes of Greek secondary education teachers towards the teaching of humour within a critical literacy framework. This fieldwork-based research took place during and after 8 training seminars (218 participants), which aimed to familiarise educators with the critical teaching of humorous texts using an annotated database. After each seminar, participants answered questions eliciting their attitudes …
Liquid racism in Greek online satirical news
The present study explores the infiltration of racism in humorous texts which at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions, in particular in satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist practices towards migrants. The analysis reveals that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism…
Francisco Yus
In an interdisciplinary area of study such as humor research it is, of course, important to employ theoretical concepts and analytical tools developed within this area, but, in my view, it is equally, if not more, important to enrich these concepts and tools with others which originate in different yet adjacent areas.In his latest monograph, Francisco Yus attempts to familiarize us with concepts and tools from Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson…
Deconstructing imagined identities and imagined communities through humor
The aim of this study is to explore humor as a means for deconstructing identities in humorous narratives written by adult L2 learners. Norton Pierce’s (1995) notions of investment in L2 learning, imagined identities, and imagined communities as well as the concepts of script opposition and target employed for the sociopragmatic analysis of humor ( Attardo 2001 ) are exploited for demonstrating how humor constitutes a means for deconstructing L2 …
“It Is Necessary to Try Our Best to Learn the Language”
A critical literacy proposal for exploring conflict and immigrant identities in the classroom
In this paper we intend to show that conflict emerging from multiple and competing perspectives on social reality, may not necessarily be avoided in class, but it could instead become the starting point of critical discussions among teachers and students. To this end, we focus on the exploitation of essays written by immigrant students attending Greek Lyceums (15–18 years old) to promote conflict-dialogue processes in class, which are most compat…
To laugh or not to laugh? That is the question
We usually think of comedy and tragedy as opposites, but perhaps we should consider them as two sides of the same coin. As Morreall (1999: 21) suggests,“[t]he most basic belief [which the comic and the tragic visions of life] share is that life is full of incongruities, discrepancies between the way things ought to be and the way they are. The difference between the two visions of life is more in their attitudes than in any beliefs about matters …
The humorous rewriting of Orwell’s '1984
This commentary piece offers some preliminary thoughts concerning the Greek memes produced since COVID-19 disease arrived at Greece at the end of February 2020, through identifying an analogy between the sociopolitical conditions in Greece-under-lockdown and Orwell’s Oceania in his 1984 novel. It is specifically argued that such texts constitute political humour commenting on the abrupt, yet pervasive changes attested due to state measures agains…
From the illegal migrant-criminal to the illegal migrant-invader
Following a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, the present study reports on the analysis of 49 texts from the Hellenic Parliament Proceedings, where the term λαθρομετανάστης “illegal migrant” is used. The texts under scrutiny date back to 2015 (i. e., the year the migration crisis reached its peak) and reveal the recontextualized use of this term, which is identified with the hegemonic national-racist discourse of the 1990s perceiving mi…
Did you hear the crunch sound
Liquid racism in the Greek anti-racist campaign #StopMindBorders
This study examines the opaque reproduction of racism in an online, anti-racist campaign officially aiming to denounce hate speech and challenge widespread stereotypes concerning migrants. In particular, we investigate the video clips of the #StopMindBorders campaign launched by the Greek branch of the International Organization for Migration. We specifically concentrate on the liquid racism attested in these video clips, namely a highly ambivale…
Scrutinising intertextuality in humour
Humourists often resort to previous texts to create their jokes, thus establishing intertextual links between them. Consequently, the processing of such jokes presupposes specific cultural literacy skills which enable speakers to recognise the allusions and interpret them in the new humorous contexts. It has, however, been suggested that speakers’ emphasis on cultural literacy skills for processing allusions and humour may discourage or even impe…
Revisiting intertextuality and humour
In humour research, intertextuality has been extensively studied with the aim of understanding how humorous texts are constructed on the basis of previous texts. In this paper, we elaborate on the sociopragmatic functions of intertextuality, pointing out not only how humorous texts rely on previous texts and background knowledge, but also what sociopragmatic functions intertextuality serves in actual communicative situations, e.g. the effect the …
Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes
One of Davies’ significant contributions to the sociology of humor involves the exploration of the relation between jokes and the social order. He particularly argues that jokes seem to work like a “thermometer” conveying truths for the sociopolitical system. In our study, we aim to analyze jokes related to the migration crisis and circulated online since 2014 following Davies’ methodological guidelines. During the past few years, the number of m…
Intertextuality and/in political jokes
Küçükali (2011). Discursive strategies and political hegemony
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This is not a political party, this is Facebook!”
The present study attempts to combine Raskin’s (1985) and Davies’ (2011) methodological approaches to political jokes to investigate Greek political jokes targeting politicians and circulated during the first 4 years of the Greek crisis. The proposed analysis identifies, on the one hand, what Greek people perceive as politicians’ main incongruities, namely their flaws that prevent them from fulfilling their roles ‘appropriately’. On the other han…
I’m not racist but I expect linguistic assimilation”
Teaching politeness strategies in the kindergarten
The present study explores the use of the genre of service encounters to teach (about) politeness strategies in the kindergarten. My teaching proposal involves a critical approach to politeness strategies which is expected to enhance students’ awareness of the social/interactional aspects of service encounters, and in particular to familiarize them with positive and negative politeness and with how the speech acts they may use in such contexts co…
Language and image interaction in cartoons
Analyzing conversational data in GTVH terms
The central aim of this paper is to apply the General Theory of Verbal Humor (henceforth GTVH; Attardo 2001) to conversational narratives and to integrate it with sociopragmatic approaches. We consider script opposition as a necessary prerequisite for humor and its perlocutionary effect (i.e. eliciting laughter) as a secondary criterion for the characterization of a narrative as humorous. Despite the fact that one of the most common social functi…
Linguistic varieties in style
Intertextuality and/in political jokes
I’m not racist but I expect linguistic assimilation”
The wolf wakes up inside them, grows werewolf hair and reveals all their bullying
Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes
One of Davies’ significant contributions to the sociology of humor involves the exploration of the relation between jokes and the social order. He particularly argues that jokes seem to work like a “thermometer” conveying truths for the sociopolitical system. In our study, we aim to analyze jokes related to the migration crisis and circulated online since 2014 following Davies’ methodological guidelines. During the past few years, the number of m…
The Pragmatics of Political Discourse
Jab lines in narrative jokes
Parliamentary discourse in newspaper articles
The present paper aims, first, at analysing how and why parliamentary debates are transformed into newspaper articles with a narrative-like format; and, second, at proposing a model for integrating this kind of material and analysis into a literacy-based language teaching programme. Our data consists of Greek parliamentary proceedings and newspaper articles on parliamentary debates. Based on the critical discourse analysis framework and the socia…
Revisiting intertextuality and humour
In humour research, intertextuality has been extensively studied with the aim of understanding how humorous texts are constructed on the basis of previous texts. In this paper, we elaborate on the sociopragmatic functions of intertextuality, pointing out not only how humorous texts rely on previous texts and background knowledge, but also what sociopragmatic functions intertextuality serves in actual communicative situations, e.g. the effect the …
The Prosodic Framing of Humour in Conversational Narratives
In this paper we investigate the role of prosodic means in framing humour within conversational narratives. In particular, we focus on whether, how, and why jab lines as basic turn constructional units in a humorous narrative turn are marked off by prosodic features. Our aim is twofold: a) to investigate, by means of statistical tests, if jab lines are systematically segmented by pauses and by differentiation in speech rate and intensity; b) to a…
Liquid racism in Greek online satirical news
The present study explores the infiltration of racism in humorous texts which at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions, in particular in satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist practices towards migrants. The analysis reveals that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism…
Did you hear the crunch sound
Parliamentary punning
The present study focuses on the sociopragmatic functions of punning which appears to be the most frequent form of humour Greek politicians produce in parliament. The analysis takes into consideration the institutional particularities of this setting: in parliamentary systems such as the Greek one, competition and disagreement among political parties are more intense than in presidential systems, where party coalitions and collaboration are more …
Linguistic creativity and institutional design
Creative language in Greek parliamentary discourse is investigated here in order to show that Greek parliamentarians strategically resort to such language as a means of criticism and collective party identity construction. The proposed microanalysis is combined with a macroanalysis considering linguistic creativity to correlate with the particularities of the Greek political system and the topic discussed in such debates. Taking into account the …
From the illegal migrant-criminal to the illegal migrant-invader
Following a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, the present study reports on the analysis of 49 texts from the Hellenic Parliament Proceedings, where the term λαθρομετανάστης “illegal migrant” is used. The texts under scrutiny date back to 2015 (i. e., the year the migration crisis reached its peak) and reveal the recontextualized use of this term, which is identified with the hegemonic national-racist discourse of the 1990s perceiving mi…
This is not a political party, this is Facebook!”
The present study attempts to combine Raskin’s (1985) and Davies’ (2011) methodological approaches to political jokes to investigate Greek political jokes targeting politicians and circulated during the first 4 years of the Greek crisis. The proposed analysis identifies, on the one hand, what Greek people perceive as politicians’ main incongruities, namely their flaws that prevent them from fulfilling their roles ‘appropriately’. On the other han…
Bilingualisation in Practice
This paper presents the theoretical discussion emerging from the bilingualisation of an English specialised glossary of sociolinguistic terminology into Greek. The theoretical considerations related to the bilingualisation of a glossary, the practical solutions suggested, and the significance of the latter for the bilingualisation of specialised terminology, as well as for lexicographical theory and practice are discussed. Emphasis is given to th…
Jab lines in narrative jokes
Analyzing conversational data in GTVH terms
The central aim of this paper is to apply the General Theory of Verbal Humor (henceforth GTVH; Attardo 2001) to conversational narratives and to integrate it with sociopragmatic approaches. We consider script opposition as a necessary prerequisite for humor and its perlocutionary effect (i.e. eliciting laughter) as a secondary criterion for the characterization of a narrative as humorous. Despite the fact that one of the most common social functi…
Bilingualisation in Practice
This paper presents the theoretical discussion emerging from the bilingualisation of an English specialised glossary of sociolinguistic terminology into Greek. The theoretical considerations related to the bilingualisation of a glossary, the practical solutions suggested, and the significance of the latter for the bilingualisation of specialised terminology, as well as for lexicographical theory and practice are discussed. Emphasis is given to th…
Humor and image politics in parliamentary discourse
The present study investigates the function of humor in parliamentary discourse. The data under examination come from the offcial proceedings of the Greek parliament and involve two main protagonists, the Greek prime minister and the leader of the opposition. The analysis reveals that parliamentary humor is used as a means of constructing and damaging participants' public image and political identity as well as attacking the opponent without viol…
Parliamentary discourse in newspaper articles
The present paper aims, first, at analysing how and why parliamentary debates are transformed into newspaper articles with a narrative-like format; and, second, at proposing a model for integrating this kind of material and analysis into a literacy-based language teaching programme. Our data consists of Greek parliamentary proceedings and newspaper articles on parliamentary debates. Based on the critical discourse analysis framework and the socia…
Language and image interaction in cartoons
The Prosodic Framing of Humour in Conversational Narratives
In this paper we investigate the role of prosodic means in framing humour within conversational narratives. In particular, we focus on whether, how, and why jab lines as basic turn constructional units in a humorous narrative turn are marked off by prosodic features. Our aim is twofold: a) to investigate, by means of statistical tests, if jab lines are systematically segmented by pauses and by differentiation in speech rate and intensity; b) to a…
The wolf wakes up inside them, grows werewolf hair and reveals all their bullying
Irony beyond criticism
Taking into account recent pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to irony, the present study investigates irony as a discursive resource Greek parliamentarians employ to fulfill their institutional roles and to negotiate verbal rules of conduct in highly institutionalized and confrontational debates. It is suggested that, besides criticism, parliamentary irony is used to sharpen attacks against the Opposition, to elicit vivid reactions from th…
Studies in political humour
European parliaments under scrutiny
The Narrative Construction of Identities in Critical Education
Based on approaches from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, this study proposes an analytical model focusing on the linguistic and discursive means narrators use to construct a variety of identi
The Greek state and the plaster cast
The study investigates the main aspects and the ideological function of the state is a sick person metaphor which was frequently used in the public speeches of the Greek dictator George Papadopoulos and which became emblematic of his regime. A specific variation of the metaphorical imagery, namely the state is a sick person in a plaster cast, has contributed to the creation ofan idiom in Greek, signifying state or other repression and deprivation…
Linguistic creativity and institutional design
Creative language in Greek parliamentary discourse is investigated here in order to show that Greek parliamentarians strategically resort to such language as a means of criticism and collective party identity construction. The proposed microanalysis is combined with a macroanalysis considering linguistic creativity to correlate with the particularities of the Greek political system and the topic discussed in such debates. Taking into account the …
Parliamentary punning
The present study focuses on the sociopragmatic functions of punning which appears to be the most frequent form of humour Greek politicians produce in parliament. The analysis takes into consideration the institutional particularities of this setting: in parliamentary systems such as the Greek one, competition and disagreement among political parties are more intense than in presidential systems, where party coalitions and collaboration are more …
The Pragmatics of Political Discourse
Linguistic varieties in style
Teaching politeness strategies in the kindergarten
The present study explores the use of the genre of service encounters to teach (about) politeness strategies in the kindergarten. My teaching proposal involves a critical approach to politeness strategies which is expected to enhance students’ awareness of the social/interactional aspects of service encounters, and in particular to familiarize them with positive and negative politeness and with how the speech acts they may use in such contexts co…
Küçükali (2011). Discursive strategies and political hegemony
Preview this article: Küçükali (2011). Discursive strategies and political hegemony: The Turkish case, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jlac.5.1.08tsa-1.gif
This is not a political party, this is Facebook!”
The present study attempts to combine Raskin’s (1985) and Davies’ (2011) methodological approaches to political jokes to investigate Greek political jokes targeting politicians and circulated during the first 4 years of the Greek crisis. The proposed analysis identifies, on the one hand, what Greek people perceive as politicians’ main incongruities, namely their flaws that prevent them from fulfilling their roles ‘appropriately’. On the other han…
I’m not racist but I expect linguistic assimilation”
Intertextuality and/in political jokes
Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes
One of Davies’ significant contributions to the sociology of humor involves the exploration of the relation between jokes and the social order. He particularly argues that jokes seem to work like a “thermometer” conveying truths for the sociopolitical system. In our study, we aim to analyze jokes related to the migration crisis and circulated online since 2014 following Davies’ methodological guidelines. During the past few years, the number of m…
Liquid racism in the Greek anti-racist campaign #StopMindBorders
This study examines the opaque reproduction of racism in an online, anti-racist campaign officially aiming to denounce hate speech and challenge widespread stereotypes concerning migrants. In particular, we investigate the video clips of the #StopMindBorders campaign launched by the Greek branch of the International Organization for Migration. We specifically concentrate on the liquid racism attested in these video clips, namely a highly ambivale…
Scrutinising intertextuality in humour
Humourists often resort to previous texts to create their jokes, thus establishing intertextual links between them. Consequently, the processing of such jokes presupposes specific cultural literacy skills which enable speakers to recognise the allusions and interpret them in the new humorous contexts. It has, however, been suggested that speakers’ emphasis on cultural literacy skills for processing allusions and humour may discourage or even impe…
Sociology (26 works) · Linguistics (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (20 works) · Humor Studies and Applications (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (14 works)