THE ROLE OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE TWITTER DISCUSSION ON THE GREEK REFERENDUM

Abstract: This thesis investigates Twitter posting in Greek during the period of the Greek referendum in 2015 and in particular between June 27, when the referendum was announced, and July 6, one day after the referendum was completed, and how the Greek people use various external sources to express themselves (i.e. political thoughts, actions, inquires). The main research question is “What is the role of intertextuality in the Twitter discussion on the Greek referendum in Greek during the period of June 27 until July 6?”. This is answered with the help of three more specific questions: firstly, “What is the content of the tweets containing intertextuality during the referendum?”, secondly “What are the contextualized interpretations of the tweets?” and thirdly “Which intertextual relations can be discerned in the tweets and how do the tweets connect to history, proverbs, music, literature?” 50 tweets (with the hashtag categories #referendum, #yes or #no) from every day from June 27 until July 6 2015 were collected and studied (500 tweets in total). Categories were constructed based on the most repeated features concerning intertextuality in the tweets. At least one tweet from each category of intertextuality was analyzed, one from each of the three hashtags (#greekreferendum, #yes, #no) (16 tweets in total). The analysis is based predominantly on Gee’s (2014) methodology of discourse analysis. The categories of intertextuality are the following: intertextuality with historical events, proverbs, poetry, songs, and political slogans. This means that Greek people are familiar with these and either refer to them directly and indirectly or create wordplays with them to express their opinion about what to vote in the Greek referendum. There were also cases, in which the intertextual relations were ambiguous (a different kind of or a more inexplicit intertextuality).