Sylvia Sierra

Biography

Sylvia Sierra studies how people use language in social interactions, both in face-to-face settings and in online contexts.

Her specific interest is in how people create identities and form relationships in their everyday conversations. Her research interests therefore include identity, authenticity, epistemics (knowledge management), intertextuality (repetition of and reference to prior ‘texts’), popular culture/media, social media and embodied interaction. She researches interactions that occur in North American English and Mexican Spanish.

Education

• Ph.D., Georgetown University

Areas of Expertise

Discourse analysis, identity construction, intertextuality, media, everyday conversation, epistemics

Selected Publications

• Sierra, S. (2023). “Contextualization cues for media references in everyday conversation,” Language and Communication, 88: 99-110.
• Sierra, S. (2022). “The epistemics of authentication and denaturalization in the construction of identities,” Language in Society. 1-24.
• Sierra, S. (2021). “Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation.” Oxford University Press.
• Shrikant, N. and Sierra, S. (2021). “‘Nasty question’ and ‘fake news’: Metadiscourse as a resource for denying accusations of racism in Donald Trump’s Presidential Press Events.” Co-authored with Natasha Shrikant. Howard Journal of Communications, 33(2): 119-139.
• Sierra, S. (2021). “A Mexican Autodefensa Facebook Group’s use of Binarity, Legitimization Strategies, and Topoi of Religion, Family and Struggle.” Discourse, Context and Media, 42.
• Sierra, S. and Shrikant, N. (2020). “Fake Alignments.” In “Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies,” ed. by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. pp. 203-213. Cambridge University Press.
• Sierra, S. (2019). “Linguistic and ethnic media stereotypes in everyday talk: Humor and identity construction among friends.” Journal of Pragmatics.
• Sierra, S. (2017). “‘Buffy sings to Cody’: A multimodal analysis of mother and pre-lingual-infant question–response sequences.” Journal of Pragmatics, 110: 50-62.
• Sierra, S.A. (2016). “Playing out loud: Videogame texts as resources in friend interaction for managing frames, epistemics, and group identity.” Language in Society 45(2):217-245.