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- Volume 5, Issue 2, 2022
Internet Pragmatics - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2022
Volume 5, Issue 2, 2022
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Instagram and intermodal configurations of value
Author(s): Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Rosspp.: 197–226 (30)More LessAbstractThis paper explores how ideological positions associated with food are construed multimodally in Instagram posts produced by everyday social media users. Discourse about food choices is an important site for revealing syndromes of values that characterise the ideological positions that are embedded in everyday life. An example of a highly valued food is the avocado which is an important bonding icon in semantic domains from veganism, clean eating, keto/low-carb eating, ethical/sustainable eating to fitness. We explore how values associated with avocado toast are enacted intermodally through the interplay of meanings made in the images, captions, and tags in a corpus of 64,585 Instagram posts tagged #avotoast. The study draws on previous social semiotic work on visual intersubjectivity and everyday aesthetics in social photography (Zhao and Zappavigna 2018a) to interpret the visual meanings made in these posts. It also draws on research into intermodal coupling (image-text relations) and ambient affiliation (online social bonding) (Zappavigna 2018) to understand how different values are construed in these texts. A modified grounded theory approach is used to isolate and exemplify the visual and textual features at stake, and then to explore ideological positionings through close multimodal analysis. A particularly interesting pattern in the corpus is the interaction of aesthetic and moralising discourses. For instance, a regulative metadiscourse realised through hashtags is used to project an instructional discourse about how to eat and what is considered ethical, sustainable, and nutritious food consumption. Rather than being directly encoded as judgement of behaviour these assessments tended to be expressed as appreciation of food items and their aesthetics or worth (e.g., clean, healthy, etc.).
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Days of our ‘quarantined’ lives
Author(s): Erhan Aslanpp.: 227–256 (30)More LessAbstractDuring the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many users around the world exploited internet memes as a digital source of humour to cope with the negative psychological effects of quarantining. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this study investigates a set of COVID-19 internet memes to explore the quarantine activities and routines to understand ordinary people’s mindsets, anxieties and emotional narratives surrounding self-isolation as well as the pragmatically generated humorous meanings relying on verbal and visual components of memes. The findings revealed that quarantine humour is centred around themes including quarantine day comparisons focusing on the perceived effects of home quarantines on physical and mental well-being, quarantine routines, and physical appearance predictions at the end of quarantine. Intertextuality was a productive resource establishing connections between quarantine practices and popular texts. In addition, humorous meanings were created through anomalous juxtapositions of different texts and incongruity resolution is largely dependent on the combined meanings of verbal and visual components.
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Jelou pipol
Author(s): Rosalía Cotelo Garcíapp.: 257–290 (34)More LessAbstractThis study explores the characteristics of the language used in Twitch, one of the most popular streaming platforms worldwide, as an example of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Some of the most salient traits used to describe CMC are found in Twitch chat messages, as the paper will show, confirming that the communicative interaction that takes place among users of this platform matches the features of CMC described in the academic literature. Additionally, the synchronous and multimodal nature of this platform, as well as the pragmatic implications of the use of subscriber-exclusive emotes are peculiarities that must be considered for a comprehensive description of the language that takes place on Twitch. Lastly, in the case of the videogame chats in Spanish studied, the paper introduces as a key factor in the description of this language the characteristics of the lexicon: its foreign origin, its neological nature and its high level of terminological specialisation.
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“Completely incapable of logical thought”
Author(s): Kate O’Farrellpp.: 291–316 (26)More LessAbstractWhile the MeToo Movement has generally been accepted as a legitimate response to what was considered endemic sexual harassment and discrimination in Hollywood, its goals and values have nonetheless been questioned and undermined. This study examines the comment sections of two YouTube videos produced by major broadcasting corporations in which the MeToo Movement in Europe is discussed. The comment sections are analysed in terms of expressions of attitude and evaluation, using the Appraisal framework. Through this analysis it is revealed that attitudes expressed in the comments legitimate and normalise anti-feminist ideologies through discursive construction of social norms. Conversely, feminism, as well as immigration, are delegitimated. Commenters delegitimate the MeToo Movement by construing its goals and values as misdirected or insincere. These attitudes are furthermore expressed through dialogically contractive comments, thus constructing them as accepted and matter-of-fact, rather than ideological.
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Review of Livnat, Shukrun-Nagar & Hirsch (2020): The Discourse of Indirectness: Cues, Voices and Functions
Author(s): Helena Nurmikaripp.: 317–320 (4)More LessThis article reviews The Discourse of Indirectness: Cues, Voices and Functions
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Review of Vásquez (2019): Language, Creativity and Humour Online
Author(s): Li Zhuopp.: 321–325 (5)More LessThis article reviews Language, Creativity and Humour Online
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