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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2024
Internet Pragmatics - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2024
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2024
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The invitation game
Author(s): Elisabeth Muth Andersenpp.: 7–34 (28)More LessAbstractThis paper analyses Danish Tinder chats that in the very first message after ‘matching’ immediately launch the prospect of meeting. A collection of 41 threads is analyzed using Goffman’s (1967, 1974) concepts of face and interactional framing, outlining methods participants use to open a chat after having matched and addressing the interest and purpose they have approached in the other party. Methods include, in particular, inferences that can be made based on the type of activity or setting suggested for a future meeting, indirectness and ambiguity related to how the social actions are designed, and the conversational cues used such as emojis and enthusiasm markers. The analysis also shows how participants work out and negotiate whether they have a common interest in meeting, in particular, how they exploit and deal with ambiguities used extensively as a mechanism for flirting. The analysis further suggests that practices adhere to gender-stereotypes showing how participants may handle and orient to a norm that women should not agree to meet with a stranger early on in a chat correspondence.
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“I’m only half Korean but I can relate to a lot of what you said”
Author(s): Hanwool Choe and Cynthia Gordonpp.: 35–62 (28)More LessAbstractAnalyzing 20 comments posted in response to YouTube videos wherein two Asian American young women share their “lunchbox moment” stories, or first-person past-oriented accounts of how their (white) classmates at school reacted negatively to food that they brought from home for lunch, we demonstrate how posters collaboratively transform individual offline experiences of marginalization and difference into online moments of inclusion, solidarity, and shared identity. Integrating research on “second stories” (Sacks 1992), “story rounds” (Tannen 2005), online storytelling (Page 2011, 2018), and online-offline interconnections (e.g., Bolander and Locher 2020), we show how commenters of diverse backgrounds accomplish “adequation” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005) between their different minority identities in how they convey their own lunchbox moment stories. By using metadiscursive terms (e.g., “story”), “constructed dialogue” (Tannen 2007), ethnic category mentions, heritage languages, familiar address terms (e.g., first name), and emojis, YouTube posters create inclusion online and across cultural, ethnic, and spaciotemporal lines.
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“Resident superhero”
Author(s): Kerry Mullanpp.: 63–100 (38)More LessAbstractSituated at the intersection of social media communication and pragmatics of language use online, this article will examine the social action of community veneration of a local plumber by members of a neighbourhood Facebook group, the vast majority of whom do not know each other personally (nor necessarily the plumber). Particular attention will be paid to the way in which this veneration is constructed over time through linguistic creativity and humour, such as limericks, exaggeration, and various terms of reverence and hero worship. In addition to these linguistic devices, it will be shown how the participants actively exploit the digital environment to create context-dependent humour through emojis, memes, and other graphics. The selected examples will illustrate how this collaborative veneration and playfulness also strengthen the sense of belonging in this group of online strangers.
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Multimodal joint fantasising as a category‑implicative and category‑relations‑implicative action in online multi‑party interaction
Author(s): Valeria Sinkeviciutepp.: 101–136 (36)More LessAbstractDrawing on interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis, with a focus on (un)accomplished intersubjectivity, categories and social action, this paper explores some new aspects of multimodal joint fantasising in online interaction. The data for this study comes from the public Facebook event page regarding the ‘ski field opening’ in Brisbane, a sub-tropical city in Australia. The first part of the analysis examines how intersubjectivity is accomplished through joint fantasising co-constructed among the posters, serving entertainment purposes. Invoking their membership in the category ‘fantasisers’, this is done in two ways: (1) flat co-construction gradient; and (2) upgraded co-construction gradient. The second part focusses on the instances wherein intersubjectivity in relation to the fantasy world is unaccomplished. It is indexed through (1) metapragmatic labels of humour types; (2) treating the event as real; and (3) doubting the authenticity of the event and challenging the joint fantasising posts. As a result, additional categories emerge, thereby constructing category relations, namely, oppositional categories such as ‘fantasisers’-‘the gullible’ and ‘fantasisers’-‘sceptics’. This in situ change, I argue, creates a shift in the pragmatic function of joint fantasising, moving from a category-implicative action (serving entertainment) to a category-relations-implicative action (serving jocular criticism). This paper adds to the research on joint fantasising, categorial work and social action, and broadly contributes to our understanding of how members of the society orient to contexts and categories in and through talk-in-interaction.
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“Facebook’s about to know, Karen”
Author(s): Linda Walz, Jack B. Joyce and Natalie Flintpp.: 137–160 (24)More LessAbstractThis paper explores the social action of sanctioning an interlocutor’s conduct in public spaces through social media. Using membership categorisation analysis (Hester and Eglin 1997), we examine how, in offline face-to-face disputes filmed by one party, interactants deploy the name ‘Karen’ to sanction someone and threaten the transposition of the recording onto social media to impose accountability to the public at large. Our findings show how sanctioning through categorising an individual as a ‘Karen’ is interactionally achieved through framing conduct as entitled or otherwise problematic, distinguishing in-situ production of ‘Karen’ from a delivery that is perceptually unavailable to an interlocutor. We explore how social media functions as a resource to shape the ongoing encounter by orienting to the camera, and thus the online audience, as an external authority.
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Online public denunciation as recursive social practice
Author(s): Michael Haughpp.: 161–191 (31)More LessAbstractIncidents of online public shaming commonly start when a record of conduct that is perceived as transgressive by either one of the parties to that interaction or a third party observer is posted, in the form of a narrative description, photograph, audio/video-recording, screenshot, and so on to an online platform, followed by viral amplification of that online public denunciation post through sharing by others within and across platforms. Building on an analysis of 26 incidents of online public denunciations of public incivilities it is argued, in this paper, that public denunciations essentially involve inviting networked audiences to denounce entextualized moments of conduct, which are recontextualized as not only morally transgressive, but as also warranting public condemnation. It is proposed that the procedure by which online public denunciations are accomplished is thus recursive, as it not only involves the ascription of action to prior conduct of the target in question that construes that prior conduct as transgressive, but the embedding of the ascription of that complainable action within a public denunciation that invites condemnation of that ascribed action. However, since social media platforms allow for the re-entextualization and subsequent recontextualization of prior posts through which public condemnation has been invited, online public denunciations are themselves inevitably open to recursive recontextualization. It is concluded that online public denunciation is thus an inherently recursive form of social practice.
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Self-praise online and offline
Author(s): Daria Dayter
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Exploring local meaning-making resources
Author(s): Yaqian Jiang and Camilla Vásquez
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Introducing internet pragmatics
Author(s): Chaoqun Xie and Francisco Yus
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“Ya bloody drongo!!!”
Author(s): Valeria Sinkeviciute
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