Internet Pragmatics - Current Issue

Scam emails pose a significant threat to online security, exploiting individuals’ vulnerabilities through emotional manipulation. This study explores emotional triggers in a corpus of scam emails (n = 371) compiled from ten genuine email accounts over a period of five years (2018–2023). Using Robinson’s (2008) taxonomy of basic emotions, the positive and negative emotional content and triggers were identified and analyzed. The findings reveal that an overwhelming majority of the emails allude to negative emotions (n = 252), suggesting a clear scammer strategy in stimulating negativity to achieve fraudulent objectives. Conversely, the emails that evoke positive emotions (n = 119) seem to create a false sense of trust, sociability and gratitude. In addition, many scam emails employ various combinations of emotional triggers to manipulate recipients. This study sheds light on the intersection between emotions and discourse pragmatics and highlights the affective dimensions of discourse in email communication.

This paper examines how affect, creativity, and multimodality intersect in the meaning making dynamics of online discourse. Empirically drawing on a Modern Greek (MG) meme (as éstelne (‘s/he should have texted’)) and adopting a constructionist approach, the study makes a case for the mutually cross-fertilising relationship between affect and creativity by proposing that affective stance serves as a semiotic driver in the creation of memes as visuo-textual, multimodal constructions. Memes are thus viewed in Construction Grammar (CxG) terms as semiotically parsimonious templates for language use, while their visuals are seen as constructional slots, much in the spirit of what applies in purely linguistic (monomodal) constructions. Against this background, the notion of creativity, operationalised as ranging from F(ixed) to E(nlarging/xtending), is further explored both at the level of language patterning and at the level of expanding the repertoire of the visual pairing options originally available in a meme.

This study examines the pragmatics of affect and emotion in asynchronous eating shows, a genre of digital food discourse in which hosts record and share videos of themselves eating, with viewer interaction occurring through deferred comments. While previous research has explored food evaluation as a linguistic and multimodal practice, we argue that in eating shows, taste assessment is also an affective practice that fosters intimacy, engagement, and participation. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of five YouTube eating shows, we investigate how hosts perform affective stances toward food using linguistic, embodied, and audiovisual resources. We also analyze how viewers, despite the asynchronous format, contribute to the co-construction of affect through patterns of evaluative commentary. Our findings show that food assessment in eating shows is not only about describing taste but also about performing and eliciting affective alignment, shaping digital food identities such as expert eaters and lay reviewers.

Text-based, electronic communication, originally classified as secondary orality (Ong 1982), lacks immediate feedback, natural non-verbal cues, and shared physical context, impacting conversational flow and pragmatic interpretation. This contributes to the rarity of joke-telling in text-based conversations. This paper argues that cognitive factors, particularly the inferential overload effect, also play a role in the scarcity of sharing jokes, in the form of mini-narratives with a punchline, in text-based communication. Inferential overload, which occurs through weakly communicated assumptions that suddenly become manifest to the recipient, leads to emotional impact and amusement. This emotional response, underlain by non-propositional effects and essential for joke appreciation, is distinct from mere joke comprehension. The paper explores the distinction between joke comprehension and appreciation, supported by recent psychological and neuroscientific research. Additionally, it examines other reasons for the scarcity of jokes in text-based communication, related to social parameters and the dynamics of written online discourse.

This paper discusses humorous internet reels featuring cute animals voicing critical opinions about human behaviours and lifestyles. The reels are characterised by incongruity between the images of animals and the content of their messages. An analysis of lexical items and pragmatic implications of these messages indicates that a distinct idiolect has been created for the animal personas and that it is not possible to tease out the source of the views expressed in their utterances; the views can be attributed either to groups of people or to the animals themselves, as they are anthropomorphised. This makes for pragmatic indeterminacy which leaves the viewer with the impression of ambivalence at the level of propositional meaning while also giving rise to non-propositional affective effects.

This study examines the expression of affect in online comments related to the Gabby Petito murder case, in particular how commenters express anger and outrage towards her fiancé and murderer Brian Laundrie. Using corpus analysis software, comments containing the 5-gram the rest of his life were analysed to understand how digital discourse frames narratives of justice and punishment for the perpetrator, Brian Laundrie. Using Appraisal Theory and Narrative Analysis, the study demonstrates how commenters co-construct a “prison chronotope” in which they imagine Laundrie’s life in prison as one of isolation, stagnation, violation, and mental torment. The analysis also showcases how the commenters conceive of the prison experience as being a fate worse than death. The prison chronotope allows commenters to co-construct a narrative of justice and retribution. The study contributes to understanding the role of narrative in expressions of emotion in online discourse, particularly in relation to serious social issues such as murder.

In this study, we examine the online stories of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers curated by UK-based charity organisations. Through a mixed-methods approach, we focus on the online emergence of a positive storytelling canon that privileges certain affective positions over others. These positions feed into a problematic sense-making about migration in the UK that celebrates the stories of those migrants who incur positive (affective) changes in their lives, at the expense of potentially marginalizing others. Using a critical storytelling perspective that draws on the frameworks of affective positioning and small stories, we take one representative story as our focus to illustrate the affective participation frameworks made available to migrants. We discuss the linguistic and multimodal configuration of the story online, and the implications of the affective positions created for migrants for wider discourses about migration in the UK. Finally, we show how certain exemplary stories are static and affect-centred and do not seem to capitalise on dialogic and interactive participatory formats, unlike other forms of online storytelling. We argue that they contribute to a positive migrant storytelling canon that is well established in advocacy contexts and may have overtly empowering but covertly disempowering effects.