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Internet Pragmatics - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
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Persuasive language and features of formality on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit
Author(s): Daria Dayter and Thomas C. MesserliAvailable online: 06 April 2021More LessAbstractThe paper investigates formal language in persuasive discourse on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit. We collected a corpus of 100 million messages, split into subcorpora based on the user-awarded marker delta, which rewards changing an original poster’s view. Assuming that formality/informality is potentially an important factor in the persuasiveness of a message, we examine the two subcorpora with respect to formality markers. The results indicate no systematic variation along the formality/informality continuum between persuasive and non-persuasive posts on r/ChangeMyView. The posters use personal pronouns, suasive verbs, emphatics, imperatives, elaborate connectors and WH-questions with similar frequency, and express themselves using vocabulary and syntax of similar complexity. Moreover, keyword lists and n-gram rankings indicate no register difference. A qualitative analysis of concordance lines for persuade and change PRONOUN view paints a picture of a community that values factual, evidence-based discourse and openness to logical persuasion, with a linguistic norm of relatively formal, sophisticated register.
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Becoming #Instafamous
Author(s): Dominika KováčováAvailable online: 22 March 2021More LessAbstractDrawing on Goffman’s (1990 [1959]) metaphor of stage, this paper considers Instagram a frontstage environment where users are cautious of being watched and attune their performance to how they want to be perceived via strategic self-presentation. This understanding of online performance is particularly pertinent in the discussions of bloggers who turn to Instagram to promote their work to new audiences. Examining the self-presentation practices of three fashion bloggers, this paper argues that to gain popularity on Instagram, bloggers utilize the features of formality and informality in the construction of an authentic and likable self-image. Since in the photographs the bloggers’ professional life is usually depicted as distant from their audience’s reality, the accompanying textual caption serves as a means of providing balance for the overall image the poster seeks to present. Consequently, the caption abounds with features of informality, which connote linguistic immediacy and imitate an intimate conversation with peers.
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Multimodal strategies for balancing formality and informality
Author(s): Michiko KaneyasuAvailable online: 17 March 2021More LessAbstractThis paper investigates multimodal strategies for balancing formality and informality online. The analysis of 300 comment-reply interactions on a recipe sharing site in Japan demonstrates that writers tend to avoid being overly formal or informal in their messages. For example, most comments and replies are written in polite forms but many incorporate some plain forms and colloquial expressions. Linguistic features, however, are not the only way through which the writers manage an appropriate level of formality and informality. The study examines the role of kaomoji or Japanese-style emoticons for socio-relational work online. Some kaomoji function locally as cues for interpreting the sentences featuring kaomoji. All kaomoji, including those with local functions, work to enhance the social presence of the writers on the screen via pictographic gaze and gestures, which increases the perception of intimate rapport. The findings underscore the importance of a multimodal perspective in examining how people handle social relationships online.
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Brutal spoons and cheesy gloves
Author(s): Susanne MühleisenAvailable online: 16 March 2021More LessAbstractIn its long presence on television and the internet, the genre of the cooking show has changed and diversified significantly. The initial principally instructional character has given way to more entertaining sub-genres, including parodic ones, that is, ‘spoof cooking shows’ on the internet. The presentation of self ( Goffman 1959 ) takes on many forms in everyday life, but the possibilities of publicly managing one’s own impression have enormously increased on the largest stage in the world, the internet (cf. Shulman 2017 ). The blurring of the Goffmanian concepts ‘front-’ and ‘backstage’ are important here in the presentation of self as ‘fake’ or ‘real’ person on the web. This article looks at the diversification of the genre of the cooking show in its transition to the internet, first by investigating strategies of formality or informality ( Irvine 1979 , 2001 ), then by exploring a particular spoof show, Cooking with Paris, as an example of how genre conventions are manifested by undermining.
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Intimate consumptions
Author(s): Sofia RüdigerAvailable online: 12 March 2021More LessAbstractIn this paper, I investigate how the structure of and discursive performance on North American YouTube eating shows contribute to the creation of intimacy and informality. In a typical eating show, the performer eats copious amounts of food while talking to their non-copresent audience, making use of interactional registers to ‘break’ from the solitary setting and to build rapport with their viewers. The material for this study is based on two case studies drawn from a corpus of YouTube eating shows. At the heart of the eating show performances lies the persona of a ‘friend’ of the viewer, diverting from their highly structured and technologically-mediated communicative nature. While the language used on eating shows may thus seem spontaneous and unprompted, the videos are not only planned but also edited. The simultaneous presence of selected unedited moments (i.e., slips of the tongue and other mishaps), however, is evidence of a conscious blending of front- and backstage performance ( Goffman 1959 ; Shulman 2017 ).
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Instagram and intermodal configurations of value
Author(s): Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. RossAvailable online: 15 February 2021More 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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How and why people are impolite in danmu?
Author(s): Jiayi WangAvailable online: 15 July 2020More LessAbstractThis study explores how and why people are impolite in danmu. Danmu refers to anonymous comments overlaid on videos uploaded to video-sharing sites. Although there is wide recognition that impoliteness prevails in danmu, the questions of how and why people are impolite in this context have rarely been investigated. This study addresses this lacuna of research. Using both an analysis of comments identified as impolite by participants and an analysis of focus group interview data, this research identified seven impoliteness strategies, covering both conventionalised formulae and implicational impoliteness. By applying uses and gratifications theory, this study identified five uses and gratifications for performing impoliteness in danmu: social interaction, entertainment, relaxation, expression of (usually differing) opinions and finding connections. The dialectic of resonance and opposition that emerged from the data helped explain why impolite comments tended not to be perceived as inappropriate in danmu. Thus, this study contributes to the emerging research on impoliteness in social media.
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More than playfulness
Author(s): Yiqiong Zhang, Min Wang and Ying LiAvailable online: 24 March 2020More LessAbstractThis study aims to uncover the complexity of emoji usage on Chinese social media. We investigate emoji usage in comments on push notifications from the WeChat official account of Guokr, which was chosen as a representative for an open forum for public communication. The data includes 2552 comments from 90 articles pushed by the account. The analysis adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective within the framework of intercultural pragmatics ( Kecskes 2014 ), taking into account both the local discourse environment and the cultural context. It is found that Chinese WeChat users show a preference for using emojis that are unique to the WeChat platform. Qualitative analyses were carried out on selected WeChat emojis used in comments fulfilling the speech acts of self-disclosure, self-praise, humor and complaining. Emojis are found to be used to perform and reinforce a sense of playfulness in social media, but underlying this playfulness there is a discursive conformity to social norms in real life. The use of emojis resolves the tension between the openness and freedom in social media and the conservative, constraint-bounded nature of established social norms.
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The construction of heterogeneous and fluid identities
Author(s): Luyao Li and Jing HuangAvailable online: 17 February 2020More LessAbstractThis paper presents a case study of identity construction and performance by examining the dynamic translanguaging practices of a Chinese student in the UK on a widely-used social media platform, WeChat. Drawing on data from WeChat Moment posts, chatting records, face-to-face interviews and online interviews over a period of 10 months, the study discusses identity construction in a digital world with a particular focus on heterogeneity and fluidity. The main findings include the following two points. First, the participant is the epitome of his world; he selects and manipulates linguistic and other semiotic resources indicating his beliefs, attitudes and life trajectory, and he actively, creatively, critically and strategically uses resources from his communicative repertoire to construct heterogeneous and fluid self-identities in his interactions with others. Second, the participant actively creates a virtual translanguaging space on WeChat, within which his new and old identities and different knowledge meet, integrate and fuse. The findings of this research provide detailed insights of digital translanguaging practices of WeChat users and contribute to a comprehensive understanding of identity (re)construction and (re)formation of an increasing number of overseas Chinese students.
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Chronotopic (non)modernity in translocal mobile messaging among Chinese migrants in the UK
Author(s): Agnieszka Lyons, Caroline Tagg and Rachel HuAvailable online: 17 December 2019More LessAbstractMigration is often seen as crossing both space and time, from the traditional past to the modern present, while leading to perceived changes in migrants themselves. This article draws on data from a large ethnographic project to explore the ways in which Chinese translocal families dispersed between China, Hong Kong and the UK exploit mobile messaging apps to negotiate the post-migration value of Chinese-ness and Chinese tradition in geographically dispersed family and social contexts. Drawing on the concept of the mobile chronotope, we show how Chinese families and friends employ textual and multimodal resources to negotiate mobile chronotopes of (non)modernity in translocal mobile messaging interactions. Our discourse analysis focuses on critical junctures at which modernist chronotopic negotiations are most visible. The article contributes to an understanding of the discursive construction of multiple (non)modernities by showing how migrants (re)position themselves along a gradient of chronotopic modernity in everyday mobile messaging encounters.
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“The murderer is him ✓”
Author(s): Leticia Tian Zhang and Daniel CassanyAvailable online: 16 October 2019More LessAbstractThis paper analyzes humorous comments created through a popular viewing-and-commenting system used in China and Japan, known as danmu (or danmaku). This system enables its users to superimpose anonymous comments on the video frame, which are displayed in subsequent viewing. We collected 327 user-selected ‘funniest’ screenshots of comments from danmu video sharing sites. Using content and discourse analysis, we re-contextualized the comments and identified main mechanisms of humor. Results show that speakers make fun of the plot, characters and of each other, relating to the video frame, Chinese culture and Japanese fandom. They rely on non-aggressive but rather playful teasing, allusions and retorts, and apply multimodal resources such as color, layout, and symbols to enhance the humorous effect. Our study contributes to the emerging research focus on multimodal humor ( Yus 2016 ), social semiotics and a discursive approach to danmu-mediated communication.
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Introducing internet pragmatics
Author(s): Chaoqun Xie and Francisco Yus
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Self-praise online and offline
Author(s): Daria Dayter
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“Ya bloody drongo!!!”
Author(s): Valeria Sinkeviciute
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Impoliteness online
Author(s): Manfred Kienpointner
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