Internet Pragmatics - Online First

(Im)politeness research has often focused either on the importance of social norms or on the intentions of the speaker, with the active role of the listener in assigning social meanings overlooked. This limitation particularly applies to so-called “discernment languages” such as Korean and Japanese. The current paper addresses this gap by offering a small-scale qualitative study of recipient agency in Korean naturally occurring computer-mediated communication (CMC). The data analyzed includes 14 text messages between the recipient (the proprietor of an online food business) and his customer, which were posted on a blog that he owned and operated. We focus on how the recipient agentively evaluates the language usage of the customer, including inconsistent evaluations of her use of non-honorific language, or panmal. The results suggest that the instability of (im)politeness interpretations cannot be explained solely by social norms or intentions but should also include the socially-mediated agency of the recipient.

This paper discusses to what extent people can convey and understand intentions and messages in Monster Strike, which has only one tool for intentional messaging – called ‘good job’ (GJ) – to send messages to other players, and it is, therefore, interesting to analyze how players exchange ideas and infer each other’s communicative intentions using a limited means of communication towards a common goal. This paper describes the significance of GJ first through an analysis of actual game playing, with supplemental information from players’ discussion spaces on line. The communications encompass (1) the original meaning (i.e., ‘good job’); (2) extended interpretations; and (3) an attention signal, with shared temporary and cumulative knowledge of the game and the players’ own dispositions.

This paper sets out a new, multimodal account (both visual and verbal analysis) of how self-denigration is conveyed through ‘ugly selfies’ as posted to the photo-sharing site Instagram. Drawing on 226 Instagram posts categorised by the poster themselves with the hashtag #uglyselfie, the visual analysis compared the persons and setting in the selfie, the person’s facial expression (eye brow position, mouth expression), eye gaze and camera angle. The verbal analysis included the self-denigration found in the image caption and the rapport enhancing or threatening responses found in the comments to the image posted by others. Ugly selfies are found to convey various types of self-denigration, including self-deprecation and self-mockery. The difference between self-deprecation and self-mockery are explained by the types of ‘mixed messages’ generated by the images. In self-deprecation, the mixed messages arise from a contrast between the visual image and the verbal caption. In self-mockery, the mixed messages arise from contrasts within the image itself, where visual exaggeration and incongruity lead to a jocular interpretation of the ugly selfie. Although the focus in this paper is on self-denigration and selfie-taking, the analysis of mixed messages can be used to analyse many different forms of politeness strategies and many kinds of images shared with increasing frequency and importance on social media sites.

This article presents the results of a critical discourse analysis of internet memes. This analysis considers the highly visual nature of internet memes situated in a context of meme-as-utterance prompting other remixed versions as memes-as-responses. Prior to the analysis an orientation to pragmatics as related to internet memes is presented. Following this is an overview of memes research and a necessary discussion of the role of media narratives in the construction and dissemination of internet memes. Finally, a series of memes tweeted in response to Nike’s inclusion of former National Football League player, Colin Kaepernick, in its Just Do It anniversary campaign, serves as the corpus of analysis.

This paper is concerned with ‘Classical Art Memes’, a category of internet memes that distinctively derives its visual input from classical and medieval art. I specifically show that humor in Classical Art Memes arises from incongruity among different stylistic varieties, namely a colloquial linguistic expression in the text and a classical-style artwork in the image. Given that stylistic incongruity cross-cuts modalities, I further argue that Classical Art Memes make a case for what I call ‘multimodal stylistic humor’. The analysis is based on a small corpus of when-memes, whereby the image complements a when-clause. The findings of the study suggest that humor in Classical Art Memes serves to convey affective meanings that emerge from the embodied affect in the image that is textually recontextualized in contemporary terms. Such meanings ultimately convey a critical commentary on knowable features of modern life.