Internet Pragmatics - Online First

This study investigates a type of internet memes, namely, “misandry memes,” which often exhibit critical evaluations of heterosexual males and traditional masculinity in China. Drawing on the notion of feminist humor, we examine how “misandry” memes assemble semiotic resources for humorous effect, reveal perceived sexist realities, and disrupt dominant gender ideologies. Data were collected through keyword searches on the most visited microblogging site in China, i.e., Weibo, totaling a dataset of 63 memes. A multimodal analysis identified seven themes emerging from the data, including mystification of males, jocular abuse against males, reversal of gender ethics, parody of popular stereotypes of males, demonstration of feminine superiority, satire of males’ genitalia, and sexual objectification of males. The findings demonstrate that misandry memes in our dataset playfully challenge traditional gender ideologies that privilege men over women via positioning women in the social hierarchies of power, while simultaneously unsettling heterosexual males’ privilege, supremacy, and hegemony in a humorous discourse.

Even though France is not a bilingual country, French Twitter users are using various hashtags in English. The hashtag, which was originally created on Twitter, is a popular symbol widely used in the virtual world as well as in the real world. The goal of the hashtag was to organize topics of discussion relative to common themes. Even though this remains its primary usage, other functions for hashtags have emerged since its creation. In a Tag and Commentary hashtag analysis, this study investigates the pragmatic functions and positions of 755 English hashtags on Twitter from all users geo-tagged in France. The data was collected in all the regions of France through Twitter’s API (Application program interface) using the software RStudio. The results show that English hashtags are predominantly used for advertising purposes at the end of a tweet. However, instances of Commentary hashtags are also being used to add an evaluative role regarding the main body of tweets. Through this analysis, the study contributes to a deeper comprehension of online linguistic practices among French users, shedding light on the complex dynamics between language, technology, and communication in today’s digital era.

This paper examines how the communicative act of quotation may contribute to ordinary users’ discussion of politics through user comments following up on government- and opposition-party speeches during a pre-election and a non-election period in Britain. It analyses the linguistic formatting of the communicative act – as direct, indirect, mixed, hypothetical and scare quotation – and its production-format-specific distribution in the speeches of the political elite and in ordinary-user comments following up on the elite discourse. Particular attention is given to (1) references to the constitutive parts of the communicative act of quotation, to its felicity conditions and to social-context coordinates, (2) the discursive functions which quotation may fulfil in the two different contexts and timeframes, and (3) their perlocutionary effects.