The 2Nd International Conference on Internet Pragmatics - Netpra2

Home , Social in the City, Tubecon, YouTuber

THE 2ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTERNET PRAGMATICS - NETPRA2

INTERACTIONS, IDENTITIES, INTENTIONS 22–24 October 2020

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS Table of Contents

Keynotes ...... 6 Anita Fetzer (University of Augsburg) ...... 6 “It’s a very good thing to bring democracy erm directly to everybody at home”: Participation and discursive action in mediated political discourse ...... 6 Tuomo Hiippala (University of Helsinki) ...... 7 Communicative situations on social media – a multimodal perspective ...... 7 Sirpa Leppänen (University of Jyväskylä) ...... 8 Intentional identifications in digital interaction: how semiotization serves in fashioning selves and others ...... 8 Julien Longhi (University Cergy-Pontoise) ...... 9 Building, exploring and analysing CMC corpora: a pragmatic tool-based approach to political discourse on the internet ...... 9 Ruth Page (University of Birmingham) ...... 10 Relatability and the shared stories of social media influencers ...... 10 Panels ...... 11 PANEL: Linguistic, discursive, and rhetoric features in online discussion boards ...... 11 Suomalainen, Karita (University of Turku) Tuomarla, Ulla (University of Helsinki) ...... 12 Creating a common enemy. The practices of naming and referring in Finnish anti-immigration online discussion ...... 12 Määttä, Simo (University of Helsinki) Lauranto, Yrjö (University of Helsinki) ...... 13 Response strategies in threads related to sexual orientation and gender diversity in the Suomi24 discussion board ...... 13 Lehti, Lotta (University of Helsinki) Luodonpää-Manni, Milla (University of Helsinki) Jantunen, Jarmo Harri (University of Jyväskylä) Laippala, Veronika (University of Turku) ...... 14 Peer support and moralization in online discussions concerning poverty ...... 14 PANEL: Dimensions of Dementia in Digital Discourse ...... 15 Bös, Birte (University of Duisburg-Essen) Schneider, Carolin (University of Duisburg-Essen) ...... 17 “Typing with dementia” – Online Self-positioning of People Living with Dementia of the Alzheimer Type...... 17 Davis, Boyd H. (University of North Carolina-Charlotte) Pope, Charlene A. (Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center; Medical University of South Carolina) Maclagan, Margaret A. (University of Canterbury) ...... 18 Metadiscourse and multimodality in digital outreach to dementia caregivers ...... 18 Kleinke, Sonja (Heidelberg University) ...... 19 Constructing and Conceptualizing Dementia: Caregivers’ Participatory Online Talk in Public Advice Fora ...... 19 Pope, Charlene A. (Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center; Medical University of South Carolina) . 21 Barriers to Recruiting Community Caregivers of Veterans with Dementia for an E-Mobile Support Archive ...... 21

PANEL: Doing Facework Online: Imagined Audiences and Forms of Address on Public-Private Platforms ...... 22 Havu, Eva (University of Helsinki) ...... 24 The use of forms of address in French blogs and Internet Forums ...... 24 Isosävi, Johanna (University of Helsinki) Vecsernyes, Ildikó (University of Helsinki) ...... 25 Greeting, self-identification and addressing – Opening sequences in vlogs of Finnish, Hungarian and French YouTubers ...... 25 Truan, Naomi (University of Leipzig) ...... 26 Cats of Twitter: Framing pets as discourse participants in online interaction ...... 26 Individual papers ...... 27 Ainiala, Terhi (University of Helsinki) Jantunen, Jarmo H. (University of Jyväskylä) Jokela, Salla (Tampere University) Tarvainen, Jenny (University of Jyväskylä) ...... 27 Spatializing difference in Finland’s biggest online discussion forum: A corpus assisted discourse analysis of comments concerning Finland’s capital region ...... 27 Alvestad, Silje Susanne (University of Oslo)...... 28 –Beware of fakes! Detecting fake online contents based on linguistic cues ...... 28 Andersson, Marta (Stockholm University) ...... 30 ‘So many damn virologists here!’: functional analysis of impoliteness in Facebook comment threads on the Swedish management of COVID-19 –the tension between conformity and distinction ...... 30 Ballagó, Júlia (Eötvös Loránd University; MTA Research Institute for Linguistics) ...... 32 Genre knowledge and online discourses: the case of Hungarian recipe and book review websites ...... 32 Biri, Ylva (University of Helsinki) ...... 33 Stance in online fan communities: a corpus-based analysis of grammatical and lexical stance ... 33 Blitvich, Pilar (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) ...... 34 Cancelling: Boycotting and shaming rituals in an outrage culture ...... 34 Cesiri, Daniela (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) ...... 36 Food blogs as places of social interaction: a qualitative investigation of the Comments Sections 36 Chankova, Mariya (South-West University N. Rilski – Blagoevgrad) ...... 37 Have we un-learned how to argue? Divisive discourses in the post-digital era...... 37 Elordui, Agurtzane (University of the Basque Country) Aiestaran, Jokin (University of the Basque Country) ...... 38 How to be ‘authentic’ in Instagram? Metalinguistic reflections on language stylistic choices among Basque youth ...... 38 Grabiger, Luisa (University of Greifswald) ...... 40 Online Identity Construction of Trans* Beauty Vloggers - a Multimodal Linguistic Analysis of Queer Discourse on YouTube ...... 40 Hidalgo Downing, Raquel (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Márquez Reiter, Rosina (Open University) ...... 42 The intercultural expert: constructing legitimacy in TripAdvisor reviews ...... 42 Hämäläinen, Lasse (Tampere University) ...... 43 2

Identity and interaction in online usernames ...... 43 Hämäläinen, Lasse (Tampere University) Lahti, Emmi (University of Helsinki) ...... 44 Rhetorics of online discussions about cannabis decriminalization ...... 44 Iordachescu, Cristina Elena (Meisei University) ...... 45 How multimodality can change the tourists’ interactions on SNS ...... 45 Jia, Mian (The University of Texas at Austin) ...... 46 Face and (im)politeness in cross-modal communication: The case of live streaming on Periscope ...... 46 Johansson, Marjut (University of Turku) ...... 47 Chatbot as a speaker? Human users and communicative AI in digital interactions ...... 47 Kaiser, Elsi (University of Southern California) ...... 48 Amazingggggg or amaaaaaazing: Moving away from spoken language in online communication ...... 48 Kováčová, Dominika (Masaryk University) ...... 49 ‘he ain’t never gonna be shit’: Cancel culture and the role of hashtags #IsCanceled and #IsOverParty ...... 49 Kumar, Ritesh (Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University) Lahiri, Bornini (Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur) Ojha, Atul Kr. (Panlingua Language Processing LLP) Bansal, Akanksha (Panlingua Language Processing LLP) ...... 50 Impoliteness, Aggression and Misogyny in Hindi and Bangla: A Case Study of YouTube Comments ...... 50 Laczkó, Krisztina (Eötvös Loránd University Budapest) ...... 51 Deictic operations of the construal of community identity in computer-mediated discourse ...... 51 Lee, Carmen (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Chau, Dennis (The Open University of Hong Kong) ...... 53 Constructing the academic self through private and public digital writing practices ...... 53 Lexander, Kristin Vold (Inland Norway University of Applied Science)...... 54 Digital interaction and relationship negotiation at the rural workplace ...... 54 Limatius, Hanna (Tampere University)...... 55 “I'm really a part of this living, breathing thing whose roots go far and wide”: The role of offline meetings in the interaction of plus-size fashion bloggers ...... 55 Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria (Swansea University) Mullineux-Morgan, Ruth (Swansea University) ...... 57 Breaking the silence: A discursive im-politeness approach to children’s talk about online child sexual grooming ...... 57 Moreno Barreneche, Sebastián (Universidad ORT Uruguay) ...... 59 Interactions with Others Mediated by the Represented Self: A Socio-semiotic Approach ...... 59 Nurmikari, Helena (University of Helsinki) ...... 61 Finnish repair-initiators as hashtags on Twitter ...... 61 O'Farrell, Kate (Stockholm University) ...... 62 “You are a female so this statement pinched you”: Indexicality and agonistic playfulness in online discussion of the MeToo Movement...... 62 Pajukallio, Outi (University of Helsinki) ...... 63 3

Parody of anti-immigrant netspeak as a form of political discourse on the internet ...... 63 Pascual, Daniel (University of Zaragoza) ...... 64 Pragmatic functions in the multimodal ensemble of research project homepages ...... 64 Pelttari, Sanna (University of Turku) ...... 65 Spanish YouTubers’ affective narratives and shared emotions ...... 65 Pérez-Sinusía, Marina (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) Cassany, Daniel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) 66 Intersubjectivity and stance-taking in the construction of a teenage girl as a micro-celebrity on Instagram ...... 66 Petykó, Márton (Aston University) ...... 67 What communicative actions are perceived as online trolling? – A corpus-based analysis of the discourse around trolling on political blogs ...... 67 Poppi, Fabio I. M. (Sechenov University, University of Łódź) Dynel, Marta (University of Łódź) ... 68 Ad libidinem: Forms of female sexualisation in RoastMe humour ...... 68 Räisä, Tiina (University of Jyväskylä) Palviainen, Åsa (University of Jyväskylä) ...... 69 How to map ecologies of multilingual family communication ...... 69 Salomaa, Elina (University of Jyväskylä) Lehtinen, Esa (University of Jyväskylä) ...... 70 Multimediality in workplaces: Affordances of paper, post-its and digital platform for organizational work ...... 70 Satokangas, Henri (University of Helsinki) ...... 71 Construction of disciplinary identities on Wikipedia ...... 71 Sluchinski, Kerry (University of Alberta) ...... 72 Animate “It” and Genderless “Comrade”: Referential Forms in Chinese LGBT Discourses ...... 72 Sundqvist, Anna (University of Helsinki) ...... 73 The commodification of dialects in the Finnish vlogosphere ...... 73 Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa (University of Helsinki)...... 74 Adding intention to insult: metapragmatic negotiation of insults in discussion forum interaction ...... 74 Vepsäläinen, Heidi (University of Helsinki) Virtanen, Mikko T. (University of Helsinki) Koivisto, Aino (University of Helsinki) ...... 75 ’And’-prefacing 2.0: timing, chunking, and thread management in Finnish multi-party WhatsApp messaging ...... 75 Virtanen, Tuija (Åbo Akademi University) ...... 77 Intentionality marking in online consumer reviews of books ...... 77 Wentker, Michael (University of Duisburg-Essen) ...... 79 Multimodality, Interactivity and Authenticity in YouTube Reviews – Methodological Challenges and Analytical Benefits ...... 79 White, Jonathan (Högskolan Dalarna) ...... 81 Identity Work in a Newbies Football Fan Forum ...... 81 Williams, Lawrence (University of North Texas) ...... 82 The variable use of French second-person pronouns in website discourse ...... 82 Xie, Chaoqun (Zhejiang International Studies University) ...... 83 4

When the private goes public: Deviance and (im)morality in Chinese online chats ...... 83 Zhang, Wei (Fuzhou University) ...... 84 Identity Construction Realised by Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae -- A Case Analysis of Chinese and Japanese SNS Responses ...... 84

Keynotes

Anita Fetzer (University of Augsburg)

“It’s a very good thing to bring democracy erm directly to everybody at home”: Participation and discursive action in mediated political discourse

This paper examines the contextual constraints and requirements of discursive action in the context of mediated political discourse in the UK (e.g., Prime Minister’s Questions, People’s Prime Minister’s Question; interviews). It adopts an integrated approach to account for the interdependencies between the contextual constraints and requirements of the medium on the one hand, and the multilayeredness of computer-mediated discourse on the other. The approach utilizes the discourse-pragmatic premises of intentionality, action ascription, pluralism and indexicality of discursive action (cf. Fetzer 2018; Sbisà 2013), the ethnomethodological premise of accountability of social action, and the sociopragmatic framework of participation (Hoffman and Bublitz 2017; Levinson 1988).

Computer-mediated discourse has been described as potentially unbounded with respect to the structuring of discourse, but at the same time as constrained by the delimiting frame of discourse genre and the participants’ meaning-making processes. The question to be addressed in this paper is whether the generalized discourse-pragmatic, ethnomethodological and sociopragmatic premises undergo mediation-specific particularization, that is whether computer-mediated discourse is constrained by ‘mediated intentionality’, ‘mediated action ascription’, ‘mediated pluralism’ and ‘mediated accountability’.

The paper will show that participants’ meaning-making processes in the mediated political arena are not only based on these generalized premises, but also on their particularization. While the former holds for frame-internal interactions, for instance between the interactional roles of ‘interviewer’ as the one(s) asking questions and ‘interviewee’ as the one(s) providing answers, the latter involves multi-frame interactions in which the multilayered and inherently unbounded discourse and its participation framework are assigned the status of an object of talk. This is reflected in a discursive contribution’s degree of explicitness with respect to contextual embeddedness, felicity conditions and presuppositions. By making explicit their premises, reasoning and argumentation, as well as their intended perlocutionary effects not only for their direct communication partners but also for the mediated participants, they pave the ground for the construction of their ‘social reality’ (Searle 2010).

References:

Fetzer, Anita. 2018. Discourse pragmatics: Communicative action meets discourse analysis. In Cornelia Ilie and Neal Norrick (eds.). Pragmatics and its Interfaces. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 33-57.

Hoffmann, Christian and Wolfram Bublitz (eds.). 2017. Pragmatics of Social Media. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Levinson, Stephen C. 1988. Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman's concepts of participation. In Paul Drew and Andrew Wootton (eds.). Erving Goffman. Exploring the interaction order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 161-227.

Sbisà, Marina. 2013. Some remarks about speech act pluralism. In Alessandro Capone et al. (eds.). Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Cham: Springer, 227-244.

Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tuomo Hiippala (University of Helsinki)

Communicative situations on social media – a multimodal perspective

Fields of study such as conservation biology and human geography regularly analyze social media content to answer field-specific research questions (see e.g. Toivonen et al. 2019). These fields rarely attend to how humans communicate with each other on social media and typically treat social media content as a single, heterogeneous mass of data, which can be subjected to data-driven analyses and search for patterns. Although social media content is frequently accompanied by rich spatial and temporal metadata that allow imposing structure on high volumes of data, little attention is paid to the communicative situations that unfold on social media platforms and generate the data in the first place.

In this presentation, I argue that quantitative approaches to social media analysis would benefit from a deeper understanding of pragmatic phenomena. Such insights could help lend additional structure to the data by describing what social media users communicate to their audiences, how and in what kinds of communicative situations. Given that most social media platforms enable users to communicate multimodally, that is, they allow users to draw on combinations of expressive resources, I argue that contemporary theories of multimodality are particularly useful for supporting social media analysis (Bateman et al. 2017). To illustrate the proposed approach and to underline the need for linguistic and multimodal insights, I draw on my previous experiences of collaborating with geographers and conservation biologists, ranging from studying language use at specific locations (Hiippala et al. 2019) to developing methods for fighting illegal wildlife trade (Di Minin et al. 2019).

References:

John A. Bateman, Janina Wildfeuer and Tuomo Hiippala (2017) Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis – A Problem-Oriented Introduction. De Gruyter: Berlin and Boston.

Tuomo Hiippala, Anna Hausmann, Henrikki Tenkanen and Tuuli Toivonen (2019) Exploring the linguistic landscape of geotagged social media content in urban environments. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34(2): 290-309.

Enrico Di Minin, Christoph Fink, Tuomo Hiippala and Henrikki Tenkanen (2019) A framework for investigating illegal wildlife trade on social media with machine learning. Conservation Biology 33(1): 210- 213.

Tuuli Toivonen, Vuokko Heikinheimo, Christoph Fink, Anna Hausmann, Tuomo Hiippala, Olle Järv, Henrikki Tenkanen and Enrico Di Minin (2019) Social media data for conservation science: a methodological overview. Biological Conservation 233: 298-315.

Sirpa Leppänen (University of Jyväskylä)

Intentional identifications in digital interaction: how semiotization serves in fashioning selves and others

Drawing on recent work in digital discourse studies and critical sociolinguistics, my talk highlights informal and interest-driven digital activities and interactions as technologies of the self whereby selves and others are manufactured and fashioned with particular semiotic and discursive resources.

Zooming on an often overlooked, yet contested, social category - older women - , I will discuss how semiotic styling, stylization and recontextualization serve as key resources in the construction of old female selves online, in ways that (dis)align in various ways with socio-cultural gender norms.

With the help of this particular case, I hope to demonstrate digital spaces as fundamentally social in nature, and to argue how a nuanced understanding of the particularities of discourses of digital sociality calls for a critical rethinking and mobilization of many of our established (socio)linguistic concepts.

Julien Longhi (University Cergy-Pontoise)

Building, exploring and analysing CMC corpora: a pragmatic tool-based approach to political discourse on the internet

In this talk, I will present a linguistic and pragmatic analysis model for analyzing meaning which is based on a methodology that falls within the wider framework of digital humanities and is equipped with digital tools that meet the theoretical requirements stated.

First I will propose a conception of digital humanities (DH) which favors a close relationship between digital technology and the humanities. This general framework will justify the use of a number of models embodied in a dynamic conception of language. This dynamism will then be reflected in the choice of metrics and textual analysis tools. Using these tools within the identified methodological framework will help describe the semantic functioning of linguistic units and better understand the processes of variations, whether temporal or generic, within discursive corpora.

I will illustrate this approach with various corpora, composed of political discourse extracted from the digital social network Twitter or Youtube, or from the internet. The interpretations will then be able to bring new knowledge on complex semiotic objects, while advancing fundamental research on the methodological and theoretical level.

Ruth Page (University of Birmingham)

Relatability and the shared stories of social media influencers

In this paper, I analyse the discursive construction of ‘relatability’ in the shared stories (Page, 2018) posted by social media influencers. ‘Relatability’ is a non-linguistic concept which has become a ‘buzzword’ for social media marketing (Abidin, 2016), and has shifted its meaning over time from the evaluation of a narrative text to the evaluation of the narrator’s interpersonal qualities. Using mediated narrative analysis, I explore relatability in a dataset from the Instagram interactions of 10 British influencers, consisting of 314 posts and 43,915 comments collected between November 2019 and January 2020, along with over 1000 stories collected during November and December 2019.

I used the collocations, word sketch and thesaurus functions of Sketch Engine (http://www.sketchengine.eu), in the English Web2015 corpus to identify four dimensions of relatability: authenticity, affect, aspiration and humour. I compared this with the word sketch for ‘relatability’ in the 155,867 word corpus of comment threads from the influencer Instagram posts. I used this to identify which posts were most frequently evaluated as ‘relatable’ by the commenters, finding that they contained self-deprecating narratives, which in some cases also were framed as humorous or appealed to positive affect. I then mapped the components of relatability onto a complex range of multimodal resources used by the influencers which include selfies, stickers, annotations and emoji.

I interpret relatability as a discursive performance which allows the influencers to market the products and their personality as aspirational ‘life-style gurus’ (Baker and Rojek, 2020) while complying with Leech’s (2014) modesty maxim (to minimize praise of self). This is framed by and capitalises on the affective economy of Instagram interactions, which is driven by the illusion of interpersonal intimacy between these influencers and their followers. The shared stories distributed between the posts and the ‘stories’ thus serve to project a ‘shared identity’ between the influencer and their audience by using rapport-enhancing pragmatic strategies, but which is also used promote particular brands, products and campaigns.

References:

Abidin, C. (2016) Please subscribe! Influencers, social media and the commodification of everyday life. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Western Australia.

Baker, S. and Rojek, C. (2020) Lifestyle Gurus: Constructing Authority and Influence Online. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Leech, G. (2014) The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford University Press.

Page, R. (2018) Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Panels

PANEL: Linguistic, discursive, and rhetoric features in online discussion boards

This panel examines the discursive, rhetoric, and linguistic features of conversation threads focusing on different topics, such as immigration, in Finnish discussion boards, mostly the Suomi24 online discussion board which is the largest online social networking website in Finland. The papers in this panel aim to outline the means by which the participants of different conversation threads argue for and against different phenomena. Particular attention is paid to the rhetoric, lexical, syntactic, textual, and discursive tools through which the participants express their stance, seek approval and a sense of belonging, and construe different group identities, including a polarization between “us” and “them”.

The panel is chaired by Simo K. Määttä and consists of the following presentations:

Karita Suomalainen and Ulla Tuomarla: Creating a common enemy. The practices of naming and referring in Finnish anti-immigration online discussion

Simo Määttä and Yrjö Lauranto: Response strategies in threads related to sexual orientation and gender diversity in the Suomi24 discussion board

Lotta Lehti, Milla Luodonpää-Manni, Jarmo Harri Jantunen and Veronika Laippala: Peer support and moralization in Finnish online discussions concerning poverty

Simo Määttä: Discussion.

Suomalainen, Karita (University of Turku) Tuomarla, Ulla (University of Helsinki)

Creating a common enemy. The practices of naming and referring in Finnish anti- immigration online discussion

Our presentation explores the linguistic means that are used in building a polarized division between US and THEM in an anti-immigration discussion in the Finnish Suomi24 online discussion forum. The presentation is based on a case study focusing on a conversation thread that was started in October 2017. Initially, the thread consisted of 40comments, 13of which were later deleted by the moderators of the forum. In the presentation, our focus is on the practices of naming and referring, in particular on what kind of linguistic expressions are being used when the discussants talk about immigrants.

In our data, the discussants make use of explicitly and implicitly referring expressions, such as generalizing NPs, anaphoric expressions, and generalizing personal constructions, when referring to the topic of the discussion, immigrants. In addition, the discussants may show their stance towards immigration through their choice of pseudonyms. We will show that the way the participants talk about and refer to immigrants plays a major role in creating the category of “immigrants” as the enemies of Finnish people: as unwanted outsiders who do not belong to the Finnish society and who only bring trouble and cost money(cf. Lahti 2019; Määttä, Suomalainen & Tuomarla 2020; see also Herneaho 2018: 208–211). By analysing the practices of naming and referring, our aim is to gain a better understanding of the linguistic means being used in hate speech and show that although outright offense occurs, hate speech can also be more subtle in its tone and yet highly discriminatory.

References:

Herneaho, Irina. 2018. Maahanmuuttodiskurssit eduskuntapuolueiden vuoden 2015 vaalimateriaaleissa [Discourses of immigration in parliamentary parties’ political platforms 2015]. Virittäjä, 122(2), 187–223.

Lahti, Emmi. 2019. Maahanmuuttokeskustelun retoriikkaa [The rhetorics of the immigration debate]. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-5707-2.

Määttä, Simo – Suomalainen, Karita – Tuomarla, Ulla.2020. Maahanmuuttovastaisen ideologian ja ryhmäidentiteetin rakentuminen Suomi24-keskustelussa [Constructing anti-immigration ideology and group identity in an online conversation thread on the Suomi24 discussion board]. Virittäjä 124(2).

Määttä, Simo (University of Helsinki) Lauranto, Yrjö (University of Helsinki)

Response strategies in threads related to sexual orientation and gender diversity in the Suomi24 discussion board

In this paper, we will analyze the ways in which people react to both direct and indirect forms of discriminatory speech in two discussion threads in the Suomi24 discussion board. The threads analyzed in this paper are part of a larger corpus consisting of 51 threads whose topic (according to the first post) is a sexual or gender minority. The corpus was classified into 5 categories on the basis of the intention expressed in the first post: seeking information, offering information, seeking experiences, offering experiences, and unclear. In addition, each thread was classified in terms of the attitude toward sexual or gender minorities, as expressed in the first post of the thread: negative or positive.

The largest category in the corpus (n=34) consists of discussion threads whose first post constructs the thread as offering information and conveying a negative attitude toward sexual or gender minorities. This category was further divided into subcategories based on the presence or lack of argumentation in the first post. The two threads chosen for a closer analysis represent the most common of these subcategories.

First, we will present our method of data collection and categorization. Second, we will analyze the topics and argumentation strategies mobilized in posts reacting to discriminatory speech in the thread. Third, we will examine the syntactic features of these posts.

Lehti, Lotta (University of Helsinki) Luodonpää-Manni, Milla (University of Helsinki) Jantunen, Jarmo Harri (University of Jyväskylä) Laippala, Veronika (University of Turku)

Peer support and moralization in online discussions concerning poverty

In this paper, we analyse participants’ interaction in the most visited Finnish discussion forum, Suomi24, which can be conceptualized as a versatile contact zone for socially and ideologically different people (see Harju 2018). More specifically, we focus on discussions concerning poverty and the ways in which participants take a stand to each other or third parties mentioned. The data consist of Suomi24 Corpus (Aller Media 2014), in this study comments published on Suomi24 forum in 2014. The analysis is conducted through Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study (CADS), which combines quantitative methods and qualitative discourse analysis (cf. e.g. Partington et al. 2013). The quantitative analysis is done with topic modeling, an unsupervised machine learning method to explore large volumes of unlabeled text (e.g. Rehurek & Sojka 2010). First, we extracted the comments with the lemma köyhä ‘poor’ or its near synonyms, which resulted in a corpus of 32,407 comments. Second, to build the topic model solution, we used structural topic modeling implemented in R (package stm). A solution with 46 Topics was estimated to have the best fit. In the qualitative analysis, we study the 25 keywords associated with these Topics. The keywords form semantic fields reflecting discourses associated with poverty. Our earlier analysis of the topics (Authors Forthcoming) revealed that politics, money and spending, and unequal access to goods are the most prominent discourses in the context of poverty discussions. In the present paper, we focus on one of the aspects related to the unequal access to goods, namely discussions related to nutritional challenges faced by the poor. The analysis reveals that online discussions provide peer support and handy tips for affordable and healthy nutrition but it also contains moralization reflecting distance between the experiences of people with lower and higher income.

References:

Aller Media. 2014. The Suomi 24 Corpus (2015H1) [text corpus]. Kielipankki. Retrieved from http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-201412171.

Harju, A. 2018. Suomi24-keskustelut kohtaamisten ja törmäysten tilana. Media & Viestintä 41(1): 51–74. DOI: https://doi.org/10.23983/mv.69952.

Partington, A., A. Duguid & C. Taylor. 2013. Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rehurek, R. & P. Sojka. 2010. Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora. In Proceedings of LREC 2010 workshop: New Challenges for NLP Frameworks. Valletta: University of Malta. 46–50.

PANEL: Dimensions of Dementia in Digital Discourse

Dementia, a neurocognitive disease which causes a deterioration of memory, language, problem- solving and other cognitive skills, currently affects around 50 million people worldwide, according to a recent estimate of the World Health Organisation.1 The impact of dementia is tremendous, both on an individual level, for the people living with the disease (PWD), their families, caregivers and medical practitioners, as well as on a societal level. It is thus hardly surprising that discourses centring around dementia feature prominently also in the digital realm.

In the past decade, online health discourse has attracted a range of pragmatic studies (cf. e.g. Kleinke 2015, and the special issue edited by Locher/Thurnherr 2017). Issues discussed include aspects of patient empowerment and, closely related to that, the discursive construction of subjective experiences of diseases, linguistic practices of identity construction, and evidence of the formation of virtual Communities of Practice (cf. Locher/Thurnherr, eds, 2017, for a selection of relevant studies, and also Bös/Schneider 2019, Schneider/Bös 2019). Research has furthermore contributed to our understanding of culturally specific health ideologies manifesting, for example, in peer-to-peer fora and blogs, but also in institutionally framed forms of mass media discourse (e.g. Brookes et al 2018; Bailey et al 2019 on representations of dementia in British news reports).

As far as health conditions and diseases go, a quite substantial amount of research has already been conducted on topics ranging from smoking cessation, pregnancy and parenting to metabolism, cancer, HIV/AIDS (e.g. Locher/Thurnherr, eds, 2017), and a few cases of mental illnesses like depression and self-harm (e.g. Brookes/Harvey 2016). Yet, dementia, though covered in a range of pragmatic studies of off-line contexts (cf. e.g. Davis 2010, Davis/Guendouzi, eds. 2013, Hamilton 2019), still awaits more systematic treatment regarding pragmatic online practices.

Contributors:

Birte Bös (University of Duisburg-Essen) & Carolin Schneider (University of Duisburg-Essen): “Typing with dementia” – Online Self-positioning of People Living with Alzheimer’s Disease

Boyd H. Davis (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Charlene A. Pope (Ralph H. Johnson VA) & Margaret A. Maclagan (University of Canterbury): Metadiscourse and multimodality in digital outreach to dementia caregivers

Sonja Kleinke: Constructing and Conceptualizing Dementia: Caregivers’ Participatory Online Talk in Public Advice Fora

Charlene A. Pope (Ralph H. Johnson VA) & Boyd H. Davis (University of North Carolina at Charlotte): Barriers to Recruiting Community Caregivers of Veterans with Dementia for an E- Mobile Support Archive

References:

Bailey, Annika; Tom Dening, Kevin Harvey (2019), “Battles and breakthroughs: representations of dementia in the British press”. Ageing & Society (2019), 1-15.

Brookes, Gavin; Kevin Harvey (2016), “Examining the Discourse of Mental Illness in a Corpus of Online Advice-Seeking Messages”. In Lucy Pickering; Eric Friginal; Shelley Staples (eds), Talking at Work. Communicating in Professions and Organizations, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 209-234.

1 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia (last accessed 16 December 2019) 15

Brookes, Gavin; Kevin Harvey; Neil Chadborn; Tom Dening (2018), ““Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press”. Social Semiotics 28(3), 371-395.

Bös, Birte; Carolin Schneider (2019), ““We are all in this together” – Balancing virtual proximity and distance in online caregiver discussions”, Paper presented at Anglistentag 22-25 September 2019 (Leipzig).

Davis, Boyd (2010), “Interpersonal issues in health discourse”. In Miriam A. Locher; Sage L. Graham (eds), Interpersonal Pragmatics. HoPs 6, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 381-404.

Davis, Boyd; Jacqueline Guendouzi (eds) (2013), Pragmatics in Dementia Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hamilton, Heidi (2019), Language, Dementia, and Meaning Making, London: Palgrave Macmillan. 3

Kleinke, Sonja (2015), “Internetforen: Laiendiskurs Gesundheit”. In Albert v. Busch; Thomas Spranz-Fogasy (eds.), Handbuch Sprache in der Medizin, Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 405–422.

Locher, Miriam A.; Franziska Thurnherr (eds) (2017), Language and Health Online, Linguistik Online 87(8), special issue.

Locher, Miriam A.; Franziska Thurnherr (2017), “Typing yourself healthy: Introduction to the special issue on language and health online”, Linguistik Online 87(8), 3-24.

Schneider, Carolin; Birte Bös (2019), “Metapragmatic reflections on verbal interactions with people living with Alzheimer’s Dementia – A social media study”, Paper presented at Corpora for Language and Ageing Research (CLARe4) 27 February – 4 March 2019 (Helsinki).

Bös, Birte (University of Duisburg-Essen) Schneider, Carolin (University of Duisburg-Essen)

“Typing with dementia” – Online Self-positioning of People Living with Dementia of the Alzheimer Type

While dementia is a prevalent topic in various disciplines and has also been covered in a range of pragmatic studies of off-line contexts (e.g. Davis 2010, Davis/Guendouzi, eds. 2013, Hamilton 2019), it still awaits more systematic treatment regarding online practices. Additionally, the perspective of people living with dementia has so far been rather marginalised. This study thus aims to take a more inclusive approach and investigates the voices of those identifying as living with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT, the most common form of dementia), in the online environment of a public message board.

Based on a pilot corpus of twelve sample threads and drawing particularly on the notion of indexicality (Bucholtz/Hall 2005: 594) and Membership Categorization Analysis (rooted in Sack’s classic work, cf. e.g. Stokoe 2012), this study explores how participants position themselves as members of a virtual Community of Practice sharing their perspectives on living with DAT. The investigation thus focusses on processes of self-categorisation, as reflected in linguistic practices of account-giving, requesting and providing advice (cf. Stommel/Koole 2010; Stommel/Lamerichs 2014).

The qualitative, close-up analysis allows for insights into the interactive dynamics of the threads and reveals negotiations of online and offline identities, including legitimization strategies of new members joining the group, the construction of expertise and a sense of community. In this way, the findings also shed light on the conceptualisation of the disease by the people living with DAT themselves.

References:

Bucholtz, Mary; Kira Hall (2005), "Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach". Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 584–614.

Davis, Boyd (2010), “Interpersonal issues in health discourse”. In Miriam A. Locher; Sage L. Graham (eds), Interpersonal Pragmatics. HoPs 6, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 381-404.

Davis, Boyd; Jacqueline Guendouzi (eds) (2013), Pragmatics in Dementia Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hamilton, Heidi (2019), Language, Dementia, and Meaning Making, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sacks, Harvey (1995), Lectures on Conversation, Vol 1 and II, ed. Gail Jefferson, Oxford: Blackwell.

Stommel, Wyke; Tom Koole (2010), “The online support group as a community: A micro-analysis of the interaction with a new member”. Discourse Studies 12(3), 357-378.

Stommel, Wyke; Joyce Lamerichs (2014), “Interaction in Online Support Groups. Advice and Beyond”. In Heidi Hamilton; Sylvia Chou Wen-Ying (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication, New York: Routledge, 198-212.

Davis, Boyd H. (University of North Carolina-Charlotte) Pope, Charlene A. (Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center; Medical University of South Carolina) Maclagan, Margaret A. (University of Canterbury)

Metadiscourse and multimodality in digital outreach to dementia caregivers

StoryCall is a web-based digital archive of over ninety 60-second video stories told by 20 female and male, Black and White caregivers for caregivers. Each story illustrates how the teller handled a specific problem in interactions with the care recipient with dementia, such as repeated questions. It is currently delivered by tablet/mobile phone in a Veterans Administration-based project. Our discussion draws on metadiscourse such as hedges or boosters which indicate pragmatic aspects of speaker/writer stance in spoken and written discourse,. We use metadiscourse in this collection to expand analysis of selected multimodal features, such as gaze, within a larger context of 40-plus online text and video dementia caregiver blogs. Organizations like Healthline, Caregiver.com and Alzheimer’s Association (US/UK) recommend blogs as part of their services to the public. Because StoryCall is by caregivers, we focused on identifying online blogs that included authentic caregiver stories about giving care. Interestingly, over half of the caregiving sites that we identified began by sharing several years of founders’ personal experiences, created a book from their online writings, and moved to social media for marketing the book(s), tips, resources, podcasts and Facebook communities. Very little diversity was apparent in either caregiver or clientele for almost all blog sites. Video blogs typically consisted of interviews by site hosts with motivational or clinical speakers or a series of training videos given by a professional. An exception was mollysmovement.com, linking a Youtube channel of 55 half-hour video conversations by Joe Daley with his mother during her last year with LewyBody dementia, which we compare with StoryCall. Our goal is to use the multicultural, multi-ethnic video vignettes of StoryCall to decrease social isolation for caregivers of Veterans by immersing them in a temporary digital community, invite caregivers’ reflective contributions, and encourage their outreach to community resources.

Kleinke, Sonja (Heidelberg University)

Constructing and Conceptualizing Dementia: Caregivers’ Participatory Online Talk in Public Advice Fora

Linguistic research on Dementia has mainly focused on public top-down discourse domains such as academic discourse, healthcare discourse, the (print)media and a variety of cultural and social domains (Swinnen&Schweda 2015, Bailey et al. 2019). Biomedical and life-style discourses as well as the framing of Dementia as war and aggression (Bailey et al. 2019), recovery, stigma and its economic consequences (Atanasova et al. 2017) have been identified as dominating Dementia discourses and criticized for their stereotyping and stigmatizing impact on our public understanding of Dementia as well as for largely excluding the perspectives of PWD and their family carers (Clark 2006, Johnstone 2016, Bailey et al. 2019). Whilst the key role of the media in forming perceptions of health and illness has long been acknowledged (Kelly et al. 2010, Atanasova et al. 2019), the rise of social media has not only provided new opportunities to seek health information, but has implemented a whole framework of bottom-up participatory health discourses (Kleinke 2015, Demmen et al. 2015), allowing users to discuss their own individual perspectives and shape the public discussion of dementia from below.

The current study aims to compare the caregivers’ individual perspectives to those found in public top-down discourses. In order to broaden the scope of discussion in the public Dementia debate and to provide a more differentiated picture, it analyses how caregivers construct and conceptualize the condition, the PWD, and their own role in the caring process. To do so, using the software MAXQDA, this study correlates qualitative CDA- and quantitative methods. In a first step, it analyses the very popular thread And it goes on and on (with 1.123 postings at the date of retrieval) from the section I have a partner with dementia from the public forum “Talking Point” provided by the official homepage of the Alzheimer’s Society, UK. The databased but category inspired qualitative analysis of this first thread focuses on the caregivers’ verbal construction and perspectivisation of Dementia in terms of discourse topoi, force dynamic aspects of the caretaker- PWD interaction and metaphorical conceptualizations. In a second step, the most prevalent topoi (such as decline, grief, tipping point and journey) are further scrutinized in more specific topical threads using the same procedure. The study shows similarities and differences in the construction of Dementia in top-down and bottom-up discourses.

References:

Atanasova, D., Koteyko, N., Brown, B. and Crawford, P. (2019). Representations of mental health and arts participation in the national and local British press, 2007–2015. Health 23, 3 –20.

Bailey, A., Dening, T & Harvey, K. (2019). Battles and breakthroughs: representations of dementia in the British press. Ageing & Society (2019), 1–15.

Clarke, J. N. (2006). The case of the missing person: Alzheimer’s disease in mass print magazines 1991– 2001. Health Communication 19, 269–276.

Demmen, J., Semino, E., Demjen, Z., Koller, V., Hardie, A., Rayson, P. and Payne, S. (2015). A computer- assisted study of the use of violence metaphors for cancer and end of life by patients, family carers and health professionals. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20, 205–231.

Johnstone, M. J. (2016). Alzheimer’s Disease, Media Representations and the Politics of Euthanasia: Constructing Risk and Selling Death in an Ageing Society. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Kelly, B., Hornik, R., Romantan, A. et al. (2010). Cancer information scanning and seeking in the general population. Journal of Health Communication 5: 734–753.

Kleinke, S. (2015). “Internetforen: Laiendiskurs Gesundheit.” Handbuch Sprache in der Medizin. Ed. Albert Busch and Thomas Spranz-Fogasy. Berlin [u.a.]: De Gruyter. 405–422.

Swinnen, A. and Schweda, M. (2015). Popularizing dementia: public expressions and representations of forgetfulness. In Swinnen, A. and Schweda, M. (eds), Popularizing Dementia: Public Expressions and Representations of Forgetfulness. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, pp. 9–22.

Pope, Charlene A. (Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center; Medical University of South Carolina)

Barriers to Recruiting Community Caregivers of Veterans with Dementia for an E- Mobile Support Archive

The mobile app, Story-Call, was designed as a Web-based archive to collect stories of lessons learned to reduce caregiver stress and other burdens as support for caregivers. Over a four-year period, 669 records were identified as Veterans with Alzheimer’s disease and screened for caregiver presence, eligibility, and willingness to participate, through repeated mailings and repeated phone calls. Of that group,112 agreed to recruitment, but of those who originally expressed interest or enrolled, not all were able to contribute, and a final 20 were consented and 18 finally recorded for participation. The remaining two withdrew after the consent process. Those solicited expressed a variety of reasons for declining recruitment, clearly reflective of caregiver burden. Caregivers who chose not to participate produced themes of stigma, grief, frustration, embarrassment, time pressures caring for multiple family members, anxiety about using electronics (iPad), deceased Veterans, denial of dementia, caregiver health problems or life crisis, and suspicion of what would happen to their information. Future studies need to address strategies that mediate these issues.

PANEL: Doing Facework Online: Imagined Audiences and Forms of Address on Public-Private Platforms

Blogs, internet forums, social media, and platforms of microblogging are often characterized by the tension between publicness and privacy, or what Schmidt has called “the rise of personal publics” in the case of Twitter (2006: 4). Indeed, although users with an open profile are usually aware of the fact that the content they post and share may be read by strangers, they also often engage in private conversations with individual users. This leads to discrepancies between the user’s “intended audiences” (Marwick & boyd 2011) and the actual readers of the internet contents.

Previous research has paid attention to the ways in which users construct their audiences and rearticulate new participation frameworks (Goffman 1981; Gerhardt, Eisenlauer & Frobenius 2014), for instance on YouTube (Boyd 2014), Facebook (Eisenlauer 2014), or Twitter via the use of hashtags to communicate with different audiences (Page 2012; Scott 2015; Zappavigna 2015).

Person reference, and forms of address in particular remain, however, largely underinvestigated. While the specificities of the forms of address used on the different platforms (e.g. the addressee’s username preceded by the ‘@’ symbol on Twitter) and the ways they interact with different audiences have been studied (Bruns & Moe 2006), research on linguistic markers to refer to discourse participants, and specifically to single them out as the addressees of an utterance or a message, still needs further exploration.

This panel puts a special emphasis on forms of address as one of the constitutive moments for ‘doing facework’ in online settings. We invite submissions focusing on how imagined audiences may be reconceptualised and/or challenged depending on how discourse participants refer to one another and to third parties in online interaction.

Contributors:

Eva Havu (University of Helsinki): The use of forms of address in French blogs and Internet Forums

Johanna Isosävi (University of Helsinki) & Ildikó Vecsernyes (University of Helsinki): Greeting, self-identification and addressing – Opening sequences in vlogs of Finnish, Hungarian and French YouTubers

Naomi Truan (University of Leipzig): Cats of Twitter: Framing pets as discourse participants in online interaction

References:

Boyd, Michael S. 2014. (New) participatory framework on YouTube? Commenter interaction in US political speeches. Journal of Pragmatics (Participation Framework Revisited: (New) Media and Their Audiences/Users) 72. 46–58. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2014.03.002.

Bruns, Axel & Hallvard Moe. 2006. Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter. In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt & Cornelius Puschmann (eds.), Twitter and Society, 15–28. New York, etc.: Peter Lang.

Eisenlauer, Volker. 2014. Facebook as a third author—(Semi-)automated participation framework in Social Network Sites. Journal of Pragmatics (Participation Framework Revisited: (New) Media and Their Audiences/Users) 72. 73–85. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.006.

Gerhardt, Cornelia, Volker Eisenlauer & Maximiliane Frobenius. 2014. Participation framework revisited: (New) media and their audiences/users. Journal of Pragmatics 72. 1–4. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2014.08.011.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Marwick, Alice E. & danah boyd. 2011. I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13(1). 114–133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313.

Page, Ruth. 2012. The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication 6(2). 181–201. doi:10.1177/1750481312437441.

Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik. 2006. Twitter and the Rise of Personal Publics. In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt & Cornelius Puschmann (eds.), Twitter and Society, 3–14. New York, etc.: Peter Lang.

Scott, Kate. 2015. The pragmatics of hashtags: Inference and conversational style on Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics 81. 8–20. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2015.03.015.

Zappavigna, Michele. 2015. Searchable talk: the linguistic functions of hashtags. Social Semiotics 25(3). 274– 291. doi:10.1080/10350330.2014.996948.

Havu, Eva (University of Helsinki)

The use of forms of address in French blogs and Internet Forums

In French written and oral media discourse interviewers and interviewees traditionally address each other by the deferential pronoun vous, whereas in specialized magazines and television programs, the familiar tu often seems to be the usual address pronoun (cf. Williams & van Compernolle 2009; Coveney 2010). Although the use of tu seems to have spread, at least in certain contexts, Internet forums discussing the use of forms of address point out the prevalence of very traditional opinions. The choice of nominal forms of address has received less attention.

This paper examines the use of pronominal and nominal forms of address in blogs and Internet Forums discussing current political events, that is in two types of Computer-Mediated Communication where writers usually lack information about their interlocutor (age, social status, profession…). It explores the interplay between nouns and pronouns, the type of speech-act (greeting, request, directive…) and its nature (neutral, conflictual…) as well as the larger context (topic, earlier exchanges…) and the impact of nominal forms of address on the expression of interpersonal relations. It also discusses the often-suggested generalization of tu and its relation with the possibilities offered by the anonymity of the medium, showing that medium itself does not automatically guarantee the use of a certain pronominal form.

References:

Coveney, Aidan. 2010. “Vouvoiement and tutoiement: Sociolinguistic reflections.” Journal of French Language Studies, 20. 2: 127–150.

Williams, Lawrence et Rémi A. van Compernolle. 2009. “Second-person pronoun use in French language discussion fora.” Journal of French Language Studies, 19: 361–378.

Isosävi, Johanna (University of Helsinki) Vecsernyes, Ildikó (University of Helsinki)

Greeting, self-identification and addressing – Opening sequences in vlogs of Finnish, Hungarian and French YouTubers

YouTube is the second most popular social media platform with 1.9 billion users, and 8 out of 10 18–49-year-olds watch YouTube, which can be navigated in 80 different languages2. In view of the popularity of the platform, it is not surprising that most famous YouTubers publishing vlogs have turned their passion into career. Yet, opening sequences of YouTube vlogs have been only little examined (English: Frobenius 2011; French: Combe Celik 2014), and especially cross-cultural comparison remains understudied. Our aim is to compare opening sequences of vlogs of Finnish, Hungarian and French YouTubers. We hypothesise that although Finnish and Hungarian both belong to Finno-Ugric languages, Hungarian may be closer to French than Finnish lingua-culture. Our analysis is based on multimodal discourse analysis, that is, in addition to verbal greetings, address forms (cf. Domonkosi 2019), and self-identification, we examine gestures (e.g. waiving of hands, pointing of fingers) and postures. Our preliminary results show that although there was individual variation among YouTubers from different lingua-cultures related to the appearance of self-identification, greetings and nominal address forms, some cross-cultural differences existed. Hungarian YouTubers greeted the most systematically, but pointed the viewers less with fingers when greeting than Finnish and French YouTubers. Only in French, some YouTubers expressed utterances related to hoping that viewers were doing well. In all languages, the YouTubers addressed the viewers most often with a plural address pronoun, but occasionally, YouTubers addressed viewers with an informal address pronoun; nominal address forms remained fairly rare. Perhaps surprisingly, constructing an identity with a self-identification was less frequent than absence of a self-identification among YouTubers from all the lingua-cultures examined.

References:

Combe Celik, Christelle. 2014. Vlogues sur YouTube : un nouveau genre d’interactions multimodales. Premier Colloque IMPEC : Interactions Multimodales Par ECran, 266–280. https://impec.sciencesconf.org/conference/impec/pages/Impec2014_Combe_Celik.pdf

Domonkosi, Ágnes. 2019. Address forms in conversations on social media. Euriditio - Educatio 3: 77-87. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=800626

Frobenius, Maximiliane. 2011. Beginning a monologue: The opening sequence of video blogs. Journal of Pragmatics 43(3). Elsevier B.V. 814–827. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.09.018.

2 https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/youtube-stats/ (accessed 24 February 2020). 25

Truan, Naomi (University of Leipzig)

Cats of Twitter: Framing pets as discourse participants in online interaction

“Mon humaine” (“my human being”), “cher collègue Gradu” (“dear colleague Gradu”) or “horresco referens chien” (“dog horresco referens”): this is how cats speak about their owners or address other pets. While owners and dogs are put at a distance, fellow companions are conceptualized as colleagues (or sometimes even friends), thus giving us insights on how people imagine how their cat perceives them and their surroundings—and how they verbally render their cat’s behaviors.

Indeed, this paper approaches the question of facework, relationships, and imagined audiences from an underinvestigated, yet highly promising perspective: through Twitter accounts of cats. A new phenomenon has emerged in the French Twittersphere, which consists in displaying a view from within by projecting how cats would digitally interact with others on the microblogging platform. One of the earliest and most prominent and influential accounts, Sütterlin Scat Katz (@SuetterlinKatz), gathers 6,378 followers (on 28 February 2020), thus showing that we are talking about a widespread practice. These Twitter accounts display, through verbal and multimodal means (mostly pictures), how cats talk about and to others. In doing so, the people behind the screens perform an act of “ventriloquizing” (Tannen 2004), which consists in talking as a cat, as if they were a cat.

In what has now established itself as a community of practice characterized by a shared repertoire of lexical, syntactic, and orthographic-prosodic features, cats present themselves as arrogant yet needy pets. The cats’ online persona is reinforced by the use of diverging person-referring expressions to communicate with humans, cats, or dogs. The qualitative, corpus-based analysis of 100 francophone Twitter accounts shows how the humans behind the accounts picture their imagined audiences (i.e. people with or without cats, loving cats or not, etc.) and divide the world into two main categories: cat people vs. dog people.

Through these online practice seemingly on the margins, and by having a closer look on what accounts evolve on the periphery or at the core of the ‘Twittercatsphere’, we thus gain valuable insights not only on interactions between humans and non-humans, but also on how pragmatic and sociolinguistic norms are produced and reproduced in a digital world.

References:

Tannen, Deborah. 2004. Talking the Dog: Framing Pets as Interactional Resources in Family Discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction 37(4). 399–420. doi:10.1207/s15327973rlsi3704_1.

Individual papers

Ainiala, Terhi (University of Helsinki) Jantunen, Jarmo H. (University of Jyväskylä) Jokela, Salla (Tampere University) Tarvainen, Jenny (University of Jyväskylä)

Spatializing difference in Finland’s biggest online discussion forum: A corpus assisted discourse analysis of comments concerning Finland’s capital region

Capital regions are functionally and symbolically distinctive parts of nation-states. In the course of nation-building, they acquire a special role through spatialization of difference, a process through which specific traits are assigned to particular regions (Johnson & Coleman 2011). This process usually involves the deployment of urban myths and discourses for the purpose of national identity-(re)construction and management of “otherness” (Short 1996: 414-438). While the special role of capitals in nation-building has been acknowledged in many studies, much less is known about spatialization of difference within capital regions. In the era of rapid urbanization, such knowledge is important, because it enables understanding the spatial dynamics of meaning-making in cities, as well as the ways in which urban discourses are entangled with social processes that are transforming cities.

This presentation focuses on digital discourses surrounding Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa, the three biggest municipalities in Finland’s capital region. The data is from the Suomi24 online discussion corpus, which is compiled from Finland’s biggest online discussion forum. The corpus (nearly 3 billion words), covers discussions from the years 2001-2016. We analyze this data in order to find out how place-based meanings and stigmas are articulated and negotiated in digital discourses. Our ultimate goal is to discuss the implications that these discourses have for the imagined geographies of the capital region, as well as related practices of urban planning and city branding.

The analysis is carried through applying methods of corpus assisted discourse studies (CADS), including keyword analysis, which is the most essential method. Preliminary results show that people related discourses are more common in data covering Helsinki than Espoo and Vantaa. These observations will be completed with qualitative analysis. We will discuss whether the data reveals identity categories attached to these three cities and differences between the cities and their inhabitants.

References:

Johnson, C. & Coleman, A. (2011). The internal other: exploring the relationship between regional exclusion and the construction of national identity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102(4): 863- 880.

Short, J. R. (1996). The urban order: an introduction to cities, culture, and power. Blackwell, Malden, MA.

Alvestad, Silje Susanne (University of Oslo)

–Beware of fakes! Detecting fake online contents based on linguistic cues

In this talk I will present the results of a pilot study related to my research project titled “Fakespeak–the language of fake news. Fake news detection based on linguistic cues”, which recently received funding from the Research Council of Norway. The primary objective of the project, involving linguists and computer scientists, is to reveal the grammatical and stylistic features of Fakespeak in Russian, Norwegian and English. The secondary objective is to improve existing fake news detection systems by, i.a., automating the defining linguistic features of Fakespeak.

Based on analyses of large samples of natural language, corpus linguists have demonstrated that there are systematic variations in the structure of language depending on the author’s communicative purpose (Grieve 2018). Thus, the language of fake online contents, in this talk represented by fake news, may be the key to their detection (ibid.).(Fake news is defined as news items that are intentionally deceptive and in which case the author knows that they are false (Horne and Adalı 2017: 2).) Indeed, a study led by Grieve (see Grieve 2019) has rendered promising results: Jayson Blair, a former journalist in the NYT, was found to have occasionally fabricated news stories. The NYT tagged the fabricated texts, resulting in two datasets; one of true and one of fabricated stories, both datasets being written by the same author. (Thus the linguists controlled or several potential sources of error.) The linguists subjected the two datasets to Register Analysis and concluded that, based on Blair’s authorship, real news features include longer average word length and nominalisations, while fake news features include the increased use of 1st and 3rd person pronouns, and the more widespread use of the present tense and emphatics (op. cit.: 32).

In the pilot study I examine Fakespeak in Norwegian based on some intriguing datasets. Specifically, NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Company, last fall devoted a programme to a controversial experiment conducted in connection with the Norwegian regional elections last spring. Exposing the pupils at a Norwegian secondary school to fake news and other kinds of disinformation, and misinformation, in social media for 12 days prior to the election the team behind the television series wanted to see if they could affect the election results. The fabricated articles are written by a journalist, and I have compared the journalist’s fabricated texts with datasets of some of the journalist’s genuine articles. Applying methods from corpus linguistics (for example Register Analysis, mentioned above) and computational linguistics (such as stylometry) as well as applied linguistics, including forensic linguistics, and drawing on insights from sociolinguistics and text linguistics, I will seek to answer the following research question:

1. What are the stylistic and grammatical features of Norwegian Fakespeak?

Within the scope of the larger project I will seek to answer questions such as the following as well:

2. How does Fakespeak relate to other kinds of deceptive language?

3. What linguistic features distinguish fake news from real news, on the one hand, and texts belonging to genres such as satire and parody, on the other?

The present study has a clear crosslinguistic aspect: The fact that the methods used are directly comparable(with the datasets in all languages consisting of fake versus genuine texts written by one and the same author)enables us to identify to what extent the strategies used in Norwegian and English are similar, both at the level of genre (informationally dense writing vs. interactive discourse, for example) and at the level of linguistic structures. If we can show that the linguistic and stylistic features of Fakespeak are similar across different languages,

28 this will have significant implications for the research goal of automatising identification, specifically, the research question of whether the fake news detection systems should be language specific or language independent.

References:

Grieve, Jack. 2019. Linguistics approaches to the detection and obfuscation of disinformation. A multi-and inter-disciplinary approach to disinformation research and policy. Presentation held at St. Anthony’s College Oxford, March 11, 2019.

Grieve, Jack. 2018. The language of fake news. Text available at https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/2018/09/the-language-of-fake- news.aspx, accessed 28.02.20.

Horne, Benjamin D. and Sibel Adalı. 2017. This just in: Fake news packs a lot in title, uses simpler, repetitive content in text body, more similar to satire than real news. Available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.09398, accessed 28.02.20.

Andersson, Marta (Stockholm University)

‘So many damn virologists here!’: functional analysis of impoliteness in Facebook comment threads on the Swedish management of COVID-19 –the tension between conformity and distinction

This paper deals with impoliteness in COVID-19 related discussions on the Swedish national public television broadcaster(SVT) Facebook site and aims to illustrate the discursive process of ideological (dis)affiliation, ‘othering’ and group formation (Van Dijk, 2006), all of which can be realized through impolite language use.

In ideologically charged discussions, the participants often strive to form alliances with those “thinking alike” and disaffiliate themselves from their opponents (‘outgroup’). These processes have been argued to lie at the heart of how individuals categorize society, claim social identities, and situate themselves within different discourses (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lorenzo-Dus & Bou- Franch, 2015). In online context, discussions that involve group formation and ideology are usually rife with verbal strategies that infringe the norms of appropriate behavior (or even civility), create an atmosphere of negative emotion, and generally threaten the participants’ face and/or social identity. In pragmatics, such verbal behavior is commonly discussed under the umbrella term ‘impoliteness’ (e.g., Culpeper, 2011). Importantly, both production and comprehension of impoliteness have been argued to be based on the interlocutors being located in the same cultural space and sharing the same cultural assumptions (Hunston, 2001; Culpeper, 2011).

In this respect, the current study is a step towards cultural contextualization of impoliteness research, which (similarly to politeness research) has in the last years striven to depart from universalism. The underlying goal of this paper is to illustrate the problematic relationship between individualism and collectivism in contemporary Sweden –as a horizontal-individualist culture (Triandis & Genfald, 1998), Sweden values equality over competition or power, and so the level of polarization of the public discourse on the official management to the crisis situation shows the tension between the equality and consensus-based Jantelagen ideologies, on the one hand, and the idea of distinction (in line with Bordieu)–on the other.

The more specific focus of the study is evaluative language. Evaluative meanings express the value system of the speaker and thus serve the purpose of aligning or disaligning oneself with the interlocutors. Consequently, evaluation can be expected to make a salient facet of impoliteness. This argument is corroborated by the fact that the core of evaluative meanings has been argued to pertain to emotions (Martin and White, 2005). Emotions, in turn, have been argued to be one of the key features of impoliteness–on a par with other key notions, such as face (Culpeper, 2011 and elsewhere). As a result, the process of bond formation via impolite language use will be related to underlying (negative) emotions. An effective method to analyze emotion, and hence evaluation, is the systemic-functional framework of Appraisal (Martin and White, 2005), which the current study adopts. Hence, not only individual emotions (Affect) can be analyzed but also those that can be categorized as “institutional feelings” (Judgement and Appreciation) –in terms of shared community values. To this end, the study adopts a corpus analytical approach based on the affordances of UAM Corpus Tool, which includes a pre-existing and editable Appraisal annotation scheme.

References:

Culpeper, J., 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Bou-Franch, P., 2013. Relational work in anonymous, asynchronous communication: A study of (dis)affiliation on YouTube. In I. Kecskes & J. Romero-Trillo (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 343-365). Boston: Walter de Gruyter. 30

Hunston, S., 2001. Evaluation and the planes of discourse. In: S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourses (176-207). New York: Oxford University Press.

Martin, J.R., & White, P., 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Trandis, H. & Gelfand, M., 1998. Converging Measurement of Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74 (1), 118-128.

Van Dijk, T., 2006. Ideology and discourse analysis. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2), 115-140.

Ballagó, Júlia (Eötvös Loránd University; MTA Research Institute for Linguistics)

Genre knowledge and online discourses: the case of Hungarian recipe and book review websites

Genre-related issues are broadly discussed in scholarly discourse about computer-mediated communication (cf. Giltrow and Stein eds. 2009; Herring, Stein and Virtanen eds. 2013). This talk joins in the above-mentioned discourse by adopting the perspective of social cognitive pragmatics, and addresses the central question as to how specific genres of offline discourse acquire new, emergent genre qualities on the internet. On the one hand, this approach assumes that genres are discursive schemas and categories, i.e. knowledge activated during the processing and production of an utterance as a whole (cf. Busse 2014; Steen 2011). On the other hand, this entails that the focus of attention is placed on how participants of a certain type of online discourse adapt genre knowledge in an innovative way. In order to answer the research question, the talk reports on a qualitative case study of Hungarian recipe and book review websites, two discourse types having strong offline traditions. Regarding the selected websites, the study analyses participants’ reflections on the genre of the discourse they are involved in. These reflections – interpreted as macro-level contextualization cues (cf. Verschueren 1999, 108–112; Gumperz 1982) initiating the successful understanding and construal of a discourse as a whole – involve (i) explicit names of the activated discursive schema, (ii) reflections on genre-specific participant roles which activate the adequate discursive schema during the processing of a discourse, (iii) reflections on genre-specific participant roles which invite new participants to rely on the adequate discursive schema during the construal of a discourse. The analysis of linguistic data from thematically different websites points to the proactive functioning of genre knowledge, i.e. the fact that participants of online discourses use genre knowledge in a creative, innovative way.

References:

Busse, Beatrix 2014. “Genre.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, ed. by Stockwell, Peter and Sara Whiteley, 103–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Giltrow, Janet and Dieter Stein (eds.) 2009. Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Herring, Susan C., Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.) 2013. Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Steen, Gerard 2011. “Genre between the Humanities and Sciences.” In Bi-directionality in the Cognitive Sciences, ed. by Callies, Marcus, Wolfram Keller and Astrid Lohöfer, 21–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Verschueren, Jef 1999. Understanding Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold.

Biri, Ylva (University of Helsinki)

Stance in online fan communities: a corpus-based analysis of grammatical and lexical stance

Online fan communities are an example of online crowds, where participants with a shared interest engage in affective processes (Stage, 2013). This study analyses stance in fan communities to describe the linguistic realization of this affective dimension. As a resource for conveying epistemic evaluation and attitude, stance is used to express a writer’s stance towards an object, here the object of the fan community; on the other hand, stance is used to align the writer with other participants (cf. DuBois, 2007).

My goal is to investigate lexico-grammatical forms of stance as a facet of the linguistic registers of fan communities. Previous studies of stance in online settings have shown the prevalence of especially attitudinal stance (Myers, 2010), which may be used to mediate interpersonal relationships (Rahimpour, 2014). Thus, I will also interpret the kinds of stance in terms of their interpersonal functions.

To compare fan communities in different settings, my case study uses two fan communities based around popular animated TV-shows, the long-running Japanese series One Piece and the more recent US series Steven Universe. My data is a corpus of posts about the series collected from Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr. Stance is identified by searching for stance-marking grammatical constructions, but as many stance-expressions are found in the open classes of evaluative or affective lexis (Gray & Biber, 2012), the analysis is completed by identifiction of lexical stance- expressions, using the USAS semantic tagger (Rayson et al. 2004).

Preliminary results indicate that the use of stance relates to the affordances of the social media platforms, notably the perceived audience and dialogicity of the discussion forum Reddit compared to the microblogs Twitter and Tumblr. Differences in interpersonal stance functions across the studied communities and platforms suggest different motivations for fan participation and for online crowd participation on the platforms in general.

References:

DuBois, J. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2012). Current Conceptions of Stance. In Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres (pp. 15–33). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030825_2

Myers, G. (2010). Discourse of blogs and wikis. London: Continuum.

Rahimpour, S. (2014). Blogs: A Resource of Online Interactions to Develop Stance-taking. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 98, 1502–1507. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.571

Rayson, P., Archer, D., Piao, S. L., McEnery, T. (2004). The UCREL semantic analysis system. In proceedings of the workshop on Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic labelling for NLP tasks in association with 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004), 25th May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 7-12.

Stage, C. (2013). The online crowd: a contradiction in terms? On the potentials of Gustave Le Bon’s crowd psychology in an analysis of affective blogging. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 14(2), 211–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2013.773261

Blitvich, Pilar (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

Cancelling: Boycotting and shaming rituals in an outrage culture

In the USA, despite different origins and goals, “call out culture” and “cancel culture” are often grouped under the “outrage culture” rubric which finds its expression mostly through online shaming (Romano, 2019). This presentation will focus on cancelling: the virtual boycott of a celebrity or personality accused of doing/saying something (racist, misogynistic, homo/transphobic, etc.) that so outrages social media users, they “cancel” the person to take attention away from them and damage his/her career. Cancelling is seen either as the indiscriminate attack of a raging mob or as a form of social justice and empowerment of those, usually members of minorities, who lack the social, political, or professional power to establish new ethical and social norms or to respond effectively when those norms are violated (Nakamura, 2015).

Although the press has covered cancelling (see Bromwich, 2018, among others) academic research on cancelling from pragmatics or other related fields is lagging and no micro-level, theory-based descriptions of what constitutes cancelling have been yet provided.

By focusing on acclaimed writer R. J. Rowling, cancelled in late 2019 for posting perceived transphobic remarks on Twitter, this presentation offers a qualitative analysis of the form and function of cancelling looking at (circa 100) tweets that include the #cancelJKRowling/#cancelJK /#cancelrowling hashtags. A multidisciplinary theoretical framework and methodology are applied to the corpus regarding the use of hashtags (Matley, 2018; Scott, 2015), receipts, memes (Duchscherer & Dovidio, 2016; Williams et al. 2016), and aggressive language (Blitvich, 2018; Culpeper, 2011), all aimed at group exclusion (Williams et al., 2016). This exclusion is justified by reducing, through various semiotics modes, the multifaceted identity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Joseph, 2013) of those cancelled to one single defining position, that of racist, misogynistic, homo/transphobic, etc., thereby constructing them as the embodiment of those systems of oppression that need to be denounced and fought against (Ahmad, 2015).

References:

Blitvich, P. Garcés-Conejos. (2018). Globalization, transnational identities, and conflict talk: The superdiversity and complexity of the Latino identity. Journal of Pragmatics, 134, 120-133.

Bromwich, J.L. (2018, June 28) Everybody is cancelled. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/style/is-it-canceled.html

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.

Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence (Vol. 28). Cambridge University Press.

Duchscherer, K. M., & Dovidio, J. F. (2016). When memes are mean: Appraisals of and objections to stereotypic memes. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2(3), 335.

Joseph, J. E. (2013). Identity work and face work across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Journal of Politeness Research, 9(1), 35-54.

Matley, D. (2018). “Let's see how many of you mother fuckers unfollow me for this”: The pragmatic function of the hashtag #sorrynotsorry in non-apologetic Instagram posts. Journal of Pragmatics, 133, 66-78.

Nakamura, L. (2015). The unwanted labour of social media: Women of colour call out culture as venture community management. New Formations, 86(86), 106-112.

Scott, K. (2015). The pragmatics of hashtags: Inference and conversational style on Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics, 81, 8-20.

Romano, A. (2019, December 30). Why can’t we stop fighting about cancel culture. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/30/20879720/what-is-cancel-culture-explained-history-debate

Williams, A., Oliver, C., Aumer, K., & Meyers, C. (2016). Racial microaggressions and perceptions of Internet memes. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 424-432.

Williams, K. D., Forgas, J. P., & Von Hippel, W. (2013). The social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion, rejection, and bullying. London: Psychology Press.

Cesiri, Daniela (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

Food blogs as places of social interaction: a qualitative investigation of the Comments Sections

The study investigates the socio-cultural connotations and pragmatic implications present in food blogs. Food blogs can be considered virtual communities and places of social interaction, in which the food blogger acts as leader of the community, while the members are regular visitors who comment the recipes and the blog posts, and directly interact with the blogger. Food blogs are usually organized in three main sections each of which fulfils a specific communicative function. The About Pages in which the food bloggers introduce themselves and their blog, thus constructing a specific virtual persona. Then, the Recipes Sections in which food bloggers present their dishes, their expertise, reinforcing their role of expert leaders in their community, while the actual interaction between blogger and users happens in the Comments Sections (Cesiri, 2020).

The aim of the study is to ascertain if the construction of the digital identity of each food blogger as expert leader is somehow influenced by the communicative function of each section in the blog. To do so, the study explores pragmatic aspects in the Comments Sections of a corpus of food blogs in English. First, by means of Brown & Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness, and face-threatening and face-saving acts, the users’ comments and the bloggers’ responses are examined to see how bloggers and users challenge or reaffirm their reciprocal sense of in-group identity as well as how they manage their roles of expert/leader and non-expert/member, respectively. Then, Goffman’s (1959) theory of society as a stage is employed to investigate if the digital characterization that the bloggers provide for themselves in the About Pages, and the expert persona that emerges in the Recipes Sections, are consistent with the personality that transpires in their replies to the users’ comments. Hence, it will be ascertained if the food bloggers manage to construct a consistent virtual persona throughout their blog, not just in its single parts.

References:

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness. Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cesiri, D. (2020). The Discourse of Food Blogs. Multidisciplinary Perspectives. London/New York: Routledge.

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre.

Chankova, Mariya (South-West University N. Rilski – Blagoevgrad)

Have we un-learned how to argue? Divisive discourses in the post-digital era

New outlets for communication, multimodal data that shape up new affordances online, networking, scope and expansion, Web 2.0 with its liberalization of news conduits: some researchers tend to suggest that it is old news now, from Negroponte’s sharp prediction (1998) that “the digital revolution is over” to Cramer’s nuanced observation that the post-digital “in its simplest sense describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitisation”, not completely detached from “sentiments of disenchantment and scepticism” (2014: 17). It has become increasingly harder to separate online and offline presence, with social actors honing and polishing their identity through discursive actions and strategies on all communicative outlets available. Polarization and partisanship have been dominating public discourse both online and offline (e.g. Garcia et al. 2015), embodying the ultimate paradox of the digital era: freedom of expression and the liberalization of information channels on the one hand, and the impossibility of voicing (or the un-utterability of) some viewpoints.

This contribution looks into divisive discourses in an attempt to unwind argumentative strategies used in public discourses broadcasted online through various communicative and content-sharing platforms. The main focus of the study is to look into argumentative strategies that speakers use in order to articulate and defend a position, which in turn takes part in constructing their social actor. Those strategies include naming, labeling, categorizing, a range of acts of the exercitive kind, and using these acts to delimit one’s identity and the identity of the interlocutor. A combination of methods of analysis is used to conduct this study. First, it mostly draws on an illocutionary act analysis (as in Chankova 2019) with a discussion of entitlement and illocutionary effect, where the felicity condition of entitlement embodies the social power relations that speakers and hearers build in their interactions. Second, critical discourse analysis (as described in van Dijk 1995) is also drawn upon for an evaluation of socio-political issues in the process of social actor construction. The material used is collected from the video sharing platform YouTube, and consists of videos and comments to videos, in French and Russian, which are qualitatively examined. Among the multitude of divisive topics, three have been selected for their actuality and impact upon our time: climate change, political commentary and lately the coronavirus pandemic.

References:

Chankova, M. (2019). Rejecting and challenging illocutionary acts. Pragmatics 29:1, 33-56. doi: http://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17041.cha

Cramer, F. (2014). What is post-digital? Post-Digital Research 1:3, 10-25.

Garcia, D., Abisheva, A., Schweighofer, S., Serdült, U., & Schweitzer, F. (2015). Ideological and temporal components of network polarization in online political participatory media. Policy & internet, 7(1), 46-79.

Negroponte, N. (1998). Beyond digital. Wired, January 12. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/negroponte.html

Van Dijk, T. (1995). Aims of critical discourse analysis. Japanese Discourse 1, 17-27.

Elordui, Agurtzane (University of the Basque Country) Aiestaran, Jokin (University of the Basque Country)

How to be ‘authentic’ in Instagram? Metalinguistic reflections on language stylistic choices among Basque youth

Social media have become a relevant site for young people for negotiating and constructing self- presentation in the digital context. Particularly in youth’s social networks like Instagram, being ‘ourselves’ is a performance option, and it implies the deployment of communicative resources, such as language choice and alternation between linguistic codes. The display of authenticity is a core value in the production of discourse for those personal and public digital presentations (Androutsopoulos 2015, Lee 2014, Leppanen et al. 2015, Marwick and Boyd 2011): it is a form of self-validating and, as such, a desirable goal.

The research in this paper examines the practices and metalinguistic reflections on language choice and alternation in Instagram among Basque young speakers, focusing on the construction and negotiation of authenticity. Data for the research come from a sample of 30 Basque-speaking university students from the Basque Country, aged between 18 and 25, that was collected by Gaztesare research group in 2019. The corpus compiles the written production in Instagram of those students, but it also includes 6 focus groups where students were questioned about stylistic choices based on examples drawn from the corpus. We also have taken a techno-biographic approach to language and identity (Barton and Lee 2013a, b; Lee 2017). That method allows us to understand the participants’ current linguistic practices in social media and how their online language uses relate to their everyday experiences with technologies.

The analysis of the written corpus and the reflections of the students show that vernacular Basque dialects are primordial resources for stylization and performance of authenticity in written social media. Vernacular dialects work as an anchor for solidarity and local affiliation but, above all, they are core resources in the negotiation of ‘authentic’ Basqueness, which is particularly significant among Basque youth in order to use Basque (Urla et al. 2016). Some cases of crossing among new speakers in the corpus also confirm it: they make their Basque speech more ‘authentic’ by integrating features of the traditional regional dialects into their school-learned Standard.

References:

Androutsopoulos, J. (2015): «Negotiating authenticities in mediatized time». Discourse, Context & Media, 8, p. 74-77.

Barton, D. and Lee C. (2013a): Language online. Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. London & New York: Routledge.

_____ (2013b): « ‘This is me’ Writing the self-online» In Language online. Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. 67-85. London & New York: Routledge.

Lee, C. (2014): «Language choice and self-presentation in social media: the case of university students in Hong Kong», in P. Seargeant and C. Tagg (eds.) The language of social media: Community and Identity on the Internet, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Lee, C. (2017): Multilingualism online. London & New York: Routledge.

Leppanen, S., Møller, J., Nørreby, T., Stæhr, A., & Kytölä, S. (2015): «Authenticity, normativity and social media». Discourse, Context & Media, 8, p. 1-5.

Marwick, A. & Boyd, D. (2011): «I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately”: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience» New Media Soc., 13 (2011), 96–113.

Urla J., Amorrortu, E., Ortega, A., Goirigolzarri, J. (2016): «Authenticity and Linguistic Variety among New Speakers of Basque». In Ferreira, V. and P. Bouda (arg.) Language Documentation and Conservation in Europe, 1-12

Grabiger, Luisa (University of Greifswald)

Online Identity Construction of Trans* Beauty Vloggers - a Multimodal Linguistic Analysis of Queer Discourse on YouTube

The presentation will focus on the ongoing PhD project of online identity construction of gender fluid influencer in the beauty and fashion genre on YouTube. With the help of makeup, trans* beauty vloggers express their sexual identities and simultaneously question stereotypes and conventional ideals and norms of beauty on YouTube. YouTube as a platform has gained notable relevance not only for a multi-million dollar beauty industry which signs influencers, but also in its original intention to offer people a platform for expressing and negotiating their online identities.

The presentation aims to give an insight into the analyses of queer discourses produced by trans* beauty influencers and vloggers on YouTube with a specific focus on the significance this has for group identity construction, influencer identity construction, language negotiations, and interactions of the discourse community. Through a multimodal discourse analysis, the presentation attempts to investigate through which semiotic resources online (gender) ident it ies are verbally and nonverbally indexed and how verbal and paralinguistic features interact in the co- construction of ident it ies between speakers and audiences. Furthermore, it will be crit ically discussed what features on YouTube enhance and limit online identity construction and how specific metrics and affordances of the medium are being used by influencer. Therefore, the presentation tries to focus on structures, patterns, and potential dangers of audiovisual communication of beauty and fashion YouTubers.

The research design subscribes to a corpus-driven, mixed methods approach with an emphasis on a qualitative and explorative paradigm. A microanalysis of videos, comments, and interviews through digital ethnography is combined with a macroanalysis of ideological processes in language use. Although being on the interface of several theoretical fields, sociolinguistics of identity, gender as a social dimension of identity, and media linguistics constitute the dominant theoretical background.

References:

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: polity, 2009.

Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. Language and sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Horak, Laura. “Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (4), 2014, 572-585.

Litosseliti, Lia. Gender and language. Theory and practice. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Page, Ruth. Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. London: Routledge, 2012.

Raun, Tobias. Out online. Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Sherman, Elisabeth. “The makeup revolution is being led by queer influencers of color”. The Daily Dot, 12.7.2018, https://www.dailydot.com/irl/lgbtq-influencers-people-of-color/. Accessed 2019-09-02.

Webster, Lexi. “‘I am I’: Self-constructed transgender identities in internet-mediated forum communication.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 256, 129-146.

Zimman, Lal. “Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men.” Journal of Language and Sexuality 2 (1), 2013, 1-39

Hidalgo Downing, Raquel (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Márquez Reiter, Rosina (Open University)

The intercultural expert: constructing legitimacy in TripAdvisor reviews

In this paper we examine internet travellers’ reviews of Spanish hotels in major tourist destinations in the Spanish-speaking world and the hotels’ responses. Drawing on a database of 120 TripAdvisor reviews over 4 Spanish hotels chains across tourist destinations in the Hispanic world, our study offers a discursive examination of how travellers and hotels provide evidence for their claims and counter claims within the framework of CMC. The analysis of the reviews show the way reviewers construct legitimacy of their claims through different discourse strategies which are specific to online reviews, and how cultural representations appear as result of the interaction between the tourist and the local tourist site. The analysis shows that the tourist’s experience is mediated by prior knowledge gathered from the hotel website (also Thurlow and Jaworski 2011) and previous visits to the country in question or previous stays at the same chain of hotels in a different destination, and how this knowledge is juxtaposed with the actual experience of the place visited. The results of the study show how the interactions between the tourists and the local hotels are expressed in the reviews. The analysis reveals the intercultural tension that arises when local knowledge of the specific culture cannot be married with the expectancies of homogeneity created by an increasingly globalized experience of tourism.

References:

Márquez Reiter, R. & Hidalgo Downing, R. (2020). Intercultural communication in a globalized world: the case of Spanish. In D. Koike & C. Félix-Bradefer (Eds.). Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics. London, Routledge.

Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A. (2011). Tourism Discourse. Languages and banal globalization. Applied Linguistics Review 2, 285-312.

Hämäläinen, Lasse (Tampere University)

Identity and interaction in online usernames

On many web services, it is possible to register a personal user account, including a username. The username functions as user’s identifier on that website, enabling other users to recognize him or her. In contrast to real-life personal names, usernames are chosen by ourselves. Therefore, they are a great chance for web users to express their identity. Usernames can also serve as a tool of interaction with other users, giving information of name bearer’s characteristics or interests.

This paper discusses how web users express their identity and how they interact with other users via their usernames. It brings together results of several previous studies (e.g. Aleksiejuk 2016a, 2016b; Hämäläinen 2019a) and some unpublished findings. Usernames are examined in various online contexts, for example discussion forums, video game communities (Crenshaw & Nardi 2014; Hämäläinen 2016), sex chats (Hämäläinen & Haasio 2019) and illegal drug markets (Hämäläinen 2019b).

The paper states that usernames often tell something about their owner’s identity, characteristics or interests, e.g. real-life personal name, age, gender, nationality, hobbies, or popular culture favourites. However, usernames in different kinds of online communities vary greatly. For example, usernames in an erotic chat are packed with information that is most relevant for dating purposes (gender, age, location, sexual orientation). Usernames on a global marketplace of illegal drugs, on the other hand, exploit various marketing strategies, thus resembling real-life commercial names.

References:

Aleksiejuk, Katarzyna 2016a: Pseudonyms. – Carole Hough (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming pp. 438–452. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aleksiejuk, Katarzyna 2016b: Internet Personal Naming Practices and Trends in Scholarly Approaches. – Guy Puzey & Laura Kostanski (eds.), Names and Naming. People, Places, Perceptions and Power, pp. 3–17. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Crenshaw, Nicole & Nardi, Bonnie 2014: What's in a name? Naming practices in online video games. – Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play pp. 67– 76.

Hämäläinen, Lasse 2016: Suomalaisten verkkoyhteisöjen käyttäjänimet [Usernames in Finnish online communities]. Virittäjä 120(3) pp. 398–422.

Hämäläinen, Lasse 2019a: Nimet verkossa. Tutkimus verkkoyhteisöjen käyttäjänimistä ja virtuaalisen minigolfpelin radannimistä [Names on the internet. A study of usernames in online communities and level names in a virtual minigolf game]. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.

Hämäläinen, Lasse 2019b: User Names of Illegal Drug Vendors on a Darknet Cryptomarket. Onoma 50 pp. 43–68.

Hämäläinen, Lasse – Ari Haasio 2019: Vakava leikki: Tiedonjakaminen, identiteetti ja leikillisyys suomalaisen seksichatin nimimerkeissä [Serious play: Information sharing, identity and playfulness in the nicknames of a Finnish sex chat]. WiderScreen 1–2/2019.

Hämäläinen, Lasse (Tampere University) Lahti, Emmi (University of Helsinki)

Rhetorics of online discussions about cannabis decriminalization

This paper deals with rhetorics and argumentation in Finnish online discussions about cannabis decriminalization. Cannabis products have long been illegal almost everywhere, but recently some countries have decriminalized using it, allowed medical cannabis or even established legal markets for non-medical cannabis. In Finland, a large debate about the theme arose in October 2019, when a citizens’ initiative to decriminalize cannabis use collected more than 50,000 signatures and ended up in Finnish Parliament treatment. The debate was participated not only by politicians and mass media but also by ordinary citizens via social media and online discussion forums.

This study examines the discussions of cannabis decriminalization on Ylilauta, one of the most used Finnish online discussion forums. Our data consists of 22 discussion threads concerning the theme, containing altogether 9,073 messages. We analyse, what kind of arguments are used to support and object cannabis decriminalization, and how other users respond these arguments. Theoretically and methodologically, the study is based especially on discourse analysis and The New Rhetoric Approach (e.g. Johnstone 2008; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1971).

According to our preliminary results, the cannabis discussions on Ylilauta are highly polarized between the supporters and the objectors of the decriminalization initiative. Opinions are sometimes presented with highly affective expressions. Argumentation is often lacking or based on fallacies, for example circular argumentation, “straw doll” or argumentum ad hominem. Overall, the findings support the idea of “post-truth era”, where emotional and affective expression is more influential than scientific facts and rational argumentation.

References:

Johnstone, Barbara 2008: Discourse analysis. 2. edition. Malden: Blackwell.

Perelman, Chaïm – Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie 1971 [1958]: The new rhetoric. A treatise on argumentation. Translated by John Wilkinson & Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Iordachescu, Cristina Elena (Meisei University)

How multimodality can change the tourists’ interactions on SNS

In the present time, social media has a very wide range of use, but its most common attribution is the interaction among individuals. This research aim is to understand how the dynamic in online interactions is chanced within multimodal communication.

The data collected and analyzed for this research focuses on the multimodal text from Ito’s city official Instagram account and official website. Ito city is one of the small local cities located 200km east from Tokyo.I have observed several issues in Ito city’s promotion such as language barrier, unimodal text on SNS, and one-way communication style. In the same time the touristic and informational elements provided do not have any continuity and the gap between the locals and the tourists’ view of attraction spots are unlike. Therefore, the notion of multimodality and intercultural communication is necessary in order to address these issues. The questionnaire addressed to tourists and the interview with visitors and Ito’s residents showed the different perception of the touristic attractions. Using multimodality I will connect the visual elements of interest from the both sides. For the language part, I will use discourse analysis for their Instagram account and their official website to recognize which can be the similarities and the difference between the locals and tourists vision of attractions and how they can be used to engage the tourists in communication. I am curious how multimodality can modify the interactions between different individuals on Ito City’s Instagram account in order to increase the awareness of the city’s popularity. At this point, the interests’ gap is wide and the interaction to increase the Ito’s popularity cannot be made if the touristic perceptions are different.

Jia, Mian (The University of Texas at Austin)

Face and (im)politeness in cross-modal communication: The case of live streaming on Periscope

Face and (im)politeness have been extensively explored in both text-based and video-based online media (Graham & Hardaker, 2017). Despite examining variations across different online platforms, existing studies often assume that participants in one platform share symmetrical affordances and tend to display similar norms of language use (Locher, Bolander, & Hohn, 2015). Live streaming platforms (e.g., Periscope, Twitch), however, represent a cross-modal communication where participants have asymmetrical communicative constraints and resources (Licoppe & Morel, 2018; Recktenwald, 2017). While streamers synchronously interact with the audience via speech and paralanguage, viewers make comments asynchronously through text messages and emoji. The discrepancy of affordances between streamers and viewers may create misunderstandings that are harder to repair, especially when discussing controversial topics. Moreover, the asymmetrical anonymity between streamers and viewers may result in different linguistic and paralinguistic representations of (im)politeness. Given the unique asymmetry of affordances in online streaming, this proposal intends to explore how streamers and viewers discursively manage their face and identity and construct communicative norms when discussing controversial topics. The present study will be grounded in Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice, which has been widely applied in the pragmatic analyses of online contexts (Graham, 2007; Stommel & Koole, 2010). The data will be collected from Periscope, a popular live streaming platform, and be analyzed by drawing on insights from interpersonal pragmatics and (im)politeness studies (Locher, 2015). This study echoes Graham and Hardaker’s (2017) call for examining the intersecting norms of multiple modalities in online communication. It is hoped that the findings can also contribute to our understanding of (im)politeness in expressing disagreement (Graham, 2007).

References:

Graham, S. L. (2007). Disagreeing to agree: Conflict,(im) politeness and identity in a computermediated community. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 742–759.

Graham, S. L. & Hardaker, C. (2017). (Im)politeness in digital communication. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kádár. (eds.). The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness. 785–814. London: Palgrave.

Licoppe, C., & Morel, J. (2018). Visuality, text and talk, and the systematic organization of interaction in Periscope live video streams. Discourse Studies, 20, 637–665.

Locher, M. A. (2015). Interpersonal pragmatics and its link to (im) politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 5–10.

Locher, M. A., Bolander, B., & Höhn, N. (2015). Introducing relational work in Facebook and discussion boards. Pragmatics, 25, 1–21.

Recktenwald, D. (2017). Toward a transcription and analysis of live streaming on Twitch. Journal of Pragmatics, 115, 68–81.

Stommel, W., & Koole, T. (2010). The online support group as a community: A micro-analysis of the interaction with a new member. Discourse studies, 12, 357–378.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johansson, Marjut (University of Turku)

Chatbot as a speaker? Human users and communicative AI in digital interactions

Chatbots, one type of social bot, are software programs that function based on artificial intelligence (AI). Their communicative functioning produces written or spoken interactions that are simulated and scripted. Social bots are used to execute various tasks, such as giving advice to consumers and patients in health care or tutoring pupils in learning tasks (Fryer et al. 2017, 2019). When they appear as disembodied conversational agents, they can have human-like features, like gender and names (See Araujo 2018).

In this paper, my aim is to study chatbots as speakers and participants in a digital communication situation, as well as the relationship established between a user and chatbot. For users who engage in a human-machine interaction, the agency of a chatbot or how to achieve shared understanding is not a clear-cut task. A chatbot is the Other, the stranger in the interaction.

In the current literature on computer-mediated communication or digital discourse analysis, the focus is on human communication. This paper instead considers some preliminaries of digital interaction in which the other conversational partner is a machine (Zhao, 2006; Guzman & Lewis 2019; Papacharissi 2019, Spence 2019, Author). My theoretical and methodological approaches will be based on sociopragmatics, dialogical linguistics, digital discourse analysis, and human-machine communication (HMC) studies, which include communication with chatbots and robots.

My data come from approximately 100 text-based interactions in French and English with entertainment chatbots. These interactions focused on two types of language activities: human agreement and cooperation with the chatbot versus disagreement and conflict. The focus will be on sequences and metacomments in which the participants are involved in getting to know each other, and constructing their interactional participant identities.

References:

Araujo, Theo, 2018. Living up to the chatbot hype: The influence of anthropomorphic design cues and communicative agency framing on conversational agent and company perceptions. Computers in Human Behavior 85, 183–189.

Fryer, Luke K., Nakao, Kaori, Thompson, Andrew, 2019. Chatbot learning partners: Connecting learning experiences, interest and competence. Computers in human behavior 93, 279–289.

Fryer, Luke K., Ainley, Mary, Thompson, Andrew, Gibson, Aaron, Sherlock, Zelinda, 2017. Stimulating and sustaining interest in a language course: An experimental comparison of Chatbot and Human task partners. Computers in Human Behavior 75, 461–468.

Guzman, Andrea L., Lewis, Seth, 2019. Artificial intelligence and communication: A Human– Machine Communication research agenda. New media & society 22 (1), 70–86.

Papacharissi, Zizi (Ed.), 2019. A networked self and human augmentics, artificial intelligence, sentience. Routledge, New York & Oxon.

Spence, Patric R., 2019. Searching for questions, original thoughts, or advancing theory: Human-machine communication. Computers in Human Behavior 90, 285–287.

Zhao, Shanyang, 2006. Humanoid social robots as a medium of communication. New media & society 8 (3), 401–419.

Kaiser, Elsi (University of Southern California)

Amazingggggg or amaaaaaazing: Moving away from spoken language in online communication

Online communication lacks prosody but has other tools, e.g. emoji (Bai et al 2019). We focus on a less-researched means to enrich online communication: lengthening words by repeating letters, e.g. English (yasssssss, craaaaazy), Finnish (hauskaaaaaa ‘fun’, lomaaaa ‘vacation’) and German (laaaaangweilig ‘boring’).

The written modality allows repetition in different positions: we find not only word-internal lengthening that emulates spoken language (e.g. amaaaaaaazing), but also word-final lengthening (e.g. amazinggggggg) that does not map directly onto spoken language (LaMontange/McCulloch 2017). Kalman/Gergle (2014) found that 94% of lengthenings in 1998-2002 data emulate spoken phoneme-lengthening, but they hypothesize this may change. Indeed, we find that, in a 2019 Twitter corpus, 43% of lengthenings are word-internal but 57% are word-final: Lengthening in online communication is diverging from spoken language.

To investigate the extent to which these two lengthening types are distinct, we annotated >3500 occurrences of 15 different subjective adjectives (lengthened and unlengthened) in tweets from 2019 for (i) syntactic position, (ii) position in tweet, (iii) amount of lengthening, etc. The results suggest that the linguistic distribution of the two lengthening types is distinct from each other, and from nonlengthened words. We conclude that a new form of lengthening, distinct from spoken language strategies and making use of the written modality of online communication, has emerged and become established with its own communicative function.

References:

Bai et al 2019. A Systematic Review of Emoji: Current Research and Future Perspectives

Fuchs et al 2019, Antonym adjective pairs and prosodic iconicity: Evidence from letter replications in an English blogger corpus.

Kalman & Gergle 2014. Letter repetitions in computer-mediated communication: A unique link between spoken and online language

Lamontagne & McCulloch. 2017. Wayyyy Longgg: Orthotactics & phonology in lengthening on Twitter

Kováčová, Dominika (Masaryk University)

‘he ain’t never gonna be shit’: Cancel culture and the role of hashtags #IsCanceled and #IsOverParty

Commonly associated with the proliferation of (digital) celebrities, social media have also been found to play a very important role in mediating their defamation. One of the most recent and possibly most malicious cases of online shaming concerns James Charles, a famous beauty YouTuber, and its magnitude brought to the fore the discussions of cancel culture. To shed more light on this phenomenon sweeping through social media, this work takes as its object of analysis the tweets posted in the aftermath of Charles’s two latest controversies (May 2019 and January 2020), which contain the then trending hashtags #jamescharlesiscanceled and #jamescharlesisoverparty. Focusing on their function, the present study argues that the two hashtags are strategically used in the collected tweets to perform the act of canceling someone (i.e. ‘You are hereby canceled’), while garnering attention of social media users and thus amplifying the hashtags’ illocutionary force. With the help of these hashtags, Twitter users are shown to engage in ambient affiliation (Zappavigna, 2011) and bond around a shared goal – to boycott Charles and unfollow his social media accounts – which is reflected in their face-aggravating behavior (Bousfield & Locher, 2008; Culpeper, 2011). The analysis not only demonstrates that their posts are therefore distinctly impolite, but also explores the diverse roles of the accompanying visual or audio-visual element. At the same time, as the two hashtags are also found in tweets devoted to different topics – often as the result of ‘hashtag hijacking’ – this study aims to define the felicity conditions necessary for the performance of cancelling someone in the social media environment (Austin, 1962). It is argued that when these conditions are satisfied, hashtags constructed according to the format #nameiscanceled or #nameisoverparty function as performatives (cf. Matley, 2018) and thus represent the most powerful and largely available tool for cancelling someone online.

References:

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford Clarendon Press.

Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge University Press.

Bousfield, D. & Locher, M. A. (Eds.) (2008). Impoliteness in language: Studies on its interplay with power in theory and practice. Mouton de Gruyter.

Matley, D. (2018). “This is NOT a #humblebrag, this is just a #brag”: The pragmatics of self-praise, hashtags and politeness in Instagram posts. Discourse, Context & Media, 22, 30-38.

Zappavigna, M. (2011). Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media & Society, 13(5), 788-806.

Kumar, Ritesh (Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University) Lahiri, Bornini (Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur) Ojha, Atul Kr. (Panlingua Language Processing LLP) Bansal, Akanksha (Panlingua Language Processing LLP)

Impoliteness, Aggression and Misogyny in Hindi and Bangla: A Case Study of YouTube Comments

In recent times, there has been a huge growth in the usage of impolite, aggressive and misogynous language in digital communication. In this paper, we explore the interrelationship between aggression and misogyny in Hindi and Bangla. We look at the co-occurrence of impoliteness and aggression with misogyny in Hindi and Bangla and look at the extent of overlap between the two in specific contexts. We also explore how morphosyntactic and lexical elements conventionalised (as formulated by Terkourafi 2001; Kumar 2017 and others) for aggression and impoliteness become enregistered (Agha 2007) for misogyny within a very short span of time on social media. This is the first study to explore the co-construction of misogyny and aggression in the two languages - Hindi and Bangla – and explore their interrelationship. Theoretically, the study advances the understanding of the process of enregisterment within the context of social media discourse.

The study is based on approximately 5,000 comments in each of the two languages collected from different YouTube videos. The data was collected mainly from the YouTube videos that discuss misogyny such as the bollywood film, Kabir Singh3 or has resulted in misogynistic attacks such as the case of Ranu Mondal4. All the comments are annotated by multiple annotators (using crowdsourcing as well as native language experts working in person) with information about their being aggressive and misogynistic. Our quantitative study shows that, in Bangla around 80% of misogynous comments are also aggressive; in Hindi it is so in over 90% of cases. On the other hand, approximately 30 – 35% non-misogynous comments are also aggressive. In addition to this, we also look at a few specific instances where the structures conventionalised for both aggression as well as politeness are used in misogynistic comments and also shows how some of these lexical items / structures become enregistered for misogyny in a very short span of time because of the rapid communication over social media platforms. In our talk, we will discuss these results in detail.

References:

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kumar, Ritesh. 2017. Conventionalized Politeness Structures: Empirical Evidence from Hindi/Urdu. Journal of Politeness Research. 13(2): 243–279. https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2015-0001

Terkourafi, Marina. 2001. Politeness in Cypriot Greek: A Frame-based Approach. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Cambridge

3 Criticised for a misogynistic portrayal of the relationship between its lead actors 4 Criticised for rude behaviour with her ‘fans’. 50

Laczkó, Krisztina (Eötvös Loránd University Budapest)

Deictic operations of the construal of community identity in computer-mediated discourse

The talk explores deictic operations involving first person plural linguistic forms from the vantage point of social cognitive pragmatics (cf. Croft 2009, Tomasello 1999, Sinha 2014). The central issue is how first person plural anchors that are prototypical deictic expressions accomplish the designation of context-dependent points of reference for the elaboration of observationally shared referential scenes and how they participate in the formation of community identity as a consequence (cf. Coupland 2007). The actual research question is how the inclusive and exclusive use and proportion of first person plural can show the change in the relationship of the members of the community.

The empirical investigation reported here concerns Hungarian and its data are taken from a computer-mediated genre, that of thematically unrestricted topics. Contributors to the topic titled “Purple mothers” on one of the biggest Hungarian webside Index (https://forum.index.hu/Article/showArticle?t=9157953&la=134947965) at hand are mothers aged 30 to 50 holding a university degree and sharing a common range of interest. Two coherent samples were annotated from the same topic, consisting of 500 contributions each and coming from 2013 and 2015, respectively. The annotation covered first person plural deictic expressions. The analyses focused on qualitative properties of the samples.

The results suggest that instances of the exclusive use of first person plural forms outnumber those of their inclusive use, in accordance with the characteristics of the given genre. Inclusive use construes participants of shared interest directly as an online discourse community; but a crucial role in the establishment of community identity is also played by stories that are shared. In these stories, the participants use first person plural forms in an exclusive sense and thereby construe themselves as members of other, offline, communities. In the inclusive use of first person plural forms, three basic deictic operations of community formation can be distinguished. Such forms may refer to (i) the speaker and a single addressee, (ii) the speaker and all relevant addressees, or (iii) additional persons beside the speaker and the addressee(s). The exclusive use also construes three characteristic community roles. In the narratives, first person plural usually refers to the narrator plus (some members of) (i) her family, (ii) her work place community, or (iii) her accommodational community.

The two samples, temporally apart by two years, exhibit different proportions between exclusive and inclusive first person plurals: the second sample contains a substantially larger share of exclusive plurals (and a smaller share of inclusive ones) than the first. This signals a change in the relationship among members of the community: the community undergoes disintegration, and hence the linguistic expression of the construal of participants as members of offline communities becomes more important than its counterpart with respect to the online community.

References:

Coupland, Nikolas 2007. Style: language variation and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Croft, William 2009. Towards a social cognitive linguistics. In: Evans, V., Prousel, S. (eds.): New direction in cognitive linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 395–420.

Sinha, Chris 2014. Niche construction and semiosis: biocultural and social dynamics. In: Dor, Daniel – Knight, Chris – Lewis, Jerome (eds.): The social origins of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 31−46.

Tomasello, Michael 1999. The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Lee, Carmen (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Chau, Dennis (The Open University of Hong Kong)

Constructing the academic self through private and public digital writing practices

The academic workplace has become increasingly digitized. Considerable work has been done in non-linguistic disciplines on the ways digital tools facilitate academic work, such as maintaining research blogs, networking on Twitter, and tracking impact on academic social network sites such as ResearchGate (Lupton et al, 2018). Not only do digital media give rise to new forms of knowledge production and consumption, but also to new kinds of text and discourse practices (Tusting et al., 2019). Central to our understanding of digital writing practices is related to how they potentially shape academic identities. This paper aims to examine the specific ways in which academics move between their private and public identities through engaging in interpersonal and mass modes of digitally-mediated interaction.

This paper is part of a larger project that explores the digital academic writing practices of Hong Kong Chinese scholars through a mixed-methods research design. In this talk, we analyze the survey data and technobigraphical narratives of five case participants from different disciplines and at different stages of their academic career. We situate these academics’ digital practices in their entire media environments, so as to understand how their online scholarly self interacts with aspects of their ‘offline’ identity. We discuss how academics’ choices of media impact and interact with their language choice, and how such choices construct their academic selves. The findings are discussed against the backdrop of higher education reforms and changing institutional policies over the past few decades in Hong Kong and elsewhere. Our study also calls for reconceptualizations of academic writing and knowledge production in the contemporary academy.

References:

Lupton, D., Mewburn, I., & Thomson, P. (Eds.). (2018). The Digital Academic. Routledge.

Tusting, K. et al. (2019). Academics writing: the dynamics of knowledge creation. Routledge.

Lexander, Kristin Vold (Inland Norway University of Applied Science)

Digital interaction and relationship negotiation at the rural workplace

Shifts in the global economic order during the two past decades have modified interactions within multilingual and multicultural environments. While the free movement of workers within the EU offers new options of professional mobility, the affordances of digital tools open new possibilities in the interaction between the migrant workers and their host community. In order to investigate this interaction, this paper presents the research design and first results from a project on digital interaction of Lithuanian migrants in rural Eastern Norway. We study digital communication as a key channel in the relationship between labour migrants and Norwegians and, therefore, for social integration. For this purpose, Lithuanian migrants’ digital interaction is studied. Unlike other migrant groups in Norway, they settle outside the urban centres, which implies different conditions for the relationships with the population.

This paper analyzes data from a pilot project, comprising interview and interactional data from communication between Norwegian employers and Lithuanian employees in the agriculture sector and in private home cleaning. Building on the work on indexicality (Silverstein 2003, Ochs 1992), I develop the notion of multimediated indexicality negotiation to answer the following questions: What language practices can be observed in this interaction and how are they interpreted by the interlocutors? How do these practices affect the relationship between the interlocutors and in the longer term inclusion/exclusion and social equality/inequality of work migrants in Norway?

References:

Ochs, E. 1992. Indexing gender. In Duranti A. and C. Goodwin (éds.) Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Cambridge University Press: 335-358.

Silverstein, M. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3-4):193- 229.

Limatius, Hanna (Tampere University)

“I'm really a part of this living, breathing thing whose roots go far and wide”: The role of offline meetings in the interaction of plus-size fashion bloggers

This paper explores the role of offline meetings within a community of 20 UK-based plus-size fashion bloggers. I focus on the ways in which the importance of offline meetings is discursively constructed in a corpus of blogs texts and comments that was compiled in 2015 (Limatius, 2020).

Fashion blogging has created new opportunities for people who have traditionally been marginalized in the field of fashion (Rocamora, 2011, p. 421). For plus-size women in particular, fashion blogging has been beneficial in many ways. Through fashion blogging, plus-size women have been able to build a sense of community with others who are in a similar situation, to construct identities that have not been available to them in mainstream fashion media, and to achieve psychological, societal and even financial empowerment (Limatius, 2020). Blogging has also enabled some plus-size women to affect the mainstream fashion discourse (Scaraboto & Fischer, 2013).

In my previous works on plus-size fashion blogging, the importance of online-based community- building practices has been clear. However, the findings of my studies have also shown that the plus-size fashion blogging community extends beyond the bloggers’ interactions within the blogosphere – even beyond all of their online interactions (Limatius, 2016; Limatius, 2020). Thus, the group of bloggers cannot be described as a virtual community (e.g. Carminati, Ferrari & Viviani, 2014; Paolillo, 1999; Rheingold, 1995).

In my presentation, I will (re)conceptualize the plus-size fashion blogging community as a digitally-driven community of practice (Limatius, 2020); a concept derived from Wenger’s (1998) community of practice framework. As well as illustrating the ways in which the significance of offline interaction is visible in the bloggers’ online interaction, I will present an approach to studying communities that are rooted in interaction on specific online platforms (such as blogs), but eventually spread to other platforms, including offline meetings.

References:

Carminati, B., Ferrari, E., & Viviani, M. (2014). Security and trust in online social networks. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

Limatius, H. (2016). “A world of beautiful fat babes:” Community-building practices in plus-size fashion blogs. Language@Internet, 13, article 4.

Limatius, H. (2020). Communities of Empowerment: Exploring the Discourse Practices of Plus-Size Fashion Bloggers. Tampere: PunaMusta Oy, Tampere University. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03- 1489-7

Paolillo, J. (1999). The virtual speech community: Social network and language variation on IRC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4 (4). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1999.tb00109.x

Rheingold, H. (1995). The virtual community: Finding connection in a computerized world. London: Mandarin Paperbacks.

Scaraboto, D., & Fischer, E. (2013). Frustrated fatshionistas: An institutional theory perspective on consumer quests for greater choice in mainstream markets. Journal of Consumer Research, 39 (6), 1234-1257.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria (Swansea University) Mullineux-Morgan, Ruth (Swansea University)

Breaking the silence: A discursive im-politeness approach to children’s talk about online child sexual grooming

Online Child Sexual Grooming (OCSG) is an internet-enabled communicative process of entrapment in which an adult uses language and other semiotic modes (e.g. images) to lure a minor into taking part in sexual activities online and, at times, also offline (Lorenzo-Dus et al 2020). Offenders regularly engage in both sophisticated relational work in order to build interpersonal closeness with their victims (Lorenzo-Dus et al 2016; Lorenzo-Dus and Izura, 2017; Lorenzo-Dus and Kinzel 2019). At the same time, offenders deploy communicative coercion (Chiang and Grant 2019). In other words, research reveals strategic use of both politeness and impoliteness in OCSG. What we currently lack is an understanding of how child victims of OCSG interpret offenders’ relational work.

In this presentation, we report the key findings of a study aimed at filling this important gap in knowledge. Adopting a discursive approach to im-politeness (e.g. Eelen 2001; Locher and Watts 2005), we examine how child victims of OCSG identify and evaluate offenders’ relational work. Our data comes from a hitherto un-examined source, namely children’s accounts of their experiences of OCSG in a counselling context via a UK national helpline (counselling sessions= 50; approximate number of words = 70,000). Our findings show that children identify a range of politeness (e.g. asserting common ground, offering/promising, assuming/asserting reciprocity and gift-giving - see Brown and Levinson 1987) and impoliteness (e.g. threats, see Culpeper 2011) strategies linked to OCSG. Importantly, the findings also reveal how challenging it is for children to make sense of – and reconcile - these two end poles of groomers’ relational work, either at the time of grooming or when reflecting upon it subsequently.

References:

Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Chiang, Emily and Grant, Tim, (2018). Deceptive identity performance: Offender moves and multiple identities in online child abuse conversations. Applied Linguistics, 1-25.

Culpeper, Jonathan, (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge: CUP.

Eelen, Gino. 2001. A critique of politeness theories. Manchester: St. Jerome Pxublishing.

Locher, Miriam A. & Richard J. Watts, (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1. 9-33.

Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Izura, Cristina and Pérez-Tattam, Rocío (2016). Understanding grooming discourse in computer-mediated environments. Discourse, Context and Media, 12, 40-50.

Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria and Izura, Cristina (2017). ‘‘cause ur special’’: Understanding trust and complimenting behaviour in online grooming discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 112, 68-82. Doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.01.004

Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria and Kinzel, Anina (2019). ‘So is your mom as cute as you?’: Examining patterns of language use by online sexual groomers. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, 2, 14-39.

Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Kinzel, Anina and Di Cristofaro, Matteo (2020). The communicative modus operandi of online child sexual groomers: Recurring patterns in their language use, Journal of Pragmatics, 155, 15-27.

Schneevogt, Daniela, Chiang, Emily and Grant, Tim, (2018). Do Perverted Justice chat logs contain examples of overt persuasion and sexual extortion? A research note responding to Chiang and Grant (2017, 2018). Language and Law = Linguagem e Direito, 5(1), 97-102.

Moreno Barreneche, Sebastián (Universidad ORT Uruguay)

Interactions with Others Mediated by the Represented Self: A Socio-semiotic Approach

Online practices of self-representation that are carried out on digital media like profile creation, selfie taking, and video-streaming on Instagram are better understood when conceived as ‘semiotic practices’ (Fontanille 2008), that is, as strategies of enunciation of the self in which individuals, by means of creative acts that imply the manipulation of semiotic resources made available by these platforms –such as emojis (Danesi 2016)–, strategically manage the image they project to the external world, aiming at producing a specific effect of sense in how others perceive and conceive them (Bullingham & Vasconcelos 2013; Hogan 2010; Papacharissi 2002). In this procedure, a number of social codes and conventions, both aesthetical and ethical, intervene, playing a key role in the ways in which individuals present themselves online, usually stylizing themselves (Moreno Barreneche 2018; 2019a; 2019b) in order to appeal to the generalized other, who is imagined as embedded in specific cultural conventions and filters as well. The overarching goal of my presentation, which will be of theoretical nature, is to discuss from a socio-semiotic perspective how the normalization in everyday life of practices of online self-representation fostered by digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Tinder (Rettberg 2014; Thumim 2012) impact the interactions that take place on these platforms. In this sense, there is substantial research done on the issue of how individuals present and represent themselves online, but not much on how these self-representations influence the relations that one establishes with others. The underlying hypothesis of my theoretical discussion is that the online representations fulfill a function of cognitive nature and that the perception that individuals have of themselves while interacting online is mediated by these representations. The presentation will hence focus on discussing from a theoretical perspective strongly anchored on a constructivist and socio-semiotic account, the role that these representations play in the cognitive dimension. The theoretical discussion will be illustrated with concrete examples.

References:

Bullingham, L. & Vasconcelos, A. (2013). The presentation of self in the online world: Goffman and the study of online identities. Journal of Information Science 39 (1): 101-112.

Carpenter, C. (2012). Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior. Personality and Individual Differences 52: 482-486.

Danesi, M. (2016). The Semiotics of Emoji. London: Bloomsbury.

Eco, U. (1975). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press.

Fontanille, J. (2008). Pratiques sémiotiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edimburgh: University of Edimburgh.

Hogan, B. (2010). The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30(6): 377-386.

Moreno Barreneche, S. (2019a). La estilización del yo en redes sociales: la proyección on-line de la identidad personal como artificio semiótico. DeSignis 30, 16-29.

(2019b). La proyección online del yo entre individuación y colectivización. InMediaciones de la Comunicación, 14(1), 65-84.

(2018). Selfie-taking: A key semiotic practice within the ‘show of the self’. Punctum 4(2), 49-65.

Paccagnella, L. & Vellar, A. (2016). Vivere online. Identità, relazioni, conoscenza. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Papacharissi, Z. (2002) The presentation of self in virtual life: Characteristics of personal home pages. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 79 (3), 643-660.

Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan.

Schulman, D. (2016). The Presentation of the Self in Contemporary Social Life. London: Sage.

Sibilia, P. (2008). La intimidad como espectáculo. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Thumim, N. (2012). Self-Representation and Digital Culture. London: Palgrave/Macmillan.

Zhao, S. et al. (2008). Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 24 (5): 1816-1836.

Nurmikari, Helena (University of Helsinki)

Finnish repair-initiators as hashtags on Twitter

Twitter is currently one of the most notable microblogging systems and social media networking services. One of the most significant special features of this media is the hashtag (e.g. #metoo), which functions as search tag, categorizing and topicalizing tweets within the Twitter community. However, as Wikström (2014) has pointed out, hashtags may be used as parenthetical explanations or metacomments, and they may even be used for emotive purposes. In this presentation, I will discuss the use of two verbal repair-initiators in Finnish spoken interaction that have become used as hashtags on Twitter.

Firstly, I will examine the use of the common Finnish self-repair initiator, the particle ”eiku” (Laakso & Sorjonen 2010), on Twitter. The particle has conventionalized as a hashtag (#eiku), and it works as a contextual marker of polyphony and irony. The hashtag #eiku is mostly positioned at the end of utterances; in spoken interaction, ”eiku” does not occur in this position. Additionally, the particle ”eiku” can be used between two words or utterances on Twitter, resembling self-repair of spoken interaction. However, the meaning of a visible self-repair in written conversation becomes different from spoken interaction, displaying humor or sarcasm.

Secondly, I will analyze the expression ”anteeks mitä” (’sorry what’). ”Anteeks mitä” functions as an open-class repair initiator (Drew 1997) in spoken Finnish conversations though not very commonly (Haakana 2011; Lilja 2010). On Twitter, the expression has evolved into a hashtag #anteeksmitä. Instead of initiating actual repair, it serves as an affective cue for expressing problems in accepting some conduct by a person or institution that the writer reports in the preceding main body of their message.

Through the analyses I will show that Finnish repair initiators have developed new usages in social media conversations. These practical resources are typically used for repair purposes in spoken interaction, but on social media, they may function as notable contextualization cues for displaying stance, especially affect and irony. In conclusion I will briefly discuss more generally the usability of repair practices in spoken interaction for categorizing the message as one displaying a certain type of stance.

References:

DREW, PAUL 1997: 'Open' class repair initiators in response to sequential sorts of troubles in conversation. – Journal of Pragmatics 28 p. 69–101.

HAAKANA, MARKKU 2011: Mitä ja muut avoimet korjausaloitteet. – Virittäjä 115 p. 36–67.

LAAKSO, MINNA – SORJONEN, MARJA-LEENA 2010: Cut-off or particle – devices for initiating self-repair in conversation. – Journal of Pragmatics 42 p. 1151–1172.

LILJA, NIINA 2010: Ongelmista oppimiseen. Toisen aloittamat korjausjaksot kakkoskielisessä keskustelussa. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto.

WIKSTRÖM, PETER 2014: #srynotfunny: Communicative Functions of Hashtags on Twitter. – SKY Journal of Linguistics 27 p. 127–152.

O'Farrell, Kate (Stockholm University)

“You are a female so this statement pinched you”: Indexicality and agonistic playfulness in online discussion of the MeToo Movement.

The production of language can be a creative, playful endeavour which may eschew relevance to a concrete world. This study explores the interconnectedness of identity construction in computer- mediated communication (CMC) and this creativity, viewing it as a sort of „agonistic playfulness‟ best characterised as a desire to „win‟ at all costs (Lugones, 1996) Playfulness and an ability to play has been a key feature of our relationship with technology (Danet, 2001; Deumert, 2014; Frissen et al., 2015). Thus, the indexing of certain identities in CMC can be seen as efforts to play and ultimately win a game. These ideas are examined in relation to online discussion of issues of gender-based discrimination, harassment, and violence, chosen because of the polarising and antagonising effect such gender-related issues often have in contemporary online discourse. The data is collected from the comment sections of two English-language YouTube videos concerning the #MeToo Movement and gender-based harassment in France and Spain, posted in September 2018 and April 2019 respectively. From this, a corpus has been constructed comprising 3,172 comments totalling 133,903 words from videos, collected manually in October 2019. The study is primarily concerned with processes of indexicality in the data, in particular asking whether these are performed in an emulous fashion with a focus on (playfully) dominating rather than discussing. The study uses Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989; 2003), along with approaches to indexicality (Silverstein, 1976; 2003; Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) to analyse the data. Using the corpus it was found that many of the participants use overt categorisations to index identities with more status, such as gender and/or French or Spanish nationality. Furthermore, covert approaches used include code-switching between comments, evaluation of the source material and others within the discussion (“Quit your female victim complex, it's pathetic”), and in-group referencing, such as employment of the anti-feminist acronym MGTOW („Men Go Their Own Way‟). In analysing such processes, this study investigates how discourses of power and play are constructed in CMC.

References:

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5) 585–614. doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407.

Danet, B. (2001). Cyberpl@y: Communicating online, Berg.

Deumert, A. (2014). The performance of the ludic self in social network(ing) sites. In Seargeant, P. and Tagg, C. (Eds.), The language of social media: Identity and community on the internet (pp. 23-45) Palgrave Macmillan.

Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. Routledge.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Routledge.

Frissen, V., Lammes, S., de Lange, M., de Mul, J., & Raessens, J. (2015). Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, media, and identity. In Frissen, V., Lammes, S., de Lange, M., de Mul, J., Raessens, J. (Eds.) Playful identities: The ludification of digital media cultures (pp. 9-52) Amsterdam University Press.

Lugones, M. (1996). Playfulness, “World Travelling” and Loving Perception. In Garry, A. & Pearsall, M. (Eds.) Women, Knowledge and Reality. Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (pp. 419-433) Routledge.

Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description. In Basso, K. H & Selby, H. A. (Eds.) Meaning in Anthropology (pp. 11–55) University of New Mexico Press, http://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Courses/ParisPapers/Silverstein1976.pdf.

Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication, 23, 193-229. doi:10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2.

Pajukallio, Outi (University of Helsinki)

Parody of anti-immigrant netspeak as a form of political discourse on the internet

Internet and social media have increased the amount of free-form writing, and provided a platform for public discussion on political topics such as immigration. In an electronic citizen survey by the Finnish Ministry of the Interior, the responses showed up a perception of a deep polarisation of attitudes with two political extremes concerning immigrants in the Finnish society (Sisäministeriö 2017:70–71). This division is visible on the internet, where both sides dispute and show disagreement with each other for example by seizing on the language proficiency of others (Lahti 2019:217).

In this paper, I will discuss ways in which the supporters of one view make use of the perceived language proficiency of the opposite side to express their political views under the guise of humour. I will examine the posts of a humorous Facebook group whose members have a positive stance on immigration. I will show ways in which the posts parody people with anti-immigrant views. A core practice is to present the people with anti-immigrant views as incompetent or otherwise flawed writers.

I will analyse the linguistic means used in the parody and the language attitudes behind the humour. The focus of the analysis is on the typography, orthography, colloquialisms and affective expressions used in constructing the parodic meaning. In conclusion, my analysis throws into relief norms of netspeak by showing what kind of netspeak is considered to be substandard.

References:

Lahti, Emmi 2019: Maahanmuuttokeskustelun retoriikkaa [Rhetoric of discussion on immigration]. Ph.D thesis. Finnish language, University of Helsinki.

Sisäministeriö 2017 = Puustinen, Alisa – Raisio, Harri – Kokki, Esa – Luhta, Joona 2017: Kansalaismielipide: Turvapaikanhakijat ja turvapaikkapolitiikka. Sisäministeriön julkaisu 9/2017. [Citizens’ view: Asylum seekers and asylum policy. Ministry of the Interior publications 9/2017]. Sisäministeriö.

Pascual, Daniel (University of Zaragoza)

Pragmatic functions in the multimodal ensemble of research project homepages

The use of websites has spread in current academic practices, such as when participating in international research projects. They are employed in this endeavor to explain the topic of an investigation, demonstrate research progress and entice users to discover more content. It is the homepage in these websites that welcomes the readership and frames what may be found there about the project, as an entrance door to information about their research. Homepages are built on a wide range of hypermodal and hypermedial elements (Petroni 2014), alongside verbal components, creating a multimodal ensemble. This study seeks to analyse, first, the verbal and visual texts of 30 homepages hosted in websites maintained by Horizon2020 international research projects and, second, the use of pragmatic strategies in crafting the homepages and the additional pragmatic effects resulting from such an ensemble. Hence, the interplay of multiple modes in digital texts, such as project homepages, will be acknowledged and analysed from a pragmatic approach in order to understand the intents conceived behind them and instantiated in specific strategies. Focusing particularly on the compositional meaning (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), insights are offered into the saliency and framing of characteristic elements traced in international project homepages (e.g.: project mottos, partners logos, explanatory videos). The functioning of hyperlinks is also dealt with to understand how the homepage helps build the whole website and interweaves the sections, facilitating the users’ navigating mode (Askehave and Nielsen 2005). The paper also explores the overall structure and organization of the project homepage by gathering the texts into clusters, and assigning them pragmatic meta-functions, namely communicative, promotional or interactional. The analysis presented will cast some light into how research groups render accountability of themselves, and disseminate and promote their projects online through verbal and visual resources, simultaneously.

References:

Askehave, I., and Nielsen, A. 2005. Digital genres: A challenge to traditional genre theory. Information Technology and People 18 (2), 120-141.

Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.

Petroni, S. 2014. Collaborative writing and linking: When technology interacts with genres in meaning construction. In P.E. Allori, J. Bateman and V.K. Bhatia (eds.). Evolution in Genre: Emergence, Variation, Multimodality. Bern: Peter Lang, 289-306.

Pelttari, Sanna (University of Turku)

Spanish YouTubers’ affective narratives and shared emotions

In this presentation, I shall discuss the highlights of the study dealing with Spanish YouTubers’ affective narratives and the emotional reactions of their audience. Studying these narratives in rather daily diary-like storytelling context – without any prominent political or similar agenda in mind – and their audiences’ reactions introduces new insights into the participatory culture of sharing emotions, in a digital context within virtual relationships. Furthermore, it contributes to a better understanding of the bond between YouTubers and their audience.

My aim is to study YouTubers’ expression of basic emotions, such as joy/happiness, anger/disgust and sadness, and the participatory culture of sharing emotions within a virtual community. Keeping in mind, however, that in these narratives it might be a matter of the discursive (and the intentional) practices of affectivity, rather than underlining the genuineness of emotion (e.g., Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989; Caffi & Janney, 1994; Bednarek, 2008).

The corpus consists of eight YouTube videos uploaded by Spanish YouTubers and the affective narratives included in the videos. In addition, the comments of these videos (2594 at the moment of gathering) were included in the analysis. These YouTubers were among those content creators who participated in 2017 in a massive gathering of YouTubers, Tubecon, in Madrid. This reference framework allows to study an affective and interactive participation frame of a digital community of YouTubers within its wide heterogeneity. These stories and their comments will be evaluated with e.g. a multimodal perspective of mediated narrative analysis and with a practice-centered approach seeing storytelling as a discourse and semiotic practice (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2015; De Fina, 2016; Page, 2018). Furthermore, I will explore if it is feasible to distinguish some specific triggers in the videos that seem to provoke comments on these stories. Analyzing comments, e.g. their interactional dynamics, frame focus, tone and possible keywords will be discussed (De Fina, 2016; Page, 2018).

References:

Bednarek, M. (2008). Emotion talk across corpora. Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Caffi, C. & Janney, R. W. (1994). Toward a pragmatics of emotive communication. Journal of Pragmatics, 22(3), pp. 325-373.

De Fina, A. (2016). Storytelling and Audience Reactions in Social Media. Language in Society 45.4, pp. 473- 498.

De Fina, A. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2015). Introduction. In De Fina, A. & Georgakopoulou, A. (Eds.) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, pp. 1-18.

Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a heart. Text 9 (1), pp. 7-25.

Page, R. (2018). Narratives Online : Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pérez-Sinusía, Marina (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) Cassany, Daniel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Intersubjectivity and stance-taking in the construction of a teenage girl as a micro- celebrity on Instagram

Micro-celebrity can be defined as a kind of online performance in which people present themselves as celebrities by making use of strategies of self-branding that construct them as a commodity and by thinking of their audience as a fan base to be maintained (Marwick, 2013; Senft, 2008). Given that practices of micro-celebrity entail that identity is actively and discursively constructed through interactions with others (Page, 2012), this paper examines how a teenage girl from Barcelona draws on linguistic, discursive and semiotic resources to thoughtfully construct herself as a micro- celebrity on Instagram. Based on discourse-centred online ethnography (Androutsopoulos, 2008), social semiotics (Kress, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) and small stories research (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008), we analyse a set of posts and Instagram stories shared by the participant over a period of ten months and extracts of the interviews conducted with her. The focus of analysis is on the kinds of intersubjectivity that she constructs in her selfies, video selfies, and pictures of herself taken by a third party, and on the types of stances that she takes in her small stories to position herself to the audience and to differentiate herself from other Instagram users. The study shows that these resources are ways of constructing her identity as a product to be promoted to the audience in order to achieve visibility and influence. We also argue that some Instagram affordances, such as tagging and the ready-made features of stories, facilitate but also constrain the process of micro-celebrity.

References:

Androutsopoulos, J. (2008). Potentials and Limitations of Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography. Language@Internet, 5(8). Retrieved from https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1610

Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk, 28(3). https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2008.018

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445612446268b

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.

Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), 181-201. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481312437441

Senft, T. M. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of social networks. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Petykó, Márton (Aston University)

What communicative actions are perceived as online trolling? – A corpus-based analysis of the discourse around trolling on political blogs

This paper investigates the metapragmatic discourse around trolling, a negatively marked online behaviour (Hardaker, 2013), on British political blogs. It aims to identify the communicative actions that users attribute to those they call trolls in 1,713 comment threads. These threads include 740,841 comments. The threads were published on 27 British political blogs, such as Guardian Politics blog, LabourList, and Guido Fawkes, in 2015. The paper is also concerned with how the actions associated with trolling affect the ways in which trolling is depicted and trolls are portrayed in the users’ comments.

The analysis focuses on 2,144 action-related metapragmatic comments taken from these 1,713 threads. In these comments, participants call other users trolls or identify comments as trolling and also discuss the specific actions in which the alleged trolls engage. Consequently, the paper approaches ‘trolling’ and ‘troll’ as metapragmatic labels that participants use to describe, conceptualise, and evaluate others’ communicative behaviour (Haugh, 2018). Using the concordance lines of the search term *troll*, the study first presents a taxonomy of the linguistically marked communicative actions in these troll action comments and then it applies this taxonomy to annotate the comments.

The paper identifies four complex communicative activities ascribed to trolls. These include spamming, ignoring or withholding information, flaming, and dishonesty, which in total cover sixteen specific communicative actions. The paper also points out that users employ action attribution as a behaviour- and identity-building device to construct trolling and trolls in various ways in their comments (Fichman & Sanfilippo, 2015). A common feature of these different constructions is that users generally depict trolling as a non-normative and manipulative behaviour while trolls are portrayed as bad debaters and uncooperative troublemakers. This suggests that users attribute actions to the trolls not only to conceptualise their behaviour but also to belittle and discredit them.

References:

Fichman, P., & Sanfilippo, M.R. (2015). The Bad Boys and Girls of Cyberspace: How Gender and Context Impact Perception of and Reaction to Trolling. Social Science Computer Review, 33(2), 163–180.

Hardaker, C. (2013). “Uh….not to be nitpicky,,,,,but...the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.”. An Overview of Trolling Strategies. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1(1), 58–86.

Haugh, M. (2018). Corpus-based metapragmatics. In A. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp.615–639). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Poppi, Fabio I. M. (Sechenov University, University of Łódź) Dynel, Marta (University of Łódź)

Ad libidinem: Forms of female sexualisation in RoastMe humour

The abundance of human interactions online has inspired a plethora of relevant studies investigating gender and sexuality (see Carter et al., 2013; Marwick, 2013). Social media platforms have created new venues for copious amounts of sexist and/or misogynist discourse, which can take various forms (see Anderson and Cermele, 2014; Bou-Franch and Blitvich, 2014; Dynel and Poppi, 2019). This presentation reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative study of seemingly aggressive but inherently benevolent humorous jibes that involve the sexualisation of women in the RoastMe practice performed by a growing social media community on Reddit. RoastMe is an online phenomenon standing at the crossroads of (purported) language aggression and humour, which includes a potentially sexist component. RoastMe centres on creative jocular insults hurled at individuals who have willingly submitted their pictures for this good-willed roasting. When targeted at women, RoastMe insults, as is shown here, may rely on several forms of sexualisation, which humorously echo the prevalent sexist ideologies. Based on a corpus of jocular insults, six forms of sexualisation comments are proposed: hyper-sexualisation, de-sexualisation and meta-sexualisation, each concerning the female body or practices. We account for the distribution of these categories, offering conclusions about sexist humour and ideologies. Although the RoastMe community operates with a humour mindset, producing and recognising sexualisation jibes as a playful activity, RoastMe insults speak volumes about the contemporary sexist ideologies and the salience of sexuality as a topic arbitrarily invoked in humour performance.

References :

Anderson KL and Cermele J (2014) Public/Private language aggression against women: Tweeting rage and intimate partner violence. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2(2): 274-293.

Bou-Franch P and Garcés Conejos Blitvich P (2014) Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2(2): 226-248.

Carter C, Steiner L and McLaughlin L (eds) (2013) The Routledge companion to media & gender. Abingdon- on-Thames: Routledge

Dynel, M., & Poppi, F. I. M. (2019). Risum teneatis, amici?☆: The socio-pragmatics of RoastMe humour. Journal of Pragmatics, 139, 1-21.

Marwick A (2013) Gender, sexuality, and social media. In: Hunsinger J and Senft MT (eds) The social media handbook. Abingdon-on-Thame: Routledge, pp. 67-83

Räisä, Tiina (University of Jyväskylä) Palviainen, Åsa (University of Jyväskylä)

How to map ecologies of multilingual family communication

Leppänen et al. (2017) call for sociolinguistic perspectives on digital media activities as connected and enmeshed with other aspects of everyday life, because physical and virtual settings are often intertwined. This embeddedness of digital media in everyday life is particularly evident in the doing of family and enhanced by the wide accessibility and use of smartphones (Miller 2014). Language practices in bi- and multilingual families have been researched for a long period of time to understand how language choice and strategies relate to language transmission across generations. This line of research has however tended to focus on oral face-to-face interaction and neglected digitally mediated communication. In this presentation we argue that in order to understand contemporary multilingual families, we need to encompass the full and diversified ecology of non- mediated as well as mediated communication in the family networks. To reach this ambition, we need to implement and develop appropriate data collection methodologies.

In this paper we will discuss the experiences of doing participatory and ethnographic research in seven bi-/multilingual families in Finland as part of the research project WhatsInApp. After all members of the families had agreed on participation, they were provided with a list of possible data collection methods among which they were free to choose what best suited them and reflected their actual communication practices: to take photos or make video/audio recordings with their phones; engage in ”the mobile instant messaging interview” (Kaufmann and Peil 2019); collect chat conversations; use a gopro camera; and/or write diaries on their language and media uses. Research within the family domain is intrusive, digital data management is challenging, and the work with children requires sensibility. This collaborative project of data collection however provided good means to map the communication ecologies of the different families in ethical sensible ways.

References:

Kaufmann, Katja, and Corinna Peil. 2019. The mobile instant messaging interview (MIMI): Using WhatsApp to enhance self-reporting and explore media usage in situ. Mobile Media & Communication.

Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, and Elina Westinen. 2017. Multilingualism and multimodality in language use and literacies in digital environments. In Language, education and technology. encyclopedia of language and education., eds. Steven Thorn, Stephen May. Springer International Publishing. 119—130

Miller, James. 2014. The fourth screen: Mediatization and the smartphone. Mobile Media & Communication 2 (2).

What’s in the app? Digitally-mediated communication within contemporary multilingual families across time and space (WhatsInApp), Academy of Finland (2018-2022): http://www.jyu.fi/whatsinapp

Salomaa, Elina (University of Jyväskylä) Lehtinen, Esa (University of Jyväskylä)

Multimediality in workplaces: Affordances of paper, post-its and digital platform for organizational work

New technologies hold great potential for changing the working practices. However, digital platforms have not replaced other means of communication, and many organizational practices still evolve in conjunction with the use of paper (see Sellen & Harper 2002). In our presentation, we will investigate how paper and post-it notes are used together with new media in the daily practices of organizations and how these different media have their distinctive roles in these practices.

In this study, we examine the different technologies through their affordances. Paper, post-its and digital platform each have properties that enable different kinds of actions while constraining others. Our aim is to investigate 1) which affordances of paper, post-its and digital platform are made relevant in carrying out organizational tasks, and 2) how they are used in conjunction with each other.

The data have been gathered in the context of a development project in an organization and it includes video-recordings of workshops and material from a digital platform used in the project. We will analyze situations where the old and new media (either paper document or post-its and digital platform) are used in order to accomplish particular organizational tasks that have to do with planning, reflecting and organizing the project.

Our analysis shows that different media are used at different points of the exercises to accomplish different kinds of tasks: paper, which enables private hand-writing, is used to support individual thinking, sticky and portable post-its to support (re)organizing ideas collaboratively, and the persistent and remotely accessible digital platform to support sharing and storing of ideas. Thus, the study demonstrates how organizational ideas are transformed from personal to public and from drafts to recorded items while they are remediated from old to new media.

References:

Sellen, A. & Harper, R. 2002: The myth of the paperless office. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Satokangas, Henri (University of Helsinki)

Construction of disciplinary identities on Wikipedia

The presentation examines how disciplinary identities are constructed in Wikipedia articles dedicated to academic disciplines. Informed by the perspectives of linguistic and multimodal discourse analysis, Wikipedia articles are analyzed as multimodal texts that represent an image of the discipline. The data consists of ten Finnish Wikipedia articles on disciplines chosen to represent both humanities and natural sciences as well as social sciences, e.g., philosophy, physics and economics.

As a form of written interaction on the web, Wikipedia articles are characterized by an impersonal and collective authorial voice and an artifact-like nature that is inherited from printed encyclopedia articles. Identity, here, is seen as the representation of what the discipline is and what it is not. In the case of disciplines, the perspective is that of institutional identity (Benwell & Stokoe 2006: 116– 120); it is also that of identity partly attached to the discipline from the outside (Blommaert 2005: 205–206). The analysis makes visible the discursive strategies that are employed in the activity of representing this identity, such as conceptual definition, rationalization through intellectual and practical goals, presentation of methods of gaining and constituting knowledge, and drawing borders to other disciplines and thus positioning the discipline in the social order of academia. Wikipedia also has a practice of using an image as a kind of cover illustration on each topic. This gives reasons for a multimodal perspective: what kind of picture is chosen to represent the discipline and how do these choices of images for their part construct the disciplinary identity?

The presentation paints a picture of the common and public understanding of research fields through the lens of a widely read, dynamic and collectively authored platform.

References:

Benwell, Bethan & Stokoe, Elizabeth (2006). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Blommaert, Jan (2005). Discourse. A critical introduction. Cambridge (NY): Cambridge University Press.

Sluchinski, Kerry (University of Alberta)

Animate “It” and Genderless “Comrade”: Referential Forms in Chinese LGBT Discourses

Language, whether spoken, written, or visual, communicates a variety of concrete and abstract concepts which are sometimes misinterpreted. One such concept is that of identity. As all identities, ‘sexual identities’ are co-constructed in interactions. However, they are very much based on outsiders’ stereotypical perceptions and not how one communicates those identities themselves (e.g. Sablosky Elengold, 2016; Burke and LaFrance, 2015). Thus, other-defined identities are often at odds with self-defined identities, leading to social conflicts and strife. One prominent linguistic resource that is noted as participating in identity construction of both the self and others is that of pronouns (e.g. Morrish, 2002; Ige, 2010). This is reflected in the growing ways that users of various languages have begun to create and or adopt gender-neutral third person pronouns such as ‘they’ and ‘ze’ in English (Dembroff & Wodak, 2018), ‘hen’ in Swedish (Senden, Bäck, & Lindqvist, 2015), and the recent emergence of ta in Chinese social media (Sluchinski, forthcoming).By examining the language use of online Chinese “Anti” and “Pro” LGBT communities, this study investigates the role that third person pronouns play in the construction of sexual identities.

Standard Chinese currently has three separate written forms for the third person: 他 ( ‘he’), 她 ( ‘she’), and 它 ( ‘it’) all with the same pronunciation “ta”. In the last decade a fourth type of third person pronoun, non-standard genderless ta in roman alphabet, has emerged in Chinese social media. The usage of ta instead of standard characters obscures the intended referent’s gender. This is important to empirically examine because its specific function and referent is defined through language users’ unique interpretations and also by the discourse community in which it is used.

Adopting an inductive, discourse analytical approach to digital texts in which ta is used, this study is focused on determining the link between third person pronoun usage and the above discourse communities. The third person pronoun assigns a gender to a person external to the interaction who is being mentioned; thus, the conscious choice to communicate using the ta form is potentially reflective of language users’ beliefs regarding gender and sexuality. The distinct/systematic usage of one third person pronoun form, e.g. “it” as seen in the data, over the others in a given community can also serve as an ideological indicator of socially conditioned views regarding gender and sexuality.

Sundqvist, Anna (University of Helsinki)

The commodification of dialects in the Finnish vlogosphere

On YouTube, a platform largely built on user-created content, perceived authenticity plays a central role (Burgess & Green 2018:40–41). This, and the fact that the language is rarely outwardly regulated, makes YouTube a favourable media platform for non-standard language varieties. Linguistic means of commodifying identity (see e.g. Heller 2010) include speaking in dialect, which is often associated with the speaker’s authenticity (e.g. Mielikäinen & Palander 2014:84). In this study, I will examine how four Finnish YouTubers employ dialect in their content creation and brand building, and the kinds of interactional and commercial functions dialectal variation serves in the videos. The YouTubers in my data come from four different dialect areas.

I will show that the YouTubers use regional variation to distinguish between characters or speaker roles, or to perform local authenticity. Salient dialectal features and feature clusters (even those not belonging to the vlogger’s own dialect) are used to evoke a humoristic or playful mode. The functions of variation are typically similar to those determined in previous research (about code- switching within Finnish see e.g. Lappalainen 2004) but I will argue that, in the vlogosphere, these functions are intertwined with distinct commercial purposes. The employment of dialect appears in several modes. The focus of my analysis will be on the vloggers’ speech but I will also briefly discuss the language in the thumbnails, video descriptions and comments. The comment section serves as a window to the audience’s language perceptions and ideologies: sometimes even a subtle departure from the YouTuber’s typical way of talking can spark a concerned comment.

Speaking in dialect adds to the YouTubers’ conspicuity and builds perceived authenticity that appeals to both rural and urban audiences. By the localisation achieved by their respective home dialects, the YouTubers detach themselves from the stereotype of Helsinki-based vloggers.

References:

Bᴜʀɢᴇss, Jᴇᴀɴ – Jᴏsʜᴜᴀ Gʀᴇᴇɴ 2018: Youtube. Online video and participatory culture. E-book by Polity Press.

Hᴇʟʟᴇʀ, Mᴏɴɪᴄᴀ 2010:“The Commodification of Language.” – Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 101–114.

Lᴀᴘᴘᴀʟᴀɪɴᴇɴ, Hᴀɴɴᴀ 2004: Variaatio ja sen funktiot. Erään sosiaalisen verkoston jäsenten kielellisen variaation ja vuorovaikutuksen tarkastelua . [Variation and its functions. The analysis of linguistic variation and interaction among members of a social network.] Doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki. Helsinki: Finnish Literature society.

Mɪᴇʟɪᴋäɪɴᴇɴ, Aɪʟᴀ – ᴍᴀʀᴊᴀᴛᴛᴀ Pᴀʟᴀɴᴅᴇʀ 2014: Miten suomalaiset puhuvat murteista. Kansanlingvistinen tutkimus metakielestä. [How Finns talk about dialects. Folk linguistic study on meta language.] Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa (University of Helsinki)

Adding intention to insult: metapragmatic negotiation of insults in discussion forum interaction

This paper approaches insults in discussion forum interaction from a metapragmatic perspective. More specifically, it shows what metapragmatic talk can reveal about intention and accountability when it comes to insults (see Dynel 2016; Haugh 2013). The material comes from English and Finnish online discussion forums.

The paper follows the more narrowly focused definition of metapragmatics as the display of reflexive awareness by users of language of their use of language (Haugh 2018; see also Caffi 1998). In other words, metapragmatic analyses throw light on how language is used for talking about language use. The instances of such metapragmatic talk are called metapragmatic acts (Hübler & Bublitz 2007). Metapragmatic acts have several functions, but often they are used for assessing an utterance or for influencing and negotiating how an utterance should be understood. Earlier research has identified how metapragmatic acts are used in, for instance, the negotiation of appropriateness (Tanskanen 2007), rudeness (Kleinke & Bös 2015), teasing (Haugh 2018) and identity (Tanskanen 2018).

The paper concentrates on instances where an utterance by an interactant has been deemed to be an insult (e.g. with a metapragmatic evaluation “nice little insult there”). The interactant can deny any such intention (e.g. “it was a joke!”), at the same time disputing accountability: they cannot be held accountable for an intention that has been incorrectly assigned. If, on the other hand, the evaluation is accepted (“sorry if I offended you”), so is accountability for the original utterance. A close analysis of utterances regarded as insults and the ensuing metapragmatic acts shows how the insults are negotiated by the interactants, illustrating the value of metapragmatic analysis in understanding language use in interaction.

References:

Caffi, C. 1998. Metapragmatics. In J.L. Mey (Ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, 581-586. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Dynel, M. 2016. With or without intentions: accountability and (un)intentional humour in film talk. Journal of Pragmatics 95.

Haugh, M. 2013. Speaker meaning and accountability in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 48(1).

Haugh, M. 2018. Corpus-based metapragmatics. In A.H. Jucker, K.P. Schneider & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Hübler, A. & Bublitz, W. 2007. Introducing metapragmatics in use. In W. Bublitz & A. Hübler (Eds.), Metapragmatics in Use. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Kleinke, S. & Bös, B. 2015. Intergroup rudeness and the metapragmatics of its negotiation in online discussion fora. In M. Locher, B. Bolander & N. Höhn (Eds.), Relational Work in CMC. Special issue of Pragmatics 25(1).

Tanskanen, S-K. 2007. Metapragmatic utterances in computer-mediated interaction. In W. Bublitz & A. Hübler (Eds.), Metapragmatics in Use. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Tanskanen, S-K. 2018. Identity and metapragmatic acts in a student forum discussion thread. In B. Bös, S. Kleinke, S. Mollin & N. Hernández (Eds.), The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Vepsäläinen, Heidi (University of Helsinki) Virtanen, Mikko T. (University of Helsinki) Koivisto, Aino (University of Helsinki)

’And’-prefacing 2.0: timing, chunking, and thread management in Finnish multi- party WhatsApp messaging

In Conversation Analysis, turns prefaced with the connective ‘and’ have been studied extensively from spoken interaction. Previous studies have shown, among other things, that ‘and’-prefacing is a device for displaying a routine or agenda-based continuity of talk (Heritage & Sorjonen 1994; Nevile 2006) and for linking back to a speaker’s own prior talk (Local 2004) and ‘articulating the unsaid’ in formulations of other’s talk (Bolden 2010). Our paper complements these studies by examining the wide-ranging use of ‘and’-prefacing in digital multi-party conversation in the written (and visual) mode. Our analysis, based on Finnish instant messaging data, focuses on the use of ja ‘and’ in message-initial position. We define message as an element that is displayed on the mobile screen by the system as a unit of transmission (on message vs. turn, see Markman 2013). ‘And’- prefacing is analyzed from three interrelated viewpoints:

1) turn-construction

2) topic and sequence management

3) rhythm and timing

The analysis shows that ‘and’-prefacing (in instant messaging) can be used as a resource, among other things, for continuing a single turn over multiple messages (‘chunking’; Baron 2010); responding to multiple lines of talk (‘threads’) at one go; responding to a non-adjacent message after a lapse (asynchronicity and orientation to a ‘less-focused gathering’; see Goffman 1961) . Our method is applied Conversation Analysis (see Meredith 2019). The data consist of Finnish student theater group’s WhatsApp messaging in a period of six months, with 2.943 messages in total.

References

Baroni, Naomi 2010: Discourse structures in instant messaging. The case of utterance breaks. ‒ Language@Internet 7, article 4.

Bolden, Galina 2010: ‘Articulating the unsaid’ via and-prefaced formulations of others’ talk. ‒ Discourse Studies 12, 5‒32.

Heritage, John & Sorjonen, Marja-Leena 1994: And-prefacing as a feature of question design. ‒ Language in Society 23, 1‒29.

Local, John 2004: and-uh(m) as a back-connecting device in British and American English. In Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Cecilia E. Ford (eds.), Sound patterns in interaction. Crosslinguistic studies of phonetics and prosody for conversation, 377–400. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Markman, Kris 2013: Conversational coherence in small group chat. In Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication, 539–564. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Meredith, Joanne 2019: Conversation analysis and online interaction. ‒ Research on Language and Social Interaction 52, 241‒256.

Nevile, Maurice 2006: Making sequentially salient. And-prefacing in the talk of airline pilots. ‒ Discourse Studies 8, 279‒302.

Virtanen, Tuija (Åbo Akademi University)

Intentionality marking in online consumer reviews of books

Online consumer reviews constitute non-trivial ‘prosumer’ discourse, of interest to businesses and users alike. The communicative goal is to assess and evaluate a product or service, and provide justification for users’ assessments, in view of imagined audiences (Vásquez 2014). Automatic analyses face tricky issues trying to grapple with users’ ‘sentiments’, as ratings are uninformative and accurate identification of evaluation is difficult (Liu 2015; Kang&Eshkol-Taravella, i.p; Kozinets 2016; Zervas et al. 2015). Further impetus for discourse-pragmatic approaches is provided by users preferring reviews of some length (Chevalier&Mayzlin 2006; Lin et al. 2005). This paper examines online consumer reviews through the lens of the much-debated pragmatic notion of ‘intentionality’ (for an overview, see Nuyts 2003). Reviewers leave metapragmatic traces of intentions, in the ‘narrow’ sense of the term (Duranti 2006), as they refer to actions, decision- making processes, and attributions of responsibility (Ahern 2010).

Self-referential intentionality marking was investigated in 200 popular written reviews of books categorized as ‘classics’ on Amazon, taking into account the multimodal affordances and observable evolution of genre conventions. The in-depth analysis disclosed that the placement of expressions of intention is concomitant with their discourse-pragmatic functions. The findings will be discussed in light of users’ manifest awareness of writer responsibility, their explicit construction of the expected sincerity of opinion, enactment of various self-affirming acts, as well as their display of intentions in relation to past and future actions, which serve different pragmatic functions.

Intentionality marking is a pragmatic phenomenon par excellence, providing insight into user attitudes and opinions, which mediate ordinary expertise. The study adds to the knowledge of how users go about constructing a reviewer persona, some of them explicitly striving for a (higher) status as a ‘top reviewer’. It also increases the understanding of users’ efforts to create accountability and a sense of interaction, in a mode that affords helpfulness voting and comments.

References:

Ahearn, L.M. 2010. Agency and language. Verschueren, J. et al. (eds.). Handbook of Pragmatics Online. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Chevalier, J.A. & D. Mayzlin. 2006. The effect of word of mouth on sales: Online book reviews. Journal of Marketing Research 43(3): 345-354.

Duranti, A. 2006. The social ontology of intentions. Discourse Studies 8(1): 31-40.

Kang, H.J. & I. Eshkol-Taravella. In press. Evaluative language in online restaurant reviews. International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Applications.

Kozinets, R.V. 2016. Amazonian forests and trees: Multiplicity and objectivity in studies of online consumer- generated ratings and reviews. Journal of Consumer Research 42: 834-839.

Lin, T.M.Y, Luarn, P & Y.K. Huang. 2005. Effect of Internet book reviews on purchase intention: A focus group study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 31(5): 461-468.

Liu, B. 2015. Sentiment Analysis: Mining Opinions, Sentiments, and Emotions. Cambridge University Press.

Nuyts, J. 2003. Intentionality. Verschueren, J. et al. (eds.). Handbook of Pragmatics Online. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Vásquez, C. 2014. The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews. London: Bloomberg.

Zervas, G, Proserpio, D. & J.W. Byers. 2015. A first look at online reputation on Airbnb, where every stay is above average. http://collaborativeeconomy.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Byers-D.-Proserpio-D.- Zervas-G.2015.A-First-Look-at-Online-Reputation-on-Airbnb-Where-Every-Stay-is-Above-Average.Boston- University.pdf

Wentker, Michael (University of Duisburg-Essen)

Multimodality, Interactivity and Authenticity in YouTube Reviews – Methodological Challenges and Analytical Benefits

While the interactivity and multimodality of the genre have rapidly and constantly increased, thus far, most studies in the domain of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) have focused on text-based product reviews (cf. Lis & Korchmar 2013, Vásquez 2014). This study explores the methodological challenges in documenting and analyzing complex multimodal eWOM and illustrates why it is important to tackle the problems and go beyond the text-based approach.

Drawing on a multimodal corpus of YouTube product reviews and paying special attention to the socio-technical affordances and constraints of this digital mode (Herring 2007, Page et al. 2014), this case study illustrates how multimodality and interactivity contribute to creating authenticity (van Leeuwen 2001, Gill 2011, Lacoste et al. 2014, Androutsopoulos 2015, Hower 2018) both in the review video itself and in the ensuing comments section below the video, in which users vividly discuss and thus evaluate the review and reviewer. The analysis not merely focuses on linguistic strategies of (co-)constructing and negotiating authenticity but especially considers which multimodal strategies (e.g. reviewers’ self-display or video editing expertise) are exploited to perform an authentic reviewer identity (Benwell & Stokoe 2006, Bucholtz & Hall 2005, Bös et al. 2018).

Pursuing a multimodal discourse-analytic research design, this contribution addresses the methodological challenges in the collection, sampling and annotation of multimodal data to guarantee the validity and representativeness of the results. The findings indicate that authenticity is an interactive accomplishment that heavily relies on multimodal means of self-presentation. Processes of authentication are shown to serve as a currency determining the success or failure of a product review, which is especially relevant in a digital genre governed by selective anonymity and context collapse (cf. Marwick & boyd 2010) and in which notions of impartiality and incentivization are frequently discussed.

References:

Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2015. “Negotiating Authenticities in Mediatized Time". Discourse, Context and Media 8, 74–77.

Benwell, Bethan, and Elizabeth Stokoe. 2006. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bös, Birte, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin, and Nuria Hernández (eds.). 2018. The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline: Personal - Group - Collective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. "Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach". Discourse Studies 7 (4–5), 584–614.

Gill, Martin. 2011. "Authenticity". In: Östman, Jan-Ola, and Jef Verschueren (eds.), Pragmatics in Practice. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 46–65.

Herring, Susan C. 2011. "A Faceted Classification Scheme for Computer-Mediated Discourse". Language@Internet 15, article 3. [URL: https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761]

Hower, Katla. 2018. "The Construction of Authenticity in Corporate Social Media”. Language@Internet 4, article 1. [URL: https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2018/hower]

Lacoste, Véronique, Jakob Leimgruber, and Thiemo Breyer. 2014. "Authenticity: A View from Inside and Outside Sociolinguistics". In: Lacoste, Véronique, Jakob Leimgruber, and Thiemo Breyer (eds.), Indexing Authenticity: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 1–13.

Lis, Bettina, and Simon Korchmar. 2013. Digitales Empfehlungsmarketing. Konzeption, Theorien und Determinanten zur Glaubwürdigkeit des Electronic Word-of-Mouth (EWOM). Springer Gabler: Wiesbaden.

Marwick, Alice, and danah boyd. 2010. "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse and the Imagined Audience". New Media & Society 13 (1), 114–133.

Page, Ruth, David Barton, Johann W. Unger and Michele Zappavigna. 2014. Researching Language and Social Media. A Student Guide. London/New York: Routledge.

Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2001. "Authenticity, Talk and Mediated Experience: What is Authenticity?". Discourse Studies 3 (4), 392–397.

Vásquez, Camilla. 2014. The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews. London: Bloomsbury.

White, Jonathan (Högskolan Dalarna)

Identity Work in a Newbies Football Fan Forum

In the Chelsea FC fan site, The Shed End, there is a forum for new users at the site (newbies) to introduce themselves. The forum site itself started in 2009 and the newbie forum began in 2010. This forum was chosen as a good case study for how users do identity work and present themselves to other users. There are three issues that the analysis takes up. According to research, online communities are characterized by banter, conflict and an impoliteness that is considered by many to be normalised behavior (Beers Fägersten, 2017). This is clearly reflected in the Shed End forum. Users tease each other and can generally be explicitly face-threatening, even though it is warned against in the community guidelines. When a positive reaction is seen from newbies, then they are welcomed into the community by being subject to more teasing. This teasing behavior is marked and is sometimes explained metapragmatically as joking. Secondly, there is much presupposed knowledge surrounding Chelsea FC used in the football discussions, such as the nicknames of players (Lampo, Wisey). Users do ask if they do not understand particular terms, but then there is negative teasing, especially for experienced users. This, it seems to be expected that users share knowledge of certain nicknames or initialisms. Finally, the textchat speech style is mentioned in the guidelines as “horrible”, but this is clearly not filtered out by moderators, despite explicit references to this happening. Non-native speakers are often apologetic about their language skills, but this leads to teasing about the proficiency of non-standard native speaker users, and so this seems to be a linguistically open community. To conclude, we see that users are explicitly part of a teasing, non-standard linguistic culture in this fan forum.

References:

Beers Fägersten, K. (2017). The role of swearing in creating an online persona: The case of YouTuber PewDiePie. Discourse, Context & Media 18: 1-10.

Williams, Lawrence (University of North Texas)

The variable use of French second-person pronouns in website discourse

A substantial amount of research related to online discourse has been produced over the past few decades, but much of it has focused on synchronous and asynchronous communication in a range of interactive contexts. This is especially the case for research focusing on the use of French pronouns in online communication spaces (e.g., van Compernolle, 2008 and Williams, 2009). This presentation seeks to expand research on French second-person pronouns in online discourse by focusing on contexts that are mainly static, namely webpages. In contrast to discussion boards, blogs, and social media platforms, the typical webpage is a communication environment that does not allow for real-time, spontaneous negotiation of meaning with readers. As such, a company that designs a website must determine how it wants to shape or instantiate social indexicality (i.e., its relationship) with each customer that visits its website. Since a company cannot anticipate the profile of each individual, it cannot (reliably) provide different versions of the welcome page of its supersite (i.e., the main entry point) for each visitor. Therefore, in French, for example, the company must select one of three possible models: (1) use of second-person pronoun tu (T) everywhere; (2) second-person pronoun vous (V) everywhere; or T in some places and V in others. This presentation provides a corpus-driven analysis of the variable use of T and V forms used on 40 different websites of French and non-French products and services (automobiles, food, beverages, chain restaurants, and transportation services). After providing an overview of the T/V analysis, 3 websites will be analyzed in depth in order to demonstrate how T and V (as well as other pronouns and pragmatic features of discourse) can help to create a portrait of specific ways in which companies shape social indexicality (Morford, 1997; Silverstein, 2003) with current or potential customers.

References:

Morford, J. (1997). Social indexicality in French pronominal address. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 7, 3-37.

Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics ofsociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23, 193-229. van Compernolle, R. A. (2008). Second-person pronoun use and address strategies in on-line personal ads from Quebec. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 2062–2076.

Williams, L., & van Compernolle, R. A. (2009). Second-person pronoun use in French language discussion fora. French Language Studies, 19, 363–380.

Xie, Chaoqun (Zhejiang International Studies University)

When the private goes public: Deviance and (im)morality in Chinese online chats

The internet contributes, in a sense, to the extension and expansion of social members’ presence and existence in their life worlds and to the increasing blurring of online-offline, and public-private boundaries, making digital living an everyday and ordinary fact. This, in turn, has brought about, among others, an observation, namely that interpersonal interaction these days is increasingly becoming a dangerous business, in the sense that what is said or typed in a normal online discussion or debate may later be appropriated as the source of delation, incurring undesirable consequences.

Based on a detailed discursive analysis of online chats between Mr. Zheng, a university associate professor in China, and his students, which later developed into a conflict resulting in a punishment on the part of Mr. Zheng by his university, this paper aims to delve into some critical issues pertinent to deviance and (im)morality. The analysis will be devoted to the following two research questions: (1) How is deviance discursively constructed by the students concerned? (2) Is an environment in which seemingly private interactions (between a teacher and students) can be made public through the affordances of online platforms changing the ways in which deviance and respectability are discursively constructed? It is argued that perceptions around the deterioration of morality, or even the loss of ‘moral sense’, in modern China, along with the affordances of the online interactional landscape, are contributing to the rise of claims of deviance and disrespect in online chats. However, there has been at the same time a rise in perceptions that those making those claims are themselves without a proper sense of and due respect for the moral order that underlies and constrains human interactions, and that self-interest and individual satisfaction gained through ‘retaliatory pleasure’ is driving these discursive conflicts.

Zhang, Wei (Fuzhou University)

Identity Construction Realised by Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae -- A Case Analysis of Chinese and Japanese SNS Responses

With the progressive theorization of (im)politeness, increasing academic attention has been paid to re-examine the drastic context-determined theory after the discursive turn and re-evaluate the importance of conventionalisation in meaning processing. Pragmaticians come to realise that conventionalisation could be a new and fruitful approach for (im)politeness research. As a vital part of impolite discourse, conventionalised impoliteness formulae are pragmatically rooted in interpersonal interaction. Extant researches mostly focus on semantic analysis, leaving pragmatic perspectives underexplored. To delve into the pragmatic aspects of conventionalised impoliteness formulae, this research explores the role it plays in discourse, with special focus on its role in the process of identity construction and negotiation, which is the central battlefield of discursive struggle. Drawing upon Brewer and Gardner’s identity theory in 1996 and incorporating Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) identity analysis framework and ritual theory along with frequency calculation, this study attempts to model the operation of the conventionalised impoliteness formulae in identity construction and negotiation, supported by our dataset of 800 Internet responses regarding the “Security Bills” from Chinese SNS Weibo and Japanese SNS Facebook. This dataset yielded a corpus of 674 Chinese and 441 Japanese conventionalised impoliteness formulaic expressions, divided in this dissertation into four themes depending on different targets: (1) targeting government and people of other nations, (2) targeting one’s own government and people, (3) defending one’s own government and people and (4) conventionalised impoliteness formulae with veiled targets.

This analysis has revealed that identities correlate with conventionalised impoliteness formulae, which in turn contributes to the co-construction of interlocutors’ positive and negative identity attributes, with the latter far more significant than the former. The construction and negotiation occur on different layers of identity and can take place simultaneously. It is gleaned from the analysis that identity is in essence a recursive concept, as the personal identity and relational identity accrete into the group identity, and the group identity can compose into the identity of a bigger group. This is the first comprehensive and yet a tentative study on the interface of conventionalised impoliteness formulae and layers of identities at both micro and macro levels, which will hopefully contribute to the theorization of (im)politeness.