Cyberpragmatics Internet-mediated communication in context Francisco Yus John Benjamins Publishing Company Cyberpragmatics Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns Editor Associate Editor Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker University of Würzburg University of Zurich Founding Editors Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation, Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp Editorial Board Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of Foreign Studies John C. Heritage Miriam A. Locher University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson Angeles Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of California at Santa Barbara Susan C. Herring University of Athens Indiana University Srikant Sarangi Teun A. van Dijk Cardiff University Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Masako K. Hiraga Barcelona St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Marina Sbisà University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu The University of Queensland Volume 213 Cyberpragmatics. Internet-mediated communication in context by Francisco Yus Cyberpragmatics Internet-mediated communication in context Francisco Yus University of Alicante John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the 8 American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yus, Francisco. Cyberpragmatics : internet-mediated communication in context / Francisco Yus. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 213) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Pragmatics. 2. Digital communication. 3. Communication--Data processing. 4. Cognitive psychology. I. Title. P99.4.P72Y87 2011 401’.450285--dc23 2011025494 isbn 978 90 272 5619 5 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8466 2 (Eb) An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access isbn for this book is 978 90 272 8466 2. © 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. This e-book is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com Thisbookisdedicated tothememoryofEnriqueAlcarazVaró, aninvaluableresearcher,teacherandfriend wholeftusin2008 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Luz Gil, Bryn Moody and Carmen Soler for their stylistic suggestions on a draft of this book. Table of contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction xi chapter 1 Pragmatics, context and relevance 1 1. Pragmatics and the use of language 1 2. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory 3 2.1 The code model versus the inferential model 4 2.2 Ostension and intention 4 2.3 Manifestness. Cognitive environments 5 2.4 (Non-demonstrative) inference and deduction 6 2.5 Sources of information in a context 7 2.6 Relevance: Interest (cognitive effects) vs. processing effort 9 2.7 Presumption of relevance, principle of relevance 10 3. Cyberpragmatics 13 4. Cyberpragmatics, cognition and the Internet 16 chapter 2 The presentation of self in everyday web use 21 1. Introduction 21 2. Discourse and sources of identity 21 3. The (speech) community 24 4. The virtual community 26 4.1 The linguistic essence of the virtual community 28 4.2 Virtual cognitive environments 30 5. Towards personal networks of physical-virtual interactions 32 6. Virtual identity 36 7. The personal web page 41 8. The nickname (nick) 42 viii Cyberpragmatics chapter 3 Relevance on the web page 45 1. The web page genre. Intention and manifestness in the interpretation of a web page 45 2. Relevance (in information retrieval systems) 50 3. Relevance in the user who is surfing the Net 57 3.1 The role of the “addresser user” and the role of the “addressee user” 57 3.2 Levels or patterns of interactivity 59 3.3 Availability of information on the Internet and infoxication 61 3.4 Cognitive effects, mental effort and estimation of relevance 67 4. Usability: A relevance-theoretic approach 71 4.1 Users and interfaces 72 4.2 Designing for relevance 72 5. Transferring discourses to the Internet: The printed newspaper 76 6. Transferring discourses to the Internet: The printed advertisement 86 chapter 4 Social networks on the Internet: The Web 2.0 93 1. Blogs 95 1.1 The blogger’s intention 96 1.2 The blog genre 99 1.3 The reader’s interpretation 107 1.4 An emphasis on interaction 108 1.5 Communal bonding through blogs 110 2. Social networking sites on the Internet 111 2.1 Definition, attributes and types 111 2.2 Some theoretical approaches 116 2.3 Profiles, entries and (mutually) manifest information 118 2.4 Adjusting the concepts of “friend” and “friendship” on SNSs 131 3. The microblog Twitter 135 3.1 Introduction 135 3.2 Cognitive effects vs. processing effort 137 3.3 Interpreting tweets 143 3.4 Twitter conversations 148 Table of contents ix chapter 5 The virtual conversation 151 1. Introduction 151 2. Chat rooms 151 2.1 Utterance, propositional attitude and audio-visual context 152 2.2 “What is important is to be able to talk” 154 2.3 Compensating for the loss of the audio channel in chat rooms 162 2.4 Compensating for the loss of the visual channel in chat rooms 164 2.5 Oralized written text 174 2.6 Attitudes and emotions in chat rooms 179 3. See you on messenger 188 3.1 Instant messaging compared to other forms of interaction on the Net 188 3.2 Why use instant messaging? 191 3.3 The individual versus the group 192 3.4 Oralized written text in instant messaging 197 4. Chatting in 3D: Advances, avatars and SecondLife 198 4.1 Terminological explanation 202 4.2 Identity 204 4.3 Body 205 4.4 Verbal interaction 210 4.5 Nonverbal behaviour 212 5. Videoconferencing and context accessibility 217 chapter 6 You’ve got mail 219 1. Introduction 219 2. General characteristics of electronic mail 221 2.1 The newsgroup 221 2.2 The e-mail distribution list (Listserv) 224 3. Electronic mail in the oral/written continuum 225 3.1 Social dynamics 226 3.2 Format 228 3.3 Grammar 235 3.4 Style 236 4. Elements of an electronic message 238 4.1 The (ostensive) call for attention 238 4.2 The sender 241 x Cyberpragmatics 4.3 The addressee 242 4.4 The e-mail address 244 4.5 The subject line 244 4.6 The body of the message 248 4.7 The signature 252 chapter 7 Politeness on the Net 255 1. Introduction 255 2. Some approaches to the study of politeness 261 2.1 (In)direct speech acts and politeness 261 2.2 Politeness in transactional and interactive discourse 263 2.3 Politeness and rudeness 264 2.4 Metalinguistic and linguistic politeness 268 2.5 The context of speech situation 269 3. Brown & Levinson’s model 271 3.1 Parameters for weighing politeness 273 3.2 Face on the Internet 275 4. Politeness and relevance 279 chapter 8 Conclusion: Prospects for cyberpragmatic research 287 1. The oral/written and visual/verbal dichotomy 288 2. The ubiquity of the Internet 289 3. The consolidation of hybrid networks of interactions 291 4. The transference of information from the Internet to the mobile phone 293 5. The transference of content to the web 294 6. The consolidation of Web 2.0, participatory culture and user-generated content 295 References 297 Name index 343 Subject index 351 Introduction This book is the last stage in my proposal of a cognitive pragmatics analysis of Internet-mediated communication and interaction. For this specific approach to communication on the Net, I coined the term cyberpragmatics (Yus 2001a, 2010b). In short, cyberpragmatics aims at applying pragmatics to Internet users’ interactions, specifically cognitive pragmatics and, within that, relevance theory, which has proved to be useful for the explanation of face-to-face communication and also of asynchronous communication, as happens with literature (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995). Today’s Internet-mediated communication typically involves massive exchanges of messages of a written, audio-visual and multimodal quality, and most of them with an oral connotation. This is why typed texts often appear to be hybrids between the stability and rigidity of the written (i.e. typed) text, on the one hand, and the spontaneity and ephemeral quality of speech, on the other. Although this book adopts an explicitly pragmatic approach, it also men- tions other studies on Internet communication insofar as they shed light on the quality of interactions on the Net. But the central theoretical framework will be cognitive pragmatics and specifically relevance theory, as I have already pointed out. Hence, throughout the book there is an underlying certainty that although the Internet might exhibit attributes and strategies that are inherent in this medium, all of them can ultimately be explained within cognitive pragmatics. Communication is a human ability, a human resource and there is no difference between interpreting the messages that we are sent in physical contexts and do- ing so in virtual scenarios. The only thing that varies is the way communication is achieved, together with the means that human beings have devised to engage in interactions.