{"title":"“In these pandemic times”: The role of temporal meanings in ambient affiliation about COVID-19 on Twitter","authors":"Michele Zappavigna , Shoshana Dreyfus","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2022.100595","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper explores the role of a particular set of commonly occurring temporal meanings relating to the shared experience of being in a pandemic (e.g.,<!--> <em>in these unprecedented times</em>) and how these foster ambient affiliation on Twitter. Temporal meanings can be realised as a range of grammatical structures in texts and are linguistic resources that add meaning – in terms of dimensions such as manner, time, or place –<!--> <!-->to<!--> <!-->the main activities, entities or events in a clause. While often viewed in terms of their role in how experience is represented, we suggest they play a<!--> <!-->pivotal interpersonal role in how values are positioned and how social bonds are offered to ambient audiences. The paper<!--> <!-->also<!--> <!-->draws on communing affiliation, a system in the ambient affiliation framework for understanding how people share and contest values in social media environments, to show how these temporal meanings are functioning. Corpus-based discourse analysis of the contribution of<!--> <!-->temporal meanings to communing affiliation in<!--> <!-->a large of corpus of COVID-19 tweets was undertaken. Three major affiliation strategies that these temporal meanings were involved in were observed: <span>centring</span> in the service of <span>convoking</span> affiliation, <span>contrasting</span> in the service of <span>finessing</span> affiliation<span>,</span> and <span>accentuating</span> in the service of <span>promoting</span> affiliation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9733436/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse Context & Media","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695822000186","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper explores the role of a particular set of commonly occurring temporal meanings relating to the shared experience of being in a pandemic (e.g., in these unprecedented times) and how these foster ambient affiliation on Twitter. Temporal meanings can be realised as a range of grammatical structures in texts and are linguistic resources that add meaning – in terms of dimensions such as manner, time, or place – to the main activities, entities or events in a clause. While often viewed in terms of their role in how experience is represented, we suggest they play a pivotal interpersonal role in how values are positioned and how social bonds are offered to ambient audiences. The paper also draws on communing affiliation, a system in the ambient affiliation framework for understanding how people share and contest values in social media environments, to show how these temporal meanings are functioning. Corpus-based discourse analysis of the contribution of temporal meanings to communing affiliation in a large of corpus of COVID-19 tweets was undertaken. Three major affiliation strategies that these temporal meanings were involved in were observed: centring in the service of convoking affiliation, contrasting in the service of finessing affiliation, and accentuating in the service of promoting affiliation.