Discourse Context & Media最新文献

Unmanaged online depression communities (ODCs), which are self-formed without managers or professional support groups, are characterized by negative emotional sharing that is often context-absent and highly self-attentional. The atypical features of emotional narratives pose challenges for examining the communities’ communication patterns and themes of sensemaking. This study explores some methodological perspectives for conducting a thematic analysis of the mundane, fragmented, and uncontextualized emotions related to depression in the largest unmanaged ODC in Weibo, named ‘Zoufan’. By adopting the small stories research paradigm from narrative analysis and incorporating the concept of perspectivization, this study offers an in-depth thematic and narrative analysis of depressive self-talk online. It first identifies three salient theme clusters – ‘punishment’, ‘deprivation’, and ‘failure’ – to reveal how the ‘Zoufan’ members conceptualize their lived experience with depressive episodes, and then maps the theme clusters with the commenters’ passive, powerless, and paradoxical perspectivization of the self in their narratives. Methodologically, the study underscores the effectiveness of small stories research in the thematic exploration of atypical depressive self-talk on social media. Practically, it provides insights for mental health professionals, educators, parents, and other stakeholders to better understand depressive self-talk in the context of Weibo.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the “wine mom” phenomenon exploded in online spaces. This paper examines “wine mom” discourse in a Facebook support group for mothers in Hong Kong. We define the “wine mom” as a humorous memetic resource. It is culturally recognisable and associated with women’s (including mothers’) drinking. Drawing on 30 “wine mom” threads from the support group, we use interactional sociolinguistics and multimodal discourse analysis to examine humour performance and humour support in the data. We identify a range of linguistic and multimodal strategies that the support group members use to construct and respond to “wine mom” humour. A focus on particularly popular threads demonstrates that the members playfully blend advice-giving with genres such as breaking news. Humorous advice centres on various COVID-19-related practices and realities, including quarantining and self-testing. We discuss how by joking about wine and drinking, the women do more than being humorous: they build rapport and solidarity, and provide support to each other during the pandemic.

The Chinese video-sharing platform of bilibili experiences a ‘Kongming fever’, wherein danmu commenters collectively parodize the historical figure Zhuge Kongming, a pre-existing indexical of Confucianist value beliefs institutionalized by the official authority. Drawing upon Bakhtinian carnivalesque (‘free and familiar contact’ and ‘parodic profanation’), the present study proposes the analytical framework of ‘linguistic carnivalization’ as a critical metapragmatic approach (i.e., subjectivity-oriented). The multimodal analysis of danmu comments reveals how digital users appropriate multiple semiotic resources to construct carnivalesque, including vulgar linguistic varieties from media culture, netspeak genre, poetic patterns of textual repetition, and inversive sign vehicles and rescripting. As a discursive-affective effect of such carnivalization processes, Kongming’s ‘serious’ Confucianist personae and indexed ideological expectations become playfully mediatized, profaned, and transformed into new images of personhood (‘livestreaming microcelebrity’ and ‘hedonic partygoer’) according to mass popular culture. In so doing, the Chinese netizens metapragmatically negotiate existing sociocultural hierarchies and reposition themselves as neoliberal subjects. This paper further suggests that the ‘inside-out’ and ‘down-to-earth’ power of linguistic carnivalization does not simply reside in creating aesthetic humor within a local cybercommunity, but importantly owns critical implications for illuminating variegated forms of neoliberal discourse and (re)production of neoliberal subjectivity under large-scale political economic conditions.

Contemporary research has shown that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is productive in exploring patterns of Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC). In this paper, I demonstrate the analytical potential of this approach by studying the typographic representation of a prosodic feature of spoken language – High Rising Terminals (HRTs, e.g., that beer pong place I went for my birthday?) – in a large corpus of WhatsApp messages (96,471 messages; 594,183 words) sent by 15 young British adults. Combining methods and approaches from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, I show that the orthographic representation of HRTs patterns in pragmatically similar ways to the feature in speech in that it most frequently functions as a way of verifying the interlocutors’ comprehension of discourse-new information. The precise rate and pragmatic function of this feature, however, appears to be constrained by the textual modality of the platform. Concluding, I join others in arguing for the analytical potential of employing a multidimensional approach to studying variable patterns of DMC.

Contributing to the growing literature on discursive strategies against male-dominated gender discourse in the Chinese digital space (e.g., Chen and Gong, 2023), this study investigates a popular neological metaphor – diewei (“爹味” − literally, a smell of father, figuratively, a sense of fatherhood) coined by Chinese microblogging users on Weibo. Similar to mansplaining in English, diewei was originally adopted to describe men’s patronizing, condescending, and overconfident speech style (Bridges, 2017). Drawing on the cultural reference to Chinese fatherhood, diewei represents irony against the authoritative role of the father privileged by patrilineal Chinese family ethics, employed to evaluate others’ overbearing speech styles, attitudes, and behaviors. From a dataset of 198 Weibo posts, we identified three strategic adoptions of diewei based on linguistic and communicative functions. These include (1) markers of masculine essence, (2) metapragmatic commentaries, and (3) personal labels. We then adopt critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore how gender relationships are discursively produced, represented, and resisted in the diewei discourse through the above adoptions. Our findings suggest that diewei instantiates the pragmatic expansion of gendered metaphors at the expense of dominant masculinity, constituting feminist irony against the authoritative fatherhood in China’s digital space.

In highly standardized literate cultures, orthographic norms are perceived as socially binding, giving rise to negative evaluations of ‘incorrect’ writing, i.e., writing that deviates from the norm. This is evident in prescriptive practices in interactions on social media including direct corrections of a deviance (*you’re) or comments more or less implicitly referring to it (“would be great if you knew how to spell”). In this study, we focus on a special type of corrections and the reactions to them: incorrect corrections. They are often corrected in so-called re-corrections, which frequently give rise to entire chains of corrections and comments that reflect diverse practices and attitudes both shaped by and towards normativity. By conducting an exploratory case study, we investigate (meta-)pragmatic strategies of stancetaking – such as mocking or doing being an expert – as well as their negotiation in (re-)corrections. Specifically, we focus on three posts taken from the public Facebook group People Incorrectly Correcting Other People consisting of, on the one hand, decontextualized screenshots showing an incorrect correction and ensuing re-corrections framed by the reaction of the poster posting them to the group. On the other hand, given the large number of group members, they include a myriad of additional comments discussing (re-)corrections at a meta-level. Our analysis suggests that re-correcting serves to criticize not a mistake but the positioning of correctors as superior. Thus, it implicitly challenges the normativity of standard language ideologies by exposing the hypocrisy of prescriptive practices.