Discourse Context & Media最新文献

On Chinese monetary-motivated live broadcasts, during which streamers present a variety of activities such as musical and artistic skills to solicit financial contributions from online viewers, streamers’ personal authenticity is a major factor influencing viewer donations and user engagement. Through an ethnographic approach to collect data from livestream channels at the Taiwan-based livestreaming platform, Lang Live, this article examines the authenticating discourses streamers engage to demonstrate that they are being their true selves rather than performing contrived theatrics in order to attract viewers. Specifically, I explore how authenticating discourses are conducted, co-constructed, and negotiated by considering factors including the platform-specific features, streamers’ self-expression, and viewer responses. I propose a specific meaning of personal authenticity emerging from users’ dynamic interactions, discuss viewers’ reasoning behind it, and explore how these perceptions of personal authenticity are linked to Lang Live’s communicative affordances and monetary system.

Because digital affordances of the Internet have provided spaces for linguistic creativity, a large number of popular terms derive from the Internet. Analyses of these forms serve as a lens through which essential aspects of social realities can be analyzed. This study focuses on the use of a trolling label Gangjing popularized in Chinese digital interaction. Collecting data from interactional threads in Baidu Post Bar, the CA-informed study investigates what communicative actions netizens perform in using the term and what responsive behaviors it triggers. Pragmatic notions such as identity construction and relational acts are adopted to interpret its use. Results show that Gangjing is used to show disagreements, delegitimize others as irrational participants, express negative emotional stances, and invite people for entertainment. Different responsive behaviors, including resisting, criticizing, mocking, attacking, and playing, are triggered. Overall, the creative trolling label can function as an interactional resource accomplishing interpersonal functions. By nuanced analyses of the dynamics of a popular reference term rooted in Chinese language and culture, the study adds to the current interactional approach to creative language use in online communication while providing new insight on interpretations of online trolling discourse.

Linguistically, Colombia is divided into two macrovarieties of Spanish: cachaco (interior of the country) and costeño (from the coastal regions). This linguistic dichotomy can also be extended to the cultural ambit, with costeño varieties being negatively perceived in the Colombian sociolinguistic imaginary, which is in turn reflected in popular folk discourse on language. Thus, the present article explores how authenticity of the costeño macrodialect is constructed in Colombian telenovelas ‘soap operas’, examining the significance of the language ideologies behind these constructions.

Data is presented from a corpus of popular telenovelas, with findings showing that the depiction of this diverse macro-variety is often ‘exaggerated’ or ‘inauthentic’, supporting popular suggestions of misrepresentation, as well as previous findings on a cachaco narration of the Other. Importantly, this reflects wider sentiment toward costeño varieties in terms of how deeply engrained language ideologies are manifested within the country, shedding light on the social structures behind these ideologies, contributing to studies on the role of popular media in constructing and perpetuating ideologies on variation.

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.

In this paper I study discursive practices of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the pandemic, political leadership across the globe had to take tough decisions such as restrictions on the social and personal lives of individuals. This meant addressing concerns over ensuring compliance with these restrictions. I examine how Modi managed these concerns in his communication with the Indian polity over TV and radio broadcasts. I do so in instances where Modi gave specific instructions about following restrictions or other COVID appropriate behaviours. Using discourse analysis, I analyse data from two prominent ways of communicating in the pandemic, Mann Ki Baat and addresses to the nation. Analyses show that Modi developed two sets of non-electoral relations across his communication, which treated compliance as normatively expected: a) between Modi and Indians and b) among Indians themselves. These relations made way for treating audiences as those who are in specific social roles where duty and service were normative. Instructions and their compliance were embedded in these roles and treated as expected and consequently moral acts. Modi’s discursive practices worked to perform a politics of service and duty, where compliance is ultimately treated as expected service.

This article focuses on the strategies that were used to resist misogyny on the microblogging platform Twitter during March 2021, a time when the hashtag #NotAllMen was trending. We take a critical feminist approach, combining corpus linguistics with a qualitative analysis of #NotAllMen users’ discursive strategies. This particular iteration of #NotAllMen followed the disappearance and subsequent rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a 33 year old white woman who was abducted from a street in London, UK, whilst walking home. Following a keyword analysis (Scott 1997) to survey a dataset of 18,701 tweets containing the hashtag #NotAllMen, we identify salient themes in a sub-set of keyword concordances, and produce a detailed qualitative analysis of the strategies deployed in ten randomly sampled tweets. Despite #NotAllMen initally being used as a statement of protest against supposedly unfair accusations levelled at ‘all’ men, our analysis illustrates the use of resistant and empowering strategies which challenge the misogyny of this message, re-framing the hashtag and thus acting as a form of resistance to its original message: that not all men enagage in gender-based violence. We argue that this points to the strategic use of social media to challenge harmful rhetoric, whereby users exploit the affordances of hashtags. Twitter users engaged in strategies including resistance, opposition, and polarity to the hashtag, evidenced through the linguistic use of expletives, insults, and direct address, most often emerging through metadiscussion of the #NotAllMen hashtag itself; this works as a form of collective counter-protest through hashtag reframing. The hashtag reframing operates as a tool to show how those using the hashtag to focus on the defence of men, rather than critiquing the sociocultural dominance of misogynistic behaviour, ignored the fear experienced by all women and girls of being victims of gender-based violence, rape and murder.

This paper examines a viral language style that emerged during online activism against a Chinese celebrity after she was announced the winner of an architecture award. Drawing upon insights from celebrity studies, online activism, and social semiotics, I examine how netizens creatively appropriate and mock celebrity language, focusing on the semiotic work netizens engage in to mobilize emotions, form solidarity networks, and perform collective action as they reveal the moral failures, injustice, and falsehood of celebrity culture. Three semiotic strategies are found to be key in enabling netizens to formulate their critique: entextualization, stylization, and typification. In this process, language serves multiple functions: it is the target of critique, a proxy for discussing social issues, a tool for building solidarity through mutual learning, and a creative way of pursuing fun. I argue that these semiotic moves turn language into power, allowing netizens to articulate discontent against the rich amid increasing disparity and lack of trust in a neoliberal society.

The development and spread of the internet and social media technologies across China have provided people with alternative pathways for achieving celebrity status and wealth. Such persons, known as wanghong (internet celebrities), can achieve fame by promoting themselves and their online content on a variety of monetised platforms, giving rise to what is called a ‘wanghong economy’. Using a social semiotic multimodal approach, this study examines the techniques of wanghong, and the affordances of the digital platforms used to communicate celebrity-fan interaction. In particular, we study three wanghong who construct a distinct online persona on separate apps, Weibo, Douyin, and Bilibili, as they sell perceived intimacy and interaction. This study demonstrates methods for studying Chinese social media platforms.