Discourse Context & Media最新文献

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.

This paper undertakes an analysis of the streaming platform Twitch. Twitch is premised upon a single Streamer and a large audience. Interaction between a Streamer and an individual Chat member is constructed by the Streamer through a form of acknowledgement and ratification that leads to a momentary encounter. Strategic ‘reading’ and reading aloud not only function to link and sustain conversation, they also structure the embodied performance of the streamer, who must shift their visual attention away from the primary activity. These head movements are then a primary resource for interaction.Through a Conversation Analytic approach, the paper identifies a ‘reading-reading aloud-responding’ action or R(RA)R as an interactional resource for engaging audience members in ongoing conversation. The analysis is in line with the ‘respecification’ of ‘mediated interaction’ (Arminen et al., 2016) and moves towards a ‘digital CA’ (Giles et al., 2015). It contributes to an ongoing project that looks to ‘digitise Sacks’ (Housley et al., 2017) and inform methodological development of future analysis of technology-mediated interaction.

Looking at cute animal images and videos has become a popular online pastime and animals themselves increasingly appear as actors in social media who have their own accounts and profiles from which they ‘speak’ to and ‘interact’ with us. This development goes hand in hand with a change in human-animal relations in most of Western cultures, where pets – especially cats and dogs – are more and more often seen and treated as family members while the animals we eat are rendered invisible in factory farms that are spatially detached from everyday human life. The familial relationships between humans and their pet companions are constructed by a variety of sociocultural means, one of which is language. By talking about pets as babies and children and oneself as cat or dog moms, the connection between the human and the pet is discursively established as one of kinship and intimacy rather than one of ownership and obedience. Social media have become a prolific space for performing “interspecies families” (Owens, 2015), where self-acclaimed pet parents can interact with each other and build communities of practice in which pet accounts post and engage with each other from an imagined pet perspective. This article uses a quantitative corpus-based approach to study the discursive construction of interspecies families on German-speaking Instagram. By analysing more than 20,000 posts from dog and cat accounts offering first person narratives, the article provides insights into the ways human pet owners speak about themselves and their relations with their pets from an imagined pet perspective. The analysis shows that the caption texts accompanying the posted pictures and videos are highly anthropocentric: at the centre of these short texts stands the – usually female – human pet owner. Using family terminology for both humans and other animals in these posts serves the linguistic construction of interspecies families in which pets and their human companions are held together by love and kinship ties rather than ownership.

Modern day protest movements consist of demands for social action to address entrenched issues such as government leadership and long-standing traditions and values. Driven by an initiating event that incites a collective societal outburst and mobilisation, protestors engage a range of linguistic and semiotic expressions to challenge existing discourses, increasingly platforming these messages globally through the intersection of digital technology and online social networks. The 2022 demonstrations in Iran under the protest banner Woman, Life, Freedom emerged as characteristic of modern social and political movements. Sparked by a widely circulated video showing 22-year-old Mahsa Amini collapsing in a Tehran classroom after being arrested for “improper” hijab wearing, these protests utilised social media to swiftly disseminate related content. This study examines a diverse range of protest signage shared on social media that conveys these protestors’ messages. We employ the concept of “mediational means” from mediated discourse analysis to explore the linguistic and semiotic resources employed during these protests. Our analysis draws from a corpus of protest images and digital ethnographic accounts, investigating how these resources were harnessed to challenge prevailing societal norms, particularly regarding gender and its intersections with ethnicity. We assert that the semiotic processes involved in creating and disseminating protest signage not only galvanised participants during the protests but also contributed to the formation and reinforcement of a “new” identity among the demonstrators. This newly forged identity carries profound implications not only for gender dynamics but also for broader aspects of identity within Iranian society and potentially on a global scale.

In this study, we examine practices of bargaining in Chinese livestream sales events. In such livestreams, the host, usually an Internet celebrity, invites a company representative to advertise a product for the customers who are usually fans of the host. Following the promotion, the host is expected to bargain with the seller to reduce the price of the item for the customers. We approach livestream bargaining as a ritual practice in which ostensible aggression is tolerated. We capture the conventional interactional features of bargaining as strategies. We also compare livestream bargaining strategies with face-to-face ones, which allows us to capture how cyberspace affects Chinese bargaining practices. Our outcomes fill a knowledge gap because in pragmatics little attention has been devoted to bargaining in Chinese livestream sales events, even though bargaining is an important tradition in Chinese social interaction.

Vlogs, as one of the most popular digital genres for the construction of personal experience, are an important site for the study of digital storytelling. Although the narration of ongoing events is becoming increasingly common in vlogs, narration of past events is still present. As they incorporate both storytelling modes, vloggers also act as editors curating and commenting on their materials. Thus, vloggers are presented with the task of transitioning between different chronotopic identities as characters, storytellers, and vloggers in their narratives. Research has shown that vloggers are judged based on perceived authenticity and credibility, as well as their ability to involve viewers, therefore managing these self-presentations is complex in view of the above requirements which have to be met if vloggers want to attain greater popularity. Drawing on a corpus of 47 YouTube vlogs documenting vloggers’ experiences of COVID-19, we analyze how vloggers transition between these chronotopic identities, and describe such transitions according to a dual system of categorization based on the chronotopes involved in the transitions and their function. We find that vloggers shift focus between their roles as vlogger, storyteller, and character through the use of multimodal resources such as captions, overlaid media, and camera movement, and in doing so, address the demands that they need to meet in order to gain followers by presenting themselves as competent, credible, and engaging content creators.