Discourse Context & Media最新文献

Drawing on research about constructing identities through self-presentation (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012) and Bamberg’s (2011a, b) sameness and difference, I demonstrate how Korean expatriates employ vlogging strategies to construct and present everyday self, especially vis-à-vis viewers. To do so, I analyze 27 daily vlogs of Korean expatriates living in Hong Kong, New York, and Tokyo. The vloggers present the mundanity of everyday life, using chronological organization, quick scene transitions, micro-details, and “historical present” (Wolfson, 1979). These vlogging strategies, I argue, create alignment with viewers, signaling that “my daily life is just like yours.” Simultaneously, the vloggers make everyday vlogs engaging and entertaining through offering explanatory notes and not providing translation of what is being spoken, especially when they present foreign city lives, cultures, and languages they experience by virtue of living abroad, to signal “my daily life is different from yours.” Everyday vlogging of Korean expatriates, as a type of “lifestreaming” (Marwick 2013), involves meaning making and identity construction processes through which Korean expatriates skillfully exert and express agency in (ab)normalizing their expatriate self and life, in connection to others, and thus achieve self-legitimacy and -empowerment.

Public debates are rife with overt blame attributions—the explicit assignment of moral responsibility for problems in society to individuals and groups. The present study develops a framework for identifying discursive blame attribution strategies in the journalistic mediation of problems through the use of causality construction, which enables an understanding of how blame is attributed implicitly. I draw on a qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis of migration frames to distinguish three types of perceived migration-related problems: security-based, economic, and cultural. I make a further distinction based on whether these problems are causally explained by: (1) reference to migrants’ alleged culture and religion or (2) the socioeconomic conditions they experience in the recipient country. The study advances our understanding of blame attribution by drawing attention to the subtle ways groups are held responsible for problems in society through journalistic mediation processes and how context influences mediated blame attribution.

This study examines the genre of YouTube reaction videos as a distinct form of cultural production and social influence in online communication. Despite its prevalence and popularity, the genre has received limited scholarly attention, particularly with regard to reactions to ideological activism. This paper aims to fill this gap by conducting a social semiotic discourse analysis of videos reviewing the activism of transgender community on TikTok. The analysis demonstrates how intersecting non-verbal and technologically enabled modes, such as gaze, gestures, facial expressions, and various audio-visual effects, contribute to the expression of impoliteness arising from a sense of superiority over the target, shared with non-targeted viewers. Overall, the paper provides insights into the dynamics of online culture wars and the multimodal manifestations of impoliteness in contemporary social media discourse.

This article uniquely illustrates the intricate and complex dynamics between blame and the othering process. It does so by unearthing how the British Conservative government, led by Boris Johnson, systematically used blame to reproductively depict the EU, ex negativo, as the “other” to the British “self” between 1 January 2021 (the end of the transition period) and 6 September 2022 (the end of Johnson’s tenure as prime minister). The study works with a comprehensive dataset of the UK government’s official pronouncements on the EU and Brexit collected from Gov.uk (the official government website) and Hansard (the official resource documenting British parliamentary proceedings), as the very points of origin for mediation, which were then often disseminated, interpreted and amplified by the media. Drawing on Hansson’s typology of blame avoidance strategies and Krzyżanowski’s operationalisation of the discourse historical approach, due attention is paid to the topical structure of blame discourse and its underlying discursive strategies.

As government officeholders face criticism for misconduct or policy failures, they are tempted to communicate in self-defensive ways. In this paper, I draw attention to how strategic blame avoidance in government may involve coercive impoliteness, that is, the use of expressions that attack the face of (potential) critics with an aim of forcing them to withhold their (future) criticism. Taking a discourse-historical approach to political rhetoric, I present illustrative examples of institutional government messaging from the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, and Russia to demonstrate how these face attacks may be accomplished in subtle ways, such as via sarcasm or mock politeness. I discuss the ethical implications of the uses of coercive impoliteness in government communication for democratic debates over public policy issues. The paper contributes to the study of political blame games, language aggression, and incivility in (digitally) mediated contexts.

This study examines artefact-orientation in timed comments on the streaming platform Viki and contributes to research on text-based video-oriented communication. Commenters post text messages next to the subtitled videos while they are streaming, and their comments thus relate in specific ways to the artefact they complement. We explore what aspects apparent in fan subtitles are taken up in timed comments by comparing our own corpus of such timed comments (KTACC-A) to our corpus of English fansubtitles to the same Korean television-drama (KSUBV-A). Positioning the comments relative to the fan subtitles allows us to explore the linguistic features that characterise timed commenting as a video-oriented practice and to theorise artefact-orientation in terms of transtextuality. Using noun frequency and keyness as measures of comparison, we confirm the importance of sharing emotive stance and humour support. For artefact orientation, we highlight a shared focus between timed comments and subtitles on the events and characters of the plot. However, in comments, evaluation of such plot elements plays a key role, whereas highly descriptive and specific aspects are either omitted or at times referred to by means of deictic expressions. We emphasise that both comments and subtitles are enrichments of the videos that become themselves part of the artefact and point of orientation for subsequent viewers and discuss the transtextual dimension of timed comments and different types of transtextuality as dimensions along which members of the community may understand the overall artefact.

This paper seeks to investigate the indexical links (Silverstein, 2003) to social values activated by terms like “covid” and “virus” in tweets from users with opposing political leanings. Our data comes from a corpus of 12,607 tweets collected in both May and August 2020. We focus on tweets containing “Trump”, as these occurred frequently throughout the corpus, to assess the ways in which Twitter users engage with discourses surrounding Covid-19 relative to the then-US President.

Focusing on the local contexts of the tweets we, first, demonstrate the contrasting social values indexed by specific keywords and hashtags. We refer to these as countervalues (Bearth, 2005) that illustrate the multiple and competing valorisations of terms for Covid-19 and which lead to the reproduction of two main contrasting discourses. The first illustrates that Covid-19 is “fake”, “a hoax”, and is explicitly linked indexically with China and tends to appear in tweets by pro-Trump users. A second set of discourses emerges in opposition to the pro-Trump tweets where categorisations of the virus as fake or a hoax are described by users as moronic, links to China are described as racist, and users demonstrate an explicitly anti-Trump ideology. We conclude that the recirculation of these discourses is evidence of sociological fractionation (Agha, 2007), as we see the pro-Trump group resisting the scheme of values put forward by the anti-Trump group. To this end, we contribute to the body of research that sheds light on the participatory frameworks enabled by social media affordances.

During major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government officeholders issue commands to change people’s behaviour (e.g., ‘Stay at home!’) and express thanks to acknowledge the efforts of others and build solidarity. We use specialised datasets of replies to social media posts by government ministers in the United Kingdom during Covid-19 lockdowns to explore how people react to their messages that contain directive speech acts and thanking. Empirically, our corpus-assisted analysis of evaluative language and blaming shows that far from promoting team spirit, thanking may elicit at least as much, if not more blaming language than commands. Methodologically, we demonstrate how to analyse government social media communication dialogically to gain more nuanced insights about online feedback from citizens.

This study examines disciplined body in video game playing activities in which players produce their game moves with their bodies. Disciplined body refers to particularly designed bodily movements, orienting to their recognizability by the machine. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this study demonstrates that participants endogenously display a sensitivity towards machine’s recognition, through which they point to a need for players to discipline their bodies and produce machine-designed movements. Disciplining the body involves producing the game movements in particular forms required by the machine, calibrating the movements to the constraints of the machine, and timing the movements in coordination with the unfolding games. The analysis provides insights for reflecting on the relations between humans and machines and in particular how the former adapts to the latter. Participants attribute a specific form of agency to the machine to see and recognize the player movements. This necessitates the players to perform their game movements with specific qualities, which deviates from the “natural” human body, arguably leading to dehumanization. This study is based on video-recorded data in which participants speak Turkish.