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.

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.