Discourse Context & Media最新文献

This study explores how participants co-accomplish coherence in multi-modal conversation. We observed online watch parties, with an interest in the intertwining of text, talk and video. The data comes from two different communities on the live-streaming platform Twitch.tv. Each community consists of one live-streamer and their viewership. The live-streamers broadcast an audio-visual artifact, while simultaneously communicating with their viewers in real-time. The two were highly interactive, despite one (the streamer) speaking and reading, and the other (the chatters) typing and listening. The crisscross of modalities introduces challenges for the management and intelligibility of conversation. One coherence strategy involved a 4-stage process whereby streamers redirected viewers’ attention, and then initiated a collaborative activity. This 4–stage sequence illustrates a predictable structure that is potentially applicable to other digital & multimodal environments. Methodological challenges of digitally-mediated interaction are addressed, such as transcription of voice-and-text cross-modal conversation.

Digital platforms offer users various meaning-making resources to express their stances towards specific issues, and, as a result, to perform and manage their identities. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this paper explored how individuals who identify as Two-Spirit, an umbrella term used within Native American communities to refer to non-binary people, discursively construct their identities on the popular video-sharing platform TikTok by enacting varied practices of stance taking. Specifically, this paper provides a detailed analysis of three videos marked by the hashtag #TwoSpirit in which the content creators explain the meaning of the term to their audience. The findings not only illustrate the approaches taken by three content creators to the explanation of the term (i.e., contrastive, pedagogical, and metamorphic), but also shed light on the multimodal nature of stance-taking on TikTok and the centrality of embodied practices in the mediated era. In detail, embodied practices are seen as particularly relevant to disrupting colonial heteropatriarchy.

As a journalistic work routine, ‘dialogical networking’ typically consists in approaching relevant ‘stakeholders’ and later presenting their ‘voices’ in media products, often in a dialogical manner (e.g., as claims and counterclaims). The aim of this paper is to describe the practices of journalistic dialogical networking and elucidate, from a praxeological perspective, how they are embedded in other journalistic practices, e.g., sourcing or writing, and how they reflect technical as well as semiotic conventions, constraints and affordances of situated journalistic work. It is argued that dialogical networking is a members’ phenomenon and is treated as such by both the journalists and the ‘stakeholders’. The paper is based on ethnographic research at Czech Television, the public service media outlet in Czechia. The study suggests that practices of news production are based on typifications of news reports in terms of communicative genres and genre repertoires. Dialogical networking represents an operationalisation of a particular piece of genre-related knowledge with an inherent bias towards dialogism. Accordingly, journalists report on actual social interactions, but also initiate dialogues by mediating exchanges among stakeholders, acting as go-betweens. Sometimes they merely juxtapose the ‘voices’ of the stakeholders, implying dialogical engagements among them, or ‘dialogise’ a press release, as the analysis here shows. The orientation to relevant dialogical networks is also an integral part of news story planning.

This article examines the role of a mainstream newspaper in perpetuating the othering of an under-researched migrant sub-group in Malaysia, Chinese national women who work in low-paid jobs and the illegal sex trade. While issues surrounding these women’s economic and social vulnerability have been largely ignored in media discourse, their involvement in sex work as well as their extramarital relationships with Chinese-Malaysian men have garnered negative press coverage. Using critical discourse analysis and critical stylistics, this study analyses the mediatised representations of these economic migrants, the adulterous husbands and their Chinese-Malaysian wives in a local Chinese-owned news site. Our findings show that the articles position the migrant women as sexual predators, sexual commodities and criminals; the men as prey as well as deserting spouses and fathers; and the local Chinese women as moral wives. We argue that these representations facilitate a co-ethnic racism that intersects with gender, sexuality, nationality, migrant status, occupation and social class. These representational choices are inscribed with patriarchal, neoliberal and xenophobic ideologies that converge in the media coverage to reinforce social fictions that justify and entrench the marginalisation of this highly stigmatised group of migrant women.

The emergence of social media has expanded the traditional landscape of health communication research. This study applies the framework of “ambient affiliation” in Systemic Functional Linguistics to a digital health context. Specifically, it explores how viewers of medical consultation videos on Bilibili.com, a Chinese online video-sharing platform, discursively negotiate alignments and construct bonds of shared values and knowledge in their online comments. Discourse analysis of the comments shows that ambient affiliation among viewers is formed in relation to four main types of interaction (i.e., evaluating the participants of medical consultations, sharing illness experiences, seeking health-related advice, and negotiating medical knowledge), through recurrent deployment of communing and dialogic affiliation strategies that act upon particular ideational-interpersonal couplings in the online comments. We argue that ambient affiliation in this digital discourse reflects the interest- and content-focused interactions in the ‘affinity space’ offered by the social media platform. Our study expands the existing knowledge on ambient affiliation by situating it in a digital health context. It also provides insights into how medical practitioners and health educators can more effectively disseminate health knowledge and enhance public health literacy on social media.

This paper aims to explore how emoji make meaning in interaction with other semiotic resources in museum social media posts. In so doing, it examines to what extent emoji are changing the way museums communicate with their audiences. The analysis is based on a corpus of museum social posts and grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics. Findings show that emoji make meaning not only in interaction with language, working as a paralinguistic resource, but also in interaction with visual content. The analysis highlights the presence of image-driven emoji, which create a convergence of meaning in association with details of the post image, limiting or excluding the textual component of the caption from the intermodal semiosis. Image-driven emoji often lead to playful effects and can be exploited by museum communicators for engagement purposes, to create quizzes and games. The study therefore suggests that emoji can contribute to add an informal component to museum communication, according to the 'post-museum' style, which is characterised by a more direct interactional attitude towards the audience.

Danmu (anonymous superimposed video comments) is a popular form of communication on Chinese and Japanese video sharing sites. While previous studies primarily focused on the verbal aspects of danmu comments, there is a growing interest in exploring their multimodal features. This study investigates the unique potential of danmu comments to communicate visual meaning, interact with on-screen content, and thereby shape audience perception. Informed by a social semiotic approach to multimodality and relevant pragmatic theories, the study analyzed 50 screenshots of visually significant danmu comments to understand the resources used by commenters to craft visual comments and the relationship between these comments and the screen. Our findings revealed that four key resources were utilized to create visual comments: arrows, kaomoji, context-specific special characters and symbols, and ASCII art. Additionally, five types of relationships were identified between visual danmu comments and the screen, including deictic, emphasizing, complementing, extending, and independent. This study provides an up-to-date examination of the possibilities for visual expression in textual communication and extends previous research on semiotic resources in social media. It also discusses the role of danmu visual play as internet memes and the emergence of danmu visual grammar.

Mock impoliteness, a term encompassing a wide array of phenomena (e.g., banter, teasing, mocking, jocular mockery, jocular abuse/insults, humour, etc.), has long been grounded in the framework of (im)politeness. However, the research on the participants’ metapragmatic evaluations of mock impoliteness is scarce, with the exception of Sinkeviciute (2017). This research aims to investigate the third-party participants’ metapragmatic evaluation in Danmaku comments in a Chinese online talk show Roast! that features mock impoliteness speech events. Danmaku, as a commenting system that displays users’ synchronous comments within the video stream, is widely used in Asian countries, especially in China and Japan (Wu & Ito, 2014). Danmaku comments provide easy access to a vast amount of third-party participants’ evaluations of mock impoliteness, which is an ideal data source for this research. Such metapragmatic evaluations offer invaluable insight to the first-order understanding of mock impoliteness, which resonates with the discursive approaches to (im)politeness that advocates first-order understanding of (im)politeness interactions (Eelen, 2001; Locher and Watts, 2005; Locher, 2006, 2012, 2015; Mills, 2003). By qualitatively categorizing the information provided in the Danmaku comments, a data-driven coding scheme is created, which captures different aspects of information: (i) in-text reference (Referent and Speech Event); (ii) pragmatic phenomena that is relevant to mock impoliteness (Impoliteness and Funniness), and (iii) metapragmatic evaluation (positive/negative Evaluation). Then a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al., 2006; Tagliamonte and Baayen, 2012; Tantucci and Wang, 2018) was fitted to investigate to what extent the above factors contribute to third-party participants’ metapragmatic evaluations of mock impoliteness. This method generated clear data visualization by displaying the ranking of contributing factors to the metapragmatic evaluations. Such quantitative results were then interpreted through qualitative analysis of typical examples from the data. The analysis concludes that funniness and impoliteness are the two most statistically significant factors contributing to Danmaku users’ qualitative evaluations. This conclusion, in return provides solid empirical evidence for second-order theoretical underpinning of mock impoliteness.