Discourse Context & Media最新文献

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.

Research has argued that “ordinary conversation” and its organization are foundational to “institutional” talk (Drew & Heritage, 1992), and that institutional forms can be characterized as constraints on such a sequential organization. Such an argument can be extended to technology-mediated interaction, in which participants may orient jointly to “standard” conversational sequences and the technology’s interactional “affordances” to achieve interactional ends. We discuss here how such an interactional goal (closing a technology-mediated encounter) may be achieved in live video streaming. We argue that while participants can be seen to do that in a way that orients to the organization of closings in ordinary conversation, they do so in a way that is sensitive to the affordances of live video streams. We find that: a) Most of the streams involve closing sequences, thus framing the live stream as a social encounter for which closing is relevant; b) A partial and relaxed orientation to talking heads configuration in live stream closings; c) A four-part closing sequence; d) Two different topic development in closing the live streams—a topic message comes from the audience and some “mentionable noticeables” initiated by the streamer.

Multilingual interactions on digital platforms such as YouTube reveal complex translingual practices and negotiation strategies on the part of viewers. Two live performances sung in Cape Verdean Creole (Kriolu) by Mayra Andrade, a Cape Verdean music artist, uploaded to YouTube by different digital media platforms generated these types of interactions. These interactions were analyzed by adopting Wortham and Reyes’ (2015) “discourse analysis beyond the speech event” to reveal the extent to which semiotic resources utilized in the performances, and translingual practices and negotiation strategies utilized by the viewers, brought about uptake of the Cape Verdean Creole lyrics and their meaning, and artist identity. The data revealed that viewers negotiated language related themes and artist and viewer identity in different ways, yet shared similar appreciation for the performances and the artist. Additional concepts, such as phatic communication and nonrepresentational meaning, provide further understanding for viewers’ attitudes towards negotiating meaning and engaging in a digital forum to discuss with others their reactions to and love of the artist’s live performances. The study reveals the diverse semiotic resources adopted by nonlocal audiences to appreciate nonrepresentational meanings to redress the current emphasis on representational meanings and linguistic resources in translingual studies.

This study examines how interactions with a “female” chatbot are drawn as a resource for the construction of masculine identity in the context of the South Korean web. I analyze three posts shared in an online community where users of Luda Lee, an open-domain AI chatbot, gather to talk about their interactions with her, often to sexually harass her. Drawing on Kiesling's (2011) discussion of alignment in the discursive construction of gender, I examine alignment in users' interactions with and about Luda as reflective of their desire to achieve and be recognized as achieving dominance over women and other men. My analysis demonstrates how Luda, as a friendly female chatbot, becomes a convenient resource for users to draw on in their construction of masculinity. This study contributes to discussions of masculinity in online discourse, as well as to conversations on ethical considerations in AI on the female gendering and harassment of bots.

In 2016 Wayde Van Niekerk, a South African athlete of mixed-race heritage won an Olympic gold medal. In South Africa, his win caused hashtags such as #proudlysouthafrican, #blackexcellence and #colouredexcellence to trend online. By and large, these hashtags index the ongoing competitive discourses regarding nationalism, race and culture in Cape Town (cf. Author, 2018).

Amongst these hashtags, however, was #dalawhatyoumust, a Kaaps hashtag generally meaning to “do what needs to be done”. Unlike the aforementioned hashtags, this one seems to cross the linguistic and racial divide despite its strong associations with Coloured¹ people on the Cape Flats. The seemingly effortless uptake of this hashtag by diverse South Africans suggest that it has somehow become unmoored of its ethnic and linguistic inception.

We explore the use of this Kaaps hashtag as a form of translingual practice which is affect-laden and transportable across and between diverse users online and which promotes a particular “cool Capetonian” culture. Analyzing select posts from the #dalawhatyoumust thread on Facebook, we provide a nuanced look at #dalawhatyoumust as an uplifting genre which proleptically advises nameless viewers of the importance of self-actualization, determination and aspiration. Additionally, we include Goffman’s (1974) framing foundation to investigate how positivistic discourse has been rhizomatically taken up by a ‘realm’ of implicit collective users online. This research interrogates long-held ideological boundaries between Kaaps and legitimized Standard Afrikaans and standard English.

We conclude with a focus on Kaaps hashtags as semiotic acts of Linguistic Citizenship (cf. Williams and Stroud, 2013) which allows for the conjoining of Kaaps with diverse audiences, complex trajectories, and an assortment of accompanying semiotics. Following Stroud (2018:3) we argue that this Kaaps hashtag has become a form of languaging that facilitates “…the building of broad affinities of speakers that cut across…divisions and borders, and that negotiate co-existence/co-habitation outside of common ground in recognition of equivocation”. In South Africa, division was the order of the day and when we explore contemporary ordinary moments posted by heterogenous users using #dalawhatyoumust (henceforth #dwym) we aim to explore the ordinariness of languaging which brings people together despite their race, linguistic background, and ethnicity, that is to say an affinity of ‘cool Capetonian’ style.

Despite the abundance of research into conspiracy theories, including multiple studies of Covid-19 conspiracy theories in particular, user reactions to conspiracy theories are an underexplored area of social media discourse. This study aims to fill this gap by examining a dataset of humorous responses to proliferating COVID-19 conspiracy theories based on a corpus of tweets bearing the pejorative hashtag #CovidConspiracy. We report the complex orchestration of heteroglossic discursive voices in these posts to reveal their rhetorical function, oriented towards expressing a negative stance and, in some cases, amounting to ridicule. The discursive effects of this interplay of voices entail imitation, parody, mockery and irony on the micro level, while on the interactional (macro) level, anti-conspiracy tweets jointly enact what we dub “polyvocal scorn”. It expresses multiple users’ trenchant critique and contempt for conspiracy theories, while the humour of the tweets serves to display the users’ wit and superiority over conspiracy theorists.

The community of users on Viki.com, a video streaming platform distributing Asian television to an international audience, use the site to engage with streams of television dramas. Rather than just being passive consumers, viewers interact in a range of different ways, among them the use of Timed Comments (TC). TCs are comments viewers post while viewing dramas. Subsequent viewers can read these comments when streaming the same episode. Users can read and respond to comments by previous viewers as if they were written at the time of watching (similar to Danmaku). Building on our previous work on Viki-TCs, we have framed the community mainly as a harmonious collective engaging with artefacts from a different cultural and linguistic context. In this study, we focus on the creation of pseudo-synchronicity by looking at interactivity between TC writers and in particular on those TCs that construct conflict. Our corpus consists of 320,000 multilingual, but predominantly English comments. We make use of an exhaustively annotated sample of 8,930 comments to extract and formalize patterns of implicit and explicit interaction and locate them in the larger corpus using corpus linguistic methods. Special attention is given to conflictual interaction in connection with plot spoilers, judgments on co-viewers’ analytic and experiential skills and inappropriate language usage, negative comments on actor appearance, commenters using the space for fan interaction outside of the drama-scope and the technical use of the platform. These conflictual interactions often function as negotiations of the platform norms, socialize viewers into how the space works and can thus also be linked to community building. Our study contributes to understanding better how online fan community norms are built and behavior is sanctioned or (implicitly) condoned through interaction. In this way we contribute both to the study of interaction in a context that works online and asynchronously and to the study of online fan communities.

In this paper, we present a research approach that sheds light on how netizens on social media perform and negotiate their multimodal and multisemiotic repertoires embedded within their social media languaging practices. This approach brings multimodal social semiotics into conversation with the normativity of translingualism to problematise the notion of languages as being ‘ordinary’ or ‘mundane’, and to illustrate how translingual netizens deploy their knowledge of the features of different language scripts, modalities and ‘small things’ (e.g., the use of emojis, replies, and comments) to increase and exploit their communicative capacity. In order to explore this claim, drawing upon digital ethnography approaches as our guiding methodology, the study investigates a YouTube post and responding comments from Global South settings. We illustrate that the subtext of their translingual practices is influenced by how they move beyond discourses and ideologies from the Global North. The analysis will consider the nature of communication in the aforementioned online communities from historical and contemporary perspectives, focusing on how our participants exploit local linguistic diversity as a resource and on how they extract a piece of text or discourse from its original context and bring it to a new context (i.e., online) and modify this material so that it fits into the new context. This article, therefore, contributes to the emerging body of work on the normativity of translingualism in communities around the world.