Performing microcelebrity: Analyzing Papi Jiang's online persona through stance and style

ABSTRACT Contemporary digital media is characterized by a cultural logic of participation that encourages sharing, confession, phatic communication, and an emphasis on the visual. In this techno-cultural milieu, self-presentation has become a key mode of communication, and has enabled ordinary individuals to attain a measure of celebrity status. A key component of being a microcelebrity entails developing a consistent persona that is recognizable and unique. How such persona can be studied from the sociolinguistic perspective of stance and style is the focus of this article. We combined corpus linguistic and qualitative discourse analytic methods to examine a small corpus of videos produced by Chinese online celebrity, Papi Jiang. The article presents key lexico-grammatical, discourse-level, and non-linguistic resources that are analyzed as stance markers that together contribute to Papi's intense, critical-satirical performative style. The significance of the findings is discussed in relation to performance, performativity, and critique in digital media. (Persona, microcelebrity, style, performance, stance)*

Phatic Communication, Penggunaan Psikologi Komunikasi Dalam Pemberitaan Atta-Aurel di Portal Kompas

Komunikasi fatis tercipta dari komunikasi yang efektif, terutama dari ciri kesenangan yang timbulkan dari umpan balik komunikasi. Komunikasi yang dilakukan dengan pendekatan psikologi umumnya disukai oleh netizen (komunikan), terutama yang disajikan di media online. Penelitian ini mengkaji bagaimana komunikasi psikologi memberikan umpan balik dari komunikator kepada komunikan, terutama jika sumber berita yang dipublikasikan adalah tokoh hiburan. Penelitian ini menggunakan teknik analisis deskriptif dengan teknik pengumpulan data dokumentasi berita Kompas tentang Aurel keguguran pada bulan Mei 2021. Dari hasil penelitian ditemukan bahwa berita yang ditayangkan oleh Kompas menuai pro dan kontra untuk netizen karena penulisan yang menggunakan pendekatakan psikologi komunikasi. penggunaan psikologi komunikasi memunculkan komunikasi fatis antara komunikan dan komunikator.

The Role of Adjacency Pairs to Create Politeness Strategies in Students’ Phatic Utterances

Adjacency pair is one of the language features to make utterances more polite as it creates turn-taking, which means that none of the participants dominates. Adjacency pairs also create functions of phatic communication as stated by Padilla Cruz. According to Levinson, there are nine patterns of adjacency pairs, and most could be found in utterances. The data were taken from 24 students’ phatic utterances, and they were chosen because all participants are classmates. COVID-19 pandemic has forced them not to meet each other for almost 2 semesters, yet they show their closeness and solidarity. After all the data were analyzed using the qualitative method, it can be concluded that there are 7 adjacency pairs: Question-Answer, Offer-Accept, Taking leave-Taking leave, Summons-Answer, Request for information-Grant, Request-Apology, and Greeting-Greeting, and most of them have phatic functions of communication. Using adjacency pairs employs politeness strategies and negative and positive politeness strategies from Brown and Levinson. Negative politeness strategies found are Be conventionally indirect, Question, hedge, and Quality-hedges, while positive politeness strategies found are: Offer, promise, Include both S and H in the activity, and Give gifts to H. One of adjacency- pairs and phatic utterances’ functions is to maintain politeness though the students are classmates with close social distance and equal power, they perform politeness strategies to keep their social relations. The appearance of politeness strategies shows that no matter how informal utterances are, closeness and politeness must stay together.Keywords: adjacency-pairs; phatic utterances; politeness; strategies

STRATEGIES AND TACTICS OF SMALL TALK AS COMPONENTS OF INTERCULTURAL BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

The article examines the problem of business communication and inclusion of phatic communication in the form of small talk while developing communicative skills of university students when studying Business Communication in English. Strategies and tactics of the English phatic genre of small talk are structurally analyzed from the point of view of linguistic means. The authors conclude that an adequate choice of strategies and tactics for small talk aimed at successful conduct of intercultural business communication is the social skill necessary for university students.

Transformation of the Human Image in the Paradigm of Knowledge Evolution

Purpose. The knowledge influence analysis on the formation process of new anthropological images of man in the contexts of scientific achievements and innovative technologies is the basis of this study. It involves the solution of the following tasks: 1) explication of the ontological content of knowledge in the anthropo-cultural senses of the epoch; 2) analysis of the knowledge influence on the process of forming a new type of man; 3) characteristics of the modern anthropological situation in the context of digital culture; 4) substantiation of interrelation of phatic communication with post-truth society in the dimensions of anthropo-social transformations of the present. Theoretical basis. Ontological content of knowledge determines the anthropo-cultural context of the epoch by forming a system of intellectual, value, social meanings of human life. The assertion of new anthropological types of man is caused by the changes in social and cultural space in the context of the growing influence of achievements in scientific knowledge and technology. Digital revolution as the process of expanding the possibilities of informational-digital reality, the substitution of knowledge for information gives rise to Homo digitalis – the digital man. He focuses on phatic communication, which in its intellectual meaninglessness is commensurate with the anthropological dimensions of post-truth society. Originality. It is substantiated that Homo digitalis is the result of a complex set of heterogeneous effects of scientific knowledge, which in modern post-truth conditions appears as different communicative practices. A condition for the formation of a new anthropological type of man in the perspective of scientific and technological progress is the affirmation of ethical wisdom. Conclusions. Knowledge in the process of evolution of socio-cultural life acquires constitutive significance for the process of formation of anthropological situations that manifest themselves in new images of man. Today, he is commensurate with the demands of digital culture, in which human life practices are increasingly becoming information and digital clusters embedded in the reality of a post-truth society. The means of overcoming the passivity of digital man is the formation of a new anthropological type based on a rethinking of the value system.

Pragmatic Options of the Dialogical Text as a Language Unit

The purpose of the article is to analyse pragmatic variants of a dialogical text as a language unit. It is assumed that the pragmatic context of the dialogical text (dialogue) actualizing is associated with either informative or phatic intentions. Informative and phatic dialogues appear as pragmatic allotext of a dialogical text. The research methodology is based on the synthesis of derivational and anthropocentric language theories. The process of creating a dialogical text is considered, on the one hand, as a derivational process due to the suppositional relationship between the lexeme and the text, and on the other hand, as a process of interpreting the text in the pragmatic context of its actualization. The material for the study was the recording of oral and written speech of regular native speakers in an informal communication situation. The total number of analyzed speech patterns was 140 dialogic texts – 70 texts of each communication type. It is stated that the pragmatic actualization of the dialogical text is associated with the realization of paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections of lexemes. It is revealed that the syntagmatic model of a dialogical text genesis in informative communication is an adjoining model. A paradigmatic model of dialogic text genesis in informative communication is synonymy. In phatic communication, an attachment model was identified as a syntagmatic model of the genesis of a dialogical text. The paradigmatic model for the production of dialogic text in phatic communication is a homonym model.

Emotion work via digital visual communication: A comparative study between China and Japan

Through the smartphone, the production and circulation of digital visual media have become as costless and accessible as audio and text-based communication. It would be challenging to be a contemporary ethnographer without engaging with digital practices which in Japan and China at least, tend towards being highly visual. Digital visual communication is recognised in literature as an effective and accessible form of communication, with an increasing number of studies in the field of digital anthropology, media studies and Internet studies exploring the consequences of digital images on social media. There is a pressing need to understand local forms of visual communication in the digital age, where the visual has become an essential part of daily communication. This article deals particularly with the rise of visual digital communication among older adults in China and Japan. Drawing on 16-month ethnographies conducted simultaneously between 2018 and 2019 in China and Japan, this article contributes to the discussion of visual communication in light of this semiotic shift happening online, which is then contextualised within people’s offline lives. The ethnographies in both China and Japan find that, first of all, visual communication via digital media enables more effective and efficient phatic communication and emotion work. In addition, the ethnographies point to a question about ‘authenticity’ in interpersonal communication. The ethnographies show that in some cases, the deployment of visual communication via the smartphone is not so much about being able to express ‘authentic’ personal feelings but rather, in being able to effectively establish a digital public façade according to social norms.