Complaining, teasing, and meme-framing

This article explores the pragmatic act of complaining on WeChat Moments (henceforth Moments) focusing on the following question: When complaints are made in a social context where ratified viewers are hard to define, how are such acts constructed and construed? The multimodal data under study come from a project designed to address the under-examined issue of indirect complaints in Chinese social media. Drawing on the conceptualization of frame analysis in pragmatic studies and informed by a conversation analytical approach, this article proposes the concept of social complaints, accounting for how Moments users employ it performatively to deal with serious matters, to socialize and to manage rapport with people in their social networks. Teasing, it is found, is often performed in both complaints and responses to the complaints, which manifests Moments users’ flexible positioning strategies in handling interpersonal relations.

Days of our ‘quarantined’ lives

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many users around the world exploited internet memes as a digital source of humour to cope with the negative psychological effects of quarantining. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this study investigates a set of COVID-19 internet memes to explore the quarantine activities and routines to understand ordinary people’s mindsets, anxieties and emotional narratives surrounding self-isolation as well as the pragmatically generated humorous meanings relying on verbal and visual components of memes. The findings revealed that quarantine humour is centred around themes including quarantine day comparisons focusing on the perceived effects of home quarantines on physical and mental well-being, quarantine routines, and physical appearance predictions at the end of quarantine. Intertextuality was a productive resource establishing connections between quarantine practices and popular texts. In addition, humorous meanings were created through anomalous juxtapositions of different texts and incongruity resolution is largely dependent on the combined meanings of verbal and visual components.

Anonymity and authenticity on the web

Building on our own research (Kersten and Lotze 2018, 2020; Lotze and Kersten in press, under review) as well as other work in this area (Bechar-Israeli 1995; Stommel 2007; Lindholm 2013; Aleksiejuk 2016a, 2016b), this article will discuss the pragmatics of (self-)naming practices online and how they contribute to identity construction and face-work (Bedijs, Held and Maaß 2014; Seargeant and Tagg 2014). Drawing on the data collected, both existing and analysed as part of a wider study of usernames across 14 languages (Schlobinski and Siever 2018a), the use and function of anthroponyms and other names in online contexts are explored. Furthermore, we endeavour to situate both onomastic and sociolinguistic research in the field of digitally-mediated interaction (DMI) and in the field of pragmatics in general.

Multimodal strategies for balancing formality and informality

This paper investigates multimodal strategies for balancing formality and informality online. The analysis of 300 comment-reply interactions on a recipe sharing site in Japan demonstrates that writers tend to avoid being overly formal or informal in their messages. For example, most comments and replies are written in polite forms but many incorporate some plain forms and colloquial expressions. Linguistic features, however, are not the only way through which the writers manage an appropriate level of formality and informality. The study examines the role of kaomoji or Japanese-style emoticons for socio-relational work online. Some kaomoji function locally as cues for interpreting the sentences featuring kaomoji. All kaomoji, including those with local functions, work to enhance the social presence of the writers on the screen via pictographic gaze and gestures, which increases the perception of intimate rapport. The findings underscore the importance of a multimodal perspective in examining how people handle social relationships online.

Becoming #Instafamous

Drawing on Goffman’s (1990 [1959]) metaphor of stage, this paper considers Instagram a frontstage environment where users are cautious of being watched and attune their performance to how they want to be perceived via strategic self-presentation. This understanding of online performance is particularly pertinent in the discussions of bloggers who turn to Instagram to promote their work to new audiences. Examining the self-presentation practices of three fashion bloggers, this paper argues that to gain popularity on Instagram, bloggers utilize the features of formality and informality in the construction of an authentic and likable self-image. Since in the photographs the bloggers’ professional life is usually depicted as distant from their audience’s reality, the accompanying textual caption serves as a means of providing balance for the overall image the poster seeks to present. Consequently, the caption abounds with features of informality, which connote linguistic immediacy and imitate an intimate conversation with peers.

Persuasive language and features of formality on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit

The paper investigates formal language in persuasive discourse on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit. We collected a corpus of 100 million messages, split into subcorpora based on the user-awarded marker delta, which rewards changing an original poster’s view. Assuming that formality/informality is potentially an important factor in the persuasiveness of a message, we examine the two subcorpora with respect to formality markers. The results indicate no systematic variation along the formality/informality continuum between persuasive and non-persuasive posts on r/ChangeMyView. The posters use personal pronouns, suasive verbs, emphatics, imperatives, elaborate connectors and WH-questions with similar frequency, and express themselves using vocabulary and syntax of similar complexity. Moreover, keyword lists and n-gram rankings indicate no register difference. A qualitative analysis of concordance lines for persuade and change PRONOUN view paints a picture of a community that values factual, evidence-based discourse and openness to logical persuasion, with a linguistic norm of relatively formal, sophisticated register.

Brutal spoons and cheesy gloves

In its long presence on television and the internet, the genre of the cooking show has changed and diversified significantly. The initial principally instructional character has given way to more entertaining sub-genres, including parodic ones, that is, ‘spoof cooking shows’ on the internet. The presentation of self (Goffman 1959) takes on many forms in everyday life, but the possibilities of publicly managing one’s own impression have enormously increased on the largest stage in the world, the internet (cf. Shulman 2017). The blurring of the Goffmanian concepts ‘front-’ and ‘backstage’ are important here in the presentation of self as ‘fake’ or ‘real’ person on the web. This article looks at the diversification of the genre of the cooking show in its transition to the internet, first by investigating strategies of formality or informality (Irvine 1979, 2001), then by exploring a particular spoof show, Cooking with Paris, as an example of how genre conventions are manifested by undermining.

Intimate consumptions

In this paper, I investigate how the structure of and discursive performance on North American YouTube eating shows contribute to the creation of intimacy and informality. In a typical eating show, the performer eats copious amounts of food while talking to their non-copresent audience, making use of interactional registers to ‘break’ from the solitary setting and to build rapport with their viewers. The material for this study is based on two case studies drawn from a corpus of YouTube eating shows. At the heart of the eating show performances lies the persona of a ‘friend’ of the viewer, diverting from their highly structured and technologically-mediated communicative nature. While the language used on eating shows may thus seem spontaneous and unprompted, the videos are not only planned but also edited. The simultaneous presence of selected unedited moments (i.e., slips of the tongue and other mishaps), however, is evidence of a conscious blending of front- and backstage performance (Goffman 1959; Shulman 2017).