Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular ...social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the dissociative echoing of individuals wearing peculiar masks or the dissociative parodic echoing of their collective voice. The theoretical thrust of this analysis is that, as some memes are (re)posted across social media (sometimes going viral), the previous voice(s) – of the meme subject/author/poster – can be re-purposed (e.g. ridiculed) or unwittingly distorted. Overall, this investigation offers new theoretical and methodological implications for the study of memes: it indicates the usefulness of the notions of multimodal voicing, intertextuality and echoing as research apparatus; and it brings to light the epistemological ambiguity in lay and academic understandings of memes, the voices behind which cannot always be categorically known.
Mouton Series in Pragmatics (MSP) is a timely response to the growing demand for innovative and authoritative monographs and edited volumes from all angles of pragmatics. Recent theoretical work on ...the semantics/pragmatics interface, applications of evolutionary biology to the study of language, and empirical work within cognitive and developmental psychology and intercultural communication has directed attention to issues that warrant reexamination, as well as revision of some of the central tenets and claims of the field of pragmatics. The series welcomes proposals that reflect this endeavour and exploration within the discipline and neighboring fields such as language philosophy, communication, information science, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition and cognitive science. MSP will provide a forum for authors who represent different subfields of pragmatics including the linguistic, cognitive, social, and intercultural paradigms, and have important and intriguing ideas and research findings to share with scholars who are interested in linguistics in general and pragmatics in particular.
This article reports the findings of a diachronic sociopragmatic study on the politically loaded Italian hashtag #HaStatoPutin based on an automatically generated corpus of tweets (N = 31,334), ...encompassing two datasets from before and after what Putin originally called Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine that commenced on 24 February 2022. #HaStatoPutin appeared on Twitter in 2015 to mark tweets criticizing what Italian users considered to be unsupported conspiracy theories targeting Vladimir Putin, viewed by these users as a scapegoat in mainstream political rhetoric spread in the Western world. As this comparative study shows, the emergent applications of the hashtag are hardly affected by the events of 2022, indicating the stability of the expression and the political opinions of polarized Italian society, regardless of the socio-political context. Specifically, four tweet categories, which express tweeters’ political opinions or serve humorous purposes, are identified in both datasets: dissociative echo, counter-criticism, mock conspiracy theories, and metacomments. Given the specificity of #HaStatoPutin, its political contextualization, and applications, with which the users need to be familiar to create and understand tagged tweets, it is proposed that the tweeting practice makes for a “hashtag affinity space” on Twitter.
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.
This theoretical paper addresses the (im)politeness of swear words. The primary objective is to account for their nature and functions in anonymous Internet communication, represented by YouTube ...commentaries (and exemplified by those following snatches of “Borat”), in the light of recent approaches to (im)politeness, notably: second order (im)politeness, necessarily recruiting first order interpretations; intentionbased approach; and relational work. The emerging postulate is that taboo words can display impoliteness (by manifesting aggression, power-building and abuse) or politeness (by fostering solidarity, common ground and humour). The nature and functions of cursing in anonymous commentaries are posited to be largely reminiscent of those appearing in oral interactions. Nevertheless, several characteristics of expletives appear to be peculiar to the discourse of an e-community of practice.
With a focus on the online phenomena of scamming and scambaiting, this article explores users’ communicative activities on Reddit’s r/scambait subreddit. Drawing on a representative corpus viewed ...through grounded theory, we establish the basic categories of posts and then unpack those further to reveal the deceptive practices being undertaken by both scammers and scambaiters, as well as Redditors’ untruthfulness in their fabricated posts. The analysis reveals that the r/scambait subreddit exists as a site of humorous entertainment arising from various forms of deception. Scammers’ deceptive strategies are depicted as amusingly naïve and inefficient, while scambaiters’ deceptive messages targeted at scammers demonstrate great creativity and wittiness. In both cases, scammer-victims are disparaged for being immensely gullible or downright stupid; and Redditors earn online plaudits for submitting the most upvoted posts. Our significant finding is that posts such as those at r/scambait should never be taken at face value due to their inherent epistemological ambiguity, to which the users choose to remain oblivious or indifferent. Furthermore, on a general plane, this study indicates a potential shift in the emic understanding of the concept of “scambaiting” from a punitive measure and an educational instrument to a creative practice geared toward posters’ kudos and users’ joint humorous experience through “baitertainment” and “scamusement.”
This paper contributes to the fledgling pragmatic research on social media swearing. The concept of “hashtag swearing” is proposed to capture the practice of using hashtags centred on swear words. ...The empirical focus is on tweets marked with #FuckPutin and submitted in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, the article reports the findings of a multimodal discourse analysis of a randomised sample of 500 #FuckPutin tweets with media files extracted from an automatically generated corpus of 37,782 tweets in English posted within six weeks after the military attack. Accompanying multimodal content that falls into eleven categories, the viral swearing hashtag is shown to display pragmatic polysemy and polyfunctionality; it merges the seemingly mutually exclusive functions of swearing: committing acts of aggression (sometimes coupled with getting relief) and fostering solidarity (adapted to Twitter interaction). Thus, #FuckPutin swearing is conceived of as solidary flaming: tweeters flame Putin and demonstrate solidarity with the Ukrainian nation, tacitly developing rapport with like-minded users who post similar tweets with the swearing hashtag that (symbolically) abuses the common enemy. Overall, the swearing hashtag is legitimised/appropriated (albeit not neutralised) on Twitter, being adopted as an entertaining taboo buzzword and a tool in public political discussion.
•Proposal of “hashtag swearing”.•Swearing hashtags as legitimised but not neutralised buzzwords.•Hashtag swearing serving online versions of solidarity, aggression and catharsis.•#FuckPutin as a pragmatically polysemous and polyfunctional hashtag.•#FuckPutin conceptualised as solidary flaming.
Drawing on the literature on interaction in new media and on participation models underlying (non)fictional multi-party media talk, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on ...computer-mediated communication. Specifically, this article advocates a new participatory framework holding for multi-party interaction on YouTube, which is compared to that underlying films and televised programmes. YouTube users’ participation is more complex than television viewers’, who are involved primarily as ratified hearers dubbed “recipients”. YouTubers, on the other hand, engage in asynchronous computer-mediated interaction, changing their participatory statuses at the production and reception ends. The extended participatory framework proposed here for YouTube resides in three levels of communication: the level of the speaker and hearers in video interaction, the level of the sender and the recipient of a YouTube video, and the level of YouTube speakers and hearers who post and read comments, respectively. These communicative levels are realised by: interactants in videos and the (collective) sender, i.e. the production crew (both typical also of televised films and broadcasts), together with YouTube users, who may be video interactants and/or senders, as well as take other participatory roles.
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