Francisco Yus

University of Alicante | UA · Departamento de Filología inglesa

In this entry the relationship between discourse and identity is pictured as an inverted triangle with a broad section at the top for ‘inherited’ sources of identity (sex, race/ethnicity, nationality) that have discursive correlates. The section in the middle represents ‘optional’ social groups to which the individual chooses to belong (and which o...

La identidad suele dividirse en personal y social. En investigaciones anteriores, he propuesto una división tripartita que incluye una identidad interactiva que, en cierto modo, actúa como “fuente de alimentación” para la identidad personal y social. La importancia de estas tres identidades en el entorno de la comunicación virtual ha variado depend...

Using mobile phone applications for our touristic activity is very common nowadays with the popularization of smartphones. These applications are useful at all stages of the touristic activity (anticipatory, experiential and reflective), especially to those users who have integrated (and hybridized) the Net into their lives. In theory, an essential...

Success in written academic communication depends on the presence of elements related to author-reader interactions which supplement propositional information in the text, help readers reach the intended interpretation and shape the author's identity. But is this claim equally valid for online genres? This new environment demands an adaptation of t...

O uso de deformação textual e de emoticons tornou-se um fenômeno difundido na comunicação mediada por computadores atual. Neste artigo, os emoticons são analisados a partir da perspectiva pragmática da Teoria da Relevância, o que implica determinar até que ponto eles contribuem para a eventual relevância da informação comunicada pelo texto digitado...

For more than a decade, linguistics has moved increasingly away from evaluating language as an autonomous phenomenon, towards analysing it 'in use', and showing how its function within its social and interactional context plays an important role in shaping in its form. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from some of the most influential sc...

In this article we aim to examine the notion of "place" as it is discursively constructed and eventually entextualised (decontextualised and recontextualised), both individually and collectively through the online-offline interface that characterises today's digital communication. We argue that this entextualisation is mainly performed in terms of...

This collection calls for greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds. The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social afordances evok...

Pragmatics analyzes the use of language in context and the gap existing between speakers' intended interpretations and the literal meaning coded in the utterances that they produce to accomplish their communicative goals. When applied to Internet communication, researchers have to consider a number of factors. These include the role of interfaces i...

Cognitive pragmatics (and specifically relevance theory) has proved useful to explain how people make sense of other people’s utterances, that is, how people infer explicit and implicated interpretations from the words uttered by other people. These inferences are also at work in the comprehension of humorous discourses, including those shaped unde...

In this chapter, the notion of contextual constraint, both interface- and user-centred, is defined and exemplified. All acts of communication are “framed” by these constraints, and more so online, which influence the kind of discourse coded online and the audience’s inferential strategies devoted to interpreting this discourse. These are not part o...

In this chapter the label of internet humour is defined, delimited and exemplified. Humour is regarded as essential in human interaction, and the same applies to humour circulating online. As the chapter shows, not every instance of humour that can be found on the internet suits this (apparently generic) label of internet humour, and some space is...

Humour is pervasive on social networking sites and can be found in all of the areas on these sites designed for user interaction, ranging from the user’s profile, to comments and a messaging areas also available on most of these sites. The chapter starts with a description of social networking sites in general and specifically as “repositories” of...

This chapter is devoted to humorous messaging interactions. The chapter starts with some theoretical assumptions about interactive humour in face-to-face scenarios and how relevance theory may study the frequent multi-party co-construction of humorous effects during those interactions. Then, the role of laughter in humorous interactions is underlin...

This chapter studies humorous memes. It starts with an account of meme discourses with their definition, and also the origin of the term meme. Then, some discussion on the relationship between text and image in memes is provided, together with a proposal of types of text-image combinations, based on the role of the text and/or the image in deriving...

Despite not having traditionally aroused the attention of pragmatics and relevance theory, non-propositional effects (feelings, emotions…) become crucial when it comes to obtaining a fully satisfactory interpretation of the communicator’s utterance, and even more so on the internet. This chapter starts with comments on the need to account for feeli...

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in interactional humour from social and pragmatic perspectives, with fascinating results. Released more than a decade later than Norrick and Chiaro (2009) Humor in Interaction, The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts gathers some of the most recent work on humour in interaction, with contributio...

This book provides a first thorough analysis of internet humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, covering a wide range of discourses that are pervasive online and focusing especially on messaging interactions, social networking sites and memes. Its chapters describe the inferential strategies implemented to turn online coded discourses into...

En este capítulo, se analizarán las pautas y esquemas recurrentes de la interacción humorística entre usuarios de WhatsApp con el fin de aislar los patrones más frecuentes. El capítulo comienza con un análisis del género de la mensajería instantánea (epígrafe 2). A continuación, se ofrecen algunas consideraciones generales sobre la metodología util...

Smartphone ads compete for the user’s attention, which is initially intended to focus on other areas of the small screen of the device. Despite this competition, smartphone advertisements aim to produce as much cognitive reward as possible in exchange for the mental effort expended in their processing, that is, they aim at the audience’s relevance,...

Cognitive pragmatics and specifically relevance theory have traditionally focused on how addressees fill the informational gaps existing between (a) what is intentionally coded in an utterance by a communicator and the interpretation that is intended with that utterance, and (b) between the coded utterance and the interpretation chosen for that utt...

According to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995), on many occasions (if not all), the concept that underlies a word (its coded concept) has to be adjusted pragmatically when it is interpreted, in such a way that the prototypical concept associated with that word (as one would find in a dictionary, for example) is slightly different from the on...

This book offers a unique model for understanding the cognitive underpinnings, interactions and discursive effects of our evolving use of smartphones in everyday app-mediated communication, from text messages and gifs to images, video and social media apps. Adopting a cyberpragmatics framework, grounded in cognitive pragmatics and relevance theory,...

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chap...

In this paper the discourse of a specific type of meme in Spanish, the image macro, is analysed, together with several ways in which memes generate humorous effects. Two main areas are addressed: (a) how humour arises from the processing of the text in the meme (decoding of the text plus further inferential enrichment); and (b) how humour relies on...

In previous research ( Yus 2016 , 2017 ), a classification of jokes was proposed depending on how the humorous incongruity-resolution strategy was achieved. Twelve cases were isolated resulting from the combination of several parameters: (1) a differentiation between discourse-based incongruities and frame-based incongruities ; (2) the location of...

This special issue of Internet Pragmatics includes several papers on different kinds of humour on the Net and on a variety of portals or interfaces. Humorous discourses are certainly pervasive on the internet nowadays, which comes as no surprise. As acknowledged in Yus (2016a), humour is not simply meant to generate amusement or even laughter, but...

Resumen Este capítulo ofrece un recorrido por diferentes aspectos que atañen a los textos digitales y multimodales. Respecto a los textos digitales, se hace un especial hincapié en las semejanzas o diferencias con los textos no comunicados por internet, es decir, generados y consumidos fuera de la red, y las diferentes formas en las que los textos...

Las interacciones llevadas a cabo en los entornos virtuales constituyen, hoy en día, una parte esencial en la gestión cotidiana de las relaciones personales y profesionales. Lejos queda aquella época inicial del uso de la red, a principios de los años noventa del pasado siglo, cuando los contenidos e interacciones llevados a cabo de forma virtual a...

In this chapter, some applications of pragmatics to humorous discourses in Spanish are reviewed and exemplified. After an introductory section covering general issues of humor in Spanish, there is an analysis of how jokes and puns in Spanish are inferred and humorous effects are obtained. The Section also addresses stand-up comedy monologues in Spa...

This paper explores social bonding in language play via the construction of ‘Chinese character (annotation)’ on two major social media platforms (Sina Weibo and WeChat) in China. The Chinese characters and their bracketed annotations under study, despite their one-to-one matching in sequence, never match each other either in meaning or in pronuncia...

A new classification of functions of emojis

Internet communication has evolved a lot since it first became popular in the early nineties of the last century. Pragmatics has also evolved and has tried to come to terms with the non-stop changes that internet is constantly producing in our lives and especially in how we communicate and interact. We are probably now at a stage of internet develo...

Phatic interpretations are typically defined as those arising from an intention to create and maintain ties and social bonds, to exhibit desire of sociability towards others, rather than an intention to transfer substantive information. As such, they are not typical instances of communication in which the eventual relevance is centred upon the valu...

Feelings and emotions, typically non-propositional, play an important part in the eventual quality of the interpretations to which they are attached. However, relevance theory has preferred to focus on how hearers build up propositions that fill the gap between what is meant and what is eventually interpreted (Carston 2002). These are easier to han...

In recent research, it has been argued that an extension of the relevance-theoretic (and also cyberpragmatic) scope of research is necessary in order to account for elements of communication that do not have a direct link to the relevance of the propositional information being transferred among Internet users, but which are important to determine t...

In this chapter, a corpus of 100 instances of a specific type of meme, image macro (the one typically made up of one top and one bottom stretch of text and a picture in-between), is analyzed in its multimodal quality, specifically in search of different categories that these memes might fit into depending on the relationship existing between pictur...

Pragmatics addresses central features of human communication, specifically how interlocutors fill the gap between what is said and what is eventually communicated. The aim of this chapter is to review several applications of pragmatics to Internet-mediated communication, and to assess how the mediated, virtual nature of this communication requires...

Internet memes are an example of the trend of replicability and spread of discourses through the Net within today’s participatory culture. On paper, memes are instances of humorous discourse that abound on the internet, are replicated or altered, and then transmitted to other users. However, in this paper the focus is not on its humorous side, but...

The internet and internet-mediated life have presented new issues and challenges for research on pragmatics. When analyzing the application of pragmatics to internet-mediated communication, a possibility is to set up a number of layers and study the contributions that traditional pragmatic schools can make to this new research area. These layers in...

In this chapter, the term (non-)intended non-propositional effect is proposed and applied to the kind of feeling, emotion, impression, etc. that Internet humorous texts generate in the user beyond the proposition-centered humor, and which may not be tightly connected to the act of communication. These effects may be intended as part of the effects...

The incongruity-resolution model is one of the most popular theories that propose an explanation for the strategies underlying humorous texts. In this paper, a taxonomy of incongruity-resolution Cases is proposed according to a relevance-theoretic stance. Then, the extent to which these Cases are exhaustive enough to cover the whole range of possib...

This internet dialogue discusses some current issues in internet pragmatics, a relatively new branch of pragmatics, focusing in particular on the oralization of typed text, the presentation of identity and self, the user as a node, and the relationship between relevance and (im)politeness. It is hoped that the current dialogue may help to clarify s...

According to relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), information (a set of assumptions in its terminology) is relevant if it satisfies two conditions; firstly, it should generate a substantial amount of interest (positive cognitive effects in its terminology); and secondly, its processing should demand as little mental effort as possible. In m...

According to relevance theory, irony comprehension invariably entails the identification of some opinion or thought (echo) and the identification of the speaker?s dissociative attitude. In this paper, it is argued that it is also essential for hearers to identify not only that propositional attitude, but also the affective attitude that the speaker...

Cyberpragmatics analyses Internet-mediated communication from a cognitive pragmatics, relevance-theoretic perspective. It focuses on the inferential strategies that " addressee users " engage in while processing information located on the Net or the one exchanged with other users through this virtual medium. In this sense, the theory underlines the...

In this chapter, two forms of interaction on the Internet that have turned up and developed in the last few years, and that did not exist (or were not popular) at the beginning of the present millennium, will be analysed from a cognitive pragmatics point of view and, more specifically, from the cognitive perspective of relevance theory (Sperber and...

This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences...

1. Introducción: Intermedialidad e Internet La noción de intermedialidad está sujeta a no pocos debates sobre su definición y ámbito de aplicación (Cubillo Paniagua, 2013). Una aproximación inicial nos indica que la intermedialidad conlleva la integración de uno o varios medios en alguna otra forma de comunicación. Se enfatiza que la intermedialida...

In this article the relationship between discourse and identity is pictured as an inverted triangle with a broad section at the top for ‘inherited’ sources of identity (sex, race/ethnicity, nationality) that have discursive correlates. The section in the middle represents ‘optional’ social groups to which the individual chooses to belong (and which...

In: Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor. Ed. S. Attardo. Abingdon: Routledge.

In previous research, I have argued that interpreting irony involves the activation of one or several contextual sources, either simultaneously or in sequence as the utterance is interpreted (Yus 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2009), a proposal that is fully compatible with the relevance-theoretic approach to irony comprehension (Sperber, 1984; Wilson, 2006,...

Web-mediated communication is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of types of communication on the Internet. In the past, different applications were used to access areas of the Internet, but nowadays all kinds of communication are web based. In this article, four types of web-mediated communication are distinguished: (a) system to user (e.g....

Titis paper applies a pragmatic (relevance-theoretic) taxonomy of misunderstandings to miscommunication that can be found in Pinter's plays. Many conversational exchanges in which the speaker relies on very explicitly communicated information in orden to guarantee successful communication, systematically end up in misunderstanding. This unexpected...

The aim of this paper is to explain the use of insults from a relevance-theoretic perspective. To that end, our analysis takes into consideration four variables that, we believe, play a major role in how insults are produced an interpreted: (a) the conventional or innovative nature of the insult; (b) the underlying intentionality (to offend, to pra...

Speakers of jokes are aware of the human cognitively rooted relevance-seeking inferential procedure (Sperber and Wilson 1995) and predict (i.e. metarepresent) the interlocutor’s steps leading to a valid interpretation of the utterance(s) in the joke. Specifically, speakers can predict (a) the accessibility to certain information which builds up a p...

“Cyberpragmatics” was coined by Yus (2001, 2010a) as an attempt to study Internet-mediated communication (IMC) from a cognitive pragmatics point of view and, more specifically, from the theoretical framework of relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), although other theoretical approaches were also addressed when appropriate.Keywords:computer med...

In my previous research, a distinction was made, in a general classification of jokes, between those jokes that are based on the speaker’s manipulation of the audience’s interpretive steps leading to an interpretation of the joke, and those jokes whose main source of humour lies in the reinforcement or invalidation of commonly assumed social stereo...

According to Relevance Theory (Sperber/Wilson 1986/95; Wilson/Sperber 2002; Yus 1997a, 1998, 2006, 2010), human beings are cognitively geared to the maximisation of relevance and they look for relevance in all in-coming information that their minds process, either utterances that our interlocutors intentionally speak for us to process (the main obj...

Research on humour has developed enormously in the last few years, but the scope of its analysis has also broadened in a similar fashion. The papers collected in the reviewed volume do cover most of the research issues that any pragmatics of humour should address, even if this collection of articles exhibits a certain degree of heterogeneity. Howev...

Cyberpragmatics is an analysis of Internet-mediated communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. It addresses a whole range of interactions that can be found on the Net: the web page, chat rooms, instant messaging, social networking sites, 3D virtual worlds, blogs, videoconference, e-mail, Twitter, etc. Of special interest is the rol...

Todos somos más o menos conscientes de las diferencias que existen entre los géneros analógicos (ej. impresos) y los géneros electrónicos (ej. géneros de Internet). En este trabajo voy a delinear algunas de las diferencias quizás menos "obvias" y que poseen mayores implicaciones desde el punto de vista pragmático-cognitivo, el cual se centra en la...

In this chapter the author analyzes, from a cognitive pragmatics point of view and, more specifically, from a relevance-theoretic approach, the way Internet users assess the qualities of web pages in their search for optimally relevant interpretive outcomes. The relevance of a web page is measured as a balance between the interest that information...

Multimodal metaphors are those "whose target and source are each repre-sented exclusively or predominantly in different modes" (Forceville 2006: 384), mainly with a verbal-visual interface of source and/or target. When multimodality is analyzed in metaphors, the verbal and visual inputs are often treated as different phenomena demanding different i...