Michele Zappavigna

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of the Arts and Media

Social media such as microblogging services and social networking sites are changing the way people interact online and search for information and opinions. This book investigates linguistic patterns in electronic discourse,looking at online evaluative language, Internet slang, memes and ambient affiliation using a large Twitter corpus (over 100 mi...

This article explores how language is used to build community with the microblogging service, Twitter (www.twitter.com). Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL), a theory of language use in its social context, is employed to analyse the structure and meaning of ‘tweets’ (posts to Twitter) in a corpus of 45,000 tweets collected in the 24 hours after th...

Social Media is fast becoming a key area of linguistic research. This highly accessible guidebook leads students through the process of undertaking research in order to explore the language that people use when they communicate on social media sites. This textbook provides: An introduction to the linguistic frameworks currently used to analyse la...

An important dimension of social media discourse is its searchability. A key semiotic resource supporting this function is the hashtag, a form of social tagging that allows microbloggers to embed metadata in social media posts. While popularly thought of as topic-markers, hashtags are able to construe a range of complex meanings in social media tex...

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing...

This article explores the use of screenshots as a form of visual evidence on social media platforms. It considers their role in YouTube videos that spread misinformation and disinformation about the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire and an internet hoax, the Momo Challenge. The article draws on two social semiotic frameworks, legitimation (Van Leeuwen in ‘...

This chapter introduces the framework for exploring emoji-text relations in social media that is used in this book. The chapter begins by explaining the discourse semantic systems that have been developed in Systemic Functional Linguistics for describing ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning. This is in order to lay the foundation for expl...

This chapter focuses on the technical aspects of emoji, including how emoji are encoded and rendered for use in digital communication. The chapter explains how emoji are developed by the Unicode Consortium as well as considering the social implications of this process. Unicode characters, and emoji codepoints, modifiers, and sequences are explained...

This chapter explores the role of emoji in the negotiation of meaning in exchanges in TikTok comment feeds. It draws on a model of affiliation, together with the emoji text relations of concurrence, resonance, and synchronicity developed in the three previous chapters, to undertake detailed analysis of the social bonds at stake in these exchanges....

Social media is resplendent with a creative blend of non-standardised graphical resources such as images, memes, digital stickers, avatars and GIFs that extend beyond the rigid parameters of Unicode emoji character encoding. This chapter explores how emoji interact with other kinds of visual resources beyond language in social media posts such as g...

This chapter summarises the model developed for exploring emoji-text convergence in this book. It reviews the system network for describing this convergence which was built up progressively throughout, covering textual synchronicity, ideational concurrence, and interpersonal resonance. The chapter also consolidates the book’s exploration of the rol...

This chapter explores the interpersonal function of emoji as they resonate with the linguistic attitude and negotiation of solidarity expressed in social media posts. We have introduced a system network for describing the ways in which this resonance can occur, making a distinction between emoji which imbue the co-text with interpersonal meaning (u...

This chapter introduces the study of emoji as a form of social media paralanguage. It delves into the semiotic versatility of emoji as ‘picture characters’ enabling users to express a wide range of meanings through their use with language in social media communication. The book approaches emoji as a form of paralanguage due to their close dependenc...

This chapter explores the ideational function of emoji as they concur with language to construe experience as items and activities in social media posts. The chapter details a system network for modelling ideational concurrence. This network defines two main kinds of relations: depiction and embellishment. Depiction is where emoji congruently illus...

This chapter describes the ways in which emoji and language synchronise to realise textual meaning in a social media post. It organises these as features of a system network that describes this sychronicity. A primary distinction is made between instances where emoji replace linguistic co-text (inset) and instances where emoji accompany the linguis...

This chapter explores how emoji can function as a resource operating in the service of ambient affiliation, which unlike the dialogic affiliation explored in the previous chapter, does not rely on direct interaction. The chapter analyses the role of emoji in finessing and promoting the social bonds that are tabled to ambient audiences in social med...

This article presents a multimodal rhythmic analysis of a TikTok video, adopting a social semiotic perspective on embodied meaning-making. We highlight the importance of rhythm in coordinating and intertwining semiotic modes to produce meaning. The study develops a method for undertaking an integrated multimodal analysis of rhythm across speech, bo...

This book explores how both elite and non-elite actors frame societal threats such as the refugee crisis and COVID-19 using both digital and traditional media. It also explores ways in which the framing of these issues as threatening can be challenged using these platforms. People typically experience societal threats such as war and terrorism thr...

One key aspect of threat in terrorists’ language is incitement to violence. Contributing to a fuller understanding of how terrorists use language to encourage people to join their cause, this article examines the role of evaluative language in incitement strategies used by a far-rightist to align with and alienate particular social groups. The Affi...

Misinformation and hate speech are prevalent issues in social media research, as well as the rise of far-right extremists, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists. In response to these concerns about unethical behavior on social media, this article explores how underlying social bonds proposed by conspiracists are discursively negotiated in Yo...

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 b...

A particular target of gossip in the digital age is the ‘celebrity politician’, that is, politicians whose private life is scrutinised in similar ways to that of traditional celebrities, with similar issues foregrounded, such as their appearance and the state of their marriage or relationships. This chapter details a social semiotic method for unde...

This chapter explores a dataset of YouTube video comments about the ‘ID2020’ conspiracy theory, which claims that Bill Gates is part of a global conspiracy to mandate a COVID-19 vaccine incorporating a tracking microchip. This conspiracy theory merges religious discourses about the ‘Mark of the Beast’, with discourses about quantum dot and blockcha...

Since the 2016 US Presidential Election, extreme right-wing communities have gained extensive popularity on YouTube, spreading discourses of white supremacy and conspiracy. This paper focuses on how methods drawn from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) can be used to analyze this communication and contribute to research interests within the fiel...

The digital age is characterised by unprecedented access to technologies to understand our bodies, genetics and family histories. The last decade has seen a growing uptake of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, which is (re)shaping individuals’ identity narratives. Drawing on data from a national online survey with Australian donor-conceived people (N...

Criticizing the discourse of politicians via social media platforms is currently a major way in which people engage with civic and political issues, and foster social alignments around shared values through ambient affiliation. This paper explores the pragmatic and social functions of particular forms of ironic quotation that social media users emp...

This paper explores the role of a particular set of commonly occurring temporal meanings relating to the shared experience of being in a pandemic (e.g., in these unprecedented times) and how these foster ambient affiliation on Twitter. Temporal meanings can be realised as a range of grammatical structures in texts and are linguistic resources that...

Memes are a key feature of participatory digital cultures and have been found to play an important role in collective identity formation. Limited scholarship has explored the role of memes within closed communities, where perceived privacy and trust may impact the ways users demarcate the in-group (us) and out-group (them) through humor. This artic...

Exploring the relationship between theory and practice in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of Appliable Linguistics. Featuring both internationally-renowned scholars and rising stars from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA, Appliab...

Exploring the relationship between theory and practice in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of Appliable Linguistics. Featuring both internationally-renowned scholars and rising stars from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA, Appliab...

This paper applies a social semiotic framework for exploring the functions of emoji in digital discourse about working from home (WFH). This is an important and prevalent discourse in the on-going COVID-19 pandemic due to widespread ‘lockdowns’ aimed at reducing the spread of the virus which have had a profound impact upon how and where people work...

This article presents a social semiotic analysis of emoji-language semiosis. Combining the theoretical architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics and methodology of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, we propose an analytical framework that can identify how emoji make meaning both individually and in interaction with language. Using the web-based c...

This paper explores communing affiliation and out-grouping in a corpus of Trump’s tweets about Iran. Communing is a form of ‘ambient affiliation’ ( Zappavigna 2011 ) which offers a way of understanding how Trump attempts to build alignments with his audience without necessarily directly engaging with them, since he tends to ignore replies to his tw...

The drive to make our discourse readily findable by others has become a prominent social process, realised by a range of online communicative practices associated with social media. A key semiotic resource integral to microblogging is the hashtag, a form of social tagging that allows microbloggers to embed metadata in posts. This 'conversational ta...

Zappavigna, M. (2021). Ambient affiliation in comments on YouTube videos: Communing around values about ASMR. Journal of Foreign Languages. 44(1), 21-40.

This paper explores how ideological positions associated with food are construed multimodally in Instagram posts produced by everyday social media users. Discourse about food choices is an important site for revealing syndromes of values that characterise the ideological positions that are embedded in everyday life. An example of a highly valued fo...

This paper argues that paralinguistic resources employed by stand-up comedians to construe textual personae (impersonated characters) make a substantial contribution to the creation of humor by allowing the comedian to distance themselves from particular social values and by referencing shared cultural stereotypes. A stretch of stand-up comedy disc...

Deceptive communication and misinformation are crucial issues that are currently having a significant impact on social life. Parallel to the important work of identifying misinformation on digital platforms is understanding why such material proliferates. One approach to answering this question is to attempt to understand the values that are being...

Linguistic analysis of the interpersonal patterning of threatening communication is a means of uncovering the attitudes, ideological orientation, and hostile intentions of perpetrators of violence in terrorist discourse ( Gales 2010 , 2011 ). Corpus analysis focused on attitudinal meaning also offers a diagnostic for characterizing the personal and...

Recent work on algorithmic bias has shown that understanding the values embedded in technology design processes is important for avoiding social harm. This paper explores the attitudes construed in whitepapers of blockchain technology start-ups. Blockchain technology is a relatively new phenomenon that has informed discourses about the future of go...

An essential one-volume reference to contemporary discourse studies, this handbook offers a rigorous and systematic overview of the field and its recent developments. Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume covers the key methods, research topics and directions across 26 chapters, providing both a survey of current researc...

This article explores how digital intimacy is construed through ambient embodied copresence in ‘personal attention’ role play videos, a type of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) video that has become popular on YouTube. ASMR is the experience of positive sensations in response to visual and aural stimuli. Online video sharing platforms ha...

Abstract This paper develops a framework for analysing paralanguage, initially inspired by systemic functional linguistic (hereafter SFL) research on early child language development. A distinction is drawn between non-semiotic behaviour (somasis) and meaning (semiosis), and within semiosis between language and paralanguage (using the term paralang...

This paper presents a social semiotic analysis of a stand-up comedy text. Its aim is to explore how dialogic resources contribute to humour. The research is informed by the concept of affiliation in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory and work on interactional humour. Laughter is treated as a marker for the deferral of social values that create n...

The affordances of social media platforms have generated an intensified focus on the daily lives and activities of individuals. Instagram is an extremely popular platform, particularly in relation to the ‘selfie’, which has led to a growing body of research in relation to selfie types and the different subjective and intersubjective relations they...

Selfies are self-portraits typically taken with the front camera of a mobile device. This chapter considers how these images are recontextualised across different social contexts. While most research has focused on selfies that directly depict the photographer’s face, we consider how what we term ‘implied/inferred selfies’ and ‘still life self-imag...

This paper explores how people present their relationship to their domestic objects in decluttering vlogs on YouTube, where they show the process of getting rid of undesired items. These videos are associated with discourses of ‘minimalism’ that are currently prevalent on social media platforms. The paper adopts a multimodal social semiotic approac...

To appear as Zappavigna, M. (forthcoming). “And then he said… no one has more respect for women than I do”: Intermodal relations and intersubjectivity in image macros. In H. Stöckl, H. Caple, & J. Pflaeging (Eds.), Image-Centric Practices in the Contemporary Media Sphere. London: Routledge.

This chapter reviews the way in which Convenors and participants enact conferencing as a staged goal-oriented social process. In doing so, it highlights the fact that there is a range of work to be done, entailing that a number of complementary elemental genres have to be brought together in a macro-genre involving steps and sub-steps alongside the...

This chapter explores how the Convenor manages the conferencing macro-genre as a communicative interaction featuring multiple participants. It surveys how exchange structures operate in the conference, in particular focusing on the joint construction of the commissioned recount. The focus on exchange structures reveals that conferencing is best int...

This chapter considers the range of identities made available for Young Persons and Support Persons at critical stages of conferencing (testimony, rejoinder and admonition), adapting Maton’s work on specialization codes. This involves recontextualizing his Epistemic Relation and Social Relation axes from the perspective of ideational and axiologica...

This chapter suggests that conference theorists and advocates have been looking in the wrong place when trying to find a way of explaining the transformation that occurs in a conference. Instead of a theory based on personal internal emotional states, the chapter argues for a social semiotic perspective that accounts for the interactive power of th...

The focus of this chapter is the relation of feelings to community. Inspired by Knight (2008, 2010, 2013), the idea that belonging involves enacting bonds is explored, with a bond defined as a shared ‘attitude plus ideation’ coupling. This means that looking at how couplings are negotiated as bonds is crucial for understanding the reintegrative pra...

This chapter introduces the approach to restorative justice, which is the focus of this monograph—namely Youth Justice Conferencing in New South Wales, Australia. In Youth Justice Conferences, adolescent offenders meet with their victim and other relevant members of the community to discuss relatively minor offences and work out some form of commun...

The chapter focuses on the negotiation of feeling in conferencing, drawing on appraisal to analyse expressions of affect, judgement and appreciation. The generally reticent stance of Young Persons as far as expressing feeling is noted, alongside the work done by Convenors and Youth Liaison Officers to extract feeling. Consideration is then given to...

The selfie is one of the most widely publicized, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues – be they representational or compositional – alone are not sufficient for identification. Recognizing an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requ...

This book analyses the Youth Justice Conferencing Program in New South Wales, Australia. Exploring this form of diversionary justice from the perspectives of functional linguistics and performance studies, the authors combine close textual analysis with ethnographic research methodologies. They examine how participants use the discourse semantic re...

In this paper, we explore the semiotic dimension of digital scrapbooking. In particular, we look at how technological affordances of social media platforms, such as reposting and scrolling functions, facilitate the creation of a unique form of semiotic artefact—curated visual blogs. We argue that the curatorial practices of digital scrapbooking cre...

Social metadata is an important dimension of social media communication, and closely associated with practices such as curating, tagging, and searching content. This article explores how hashtags are used to coordinate and accentuate the values construed in a corpus of Twitter posts (tweets) about depression. In other words, it explores how people...

This article employs multimodal discourse analysis to explore how mothers represent their everyday experiences of motherhood on Instagram through different forms of self-portraiture. It investigates whether the ‘selfies’ that they share can be characterized as a visual genre and identifies four subgenres: presented, mirrored, inferred and implied s...

As an iconic image of our time, the selfie has attracted much attention in popular media and scholarly writing. The focus so far has been on the representation of the self or subjectivity. We propose a complementary perspective that foregrounds the intersubjective function of the selfie. We argue that the presence of selfhood is often an assumption...

This chapter explores the language of microblogging by focusing on discourse produced via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. In the first section I consider microblogging as a semiotic practice, trace its historical development and investigate the interdisciplinary research into this form of communication. My focus will be on linguistic work...

This chapter explores linguistic research into evaluation in social media texts. After a survey of some of the dominant linguistic theories of stance and evaluation, introducing the Appraisal Framework as a model that has been used across a range of social media discourses, it explores work on evaluation in social tagging, focusing on the evaluatio...

This article presents an overview and extension of research into one form of diversionary justice, the Youth Justice Conferencing programme in New South Wales, Australia. Conferences are formal procedures organised by a Convenor and typically involving a young offender, their victim or victim’s representative, support persons, the arresting police...