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"Had enough of experts": Intersubjectivity and the quoted voice in microblogging
... This work has tended to focus on phrasal template memes where users recontextualise iterations of a particular phrase, where the original phrase (e.g. 'had enough of experts') functions as a kind of discursive template (Zappavigna, 2017). In addition, image macros, where phrasal templates are used as captions on top of images, are also interesting sites where complex image-captionpost-tag relations are often involved in quoting and ridiculing political voices . ...
... This study draws on previous work on the quoted social media voice that explored how these environments expand the meaning potential of quotation through the additive affordances of 'META-VOCALISATION' seen in resources such as social metadata (e.g. instantiated as hashtags) (Zappavigna, 2017. This work is grounded in the vocalisation resources identified by White (2012) for engaging with other 'secondary voice[s]' in a text (White, 2012). ...
... Journal of Pragmatics 191 (2022) 98e112 On the other hand, INTRA-VOCALISATION is the case where a voice is implied "as part of the author's own utterances, rather than as an explicitly external voice or discourse" (White, 1998: 127). Zappavigna (2017 notes that this implication my occur by abduction involving either retrieving meaning from the co-text, or from the context associating the quoted text to a particular voice. For example, co-textual abduction 2 might occur where that voice is mentioned elsewhere in the text even though not directly attributed as the utterer of the quotation: ...
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 employ to ridicule political voices. It develops the concept of ‘parodic resonance’ to not only account for the evaluative function of ironic echoic mentions, but also to account for the way in which such quotation proliferates as a kind of semiotic ‘weapon’ within and across social media platforms. A corpus of approximately 150, 000 posts quoting Trump's controversial use of the phrase ‘it is what it is’ during an interview about the US death toll in the coronavirus pandemic is explored. The analysis considers the kinds of linguistic functions construed in ironic quotation and how these operate in the service of ambient affiliation, where social media users align through ridiculing a quoted voice. Attention is given to the function of meta-vocalisation resources such as hashtags, and to the role of visual projection in memes and gifs, in order to account for the kinds of multimodal quotation practices that are possible in social media texts.
... Sampling ceased when saturation of description was reached, that is, at the point at which collecting additional data did not appear to modify the description of these relations (i.e., the description of the relations was exhausted). I then began to qualitatively consider how these relations could be integrated with the framework for considering intersubjectivity and the quoted voice in social media developed in Zappavigna (2017). This framework is described in the next section. ...
... For instance, platforms will often incorporate technical affordances that allow the user to republish other people's material within their post, for example, 'retweeting' on Twitter, 're-pinning' on Pinterest, or 're-blogging' on various blog platforms. In addition, social media texts will often quote other texts without using any punctuation resources such as quotation marks, instead relying on the ambient audience's ability to resolve important cultural moments from either their observations of what has been happening in the social stream, or from knowledge of the relevant contextual meaning, particularly in relation to political or crisis events that are prominent at the time (Zappavigna, 2017). ...
... In Zappavigna (2017), I further developed the system of assimilation to distinguish between contextually abduced and co-textually abduced vocalization in order to account for the particular meaning potential afforded by Twitter as a communicative channel. Contextually abduced extra-vocalization implicates a source that is unnamed in the co-text through contextual knowledge (e.g., knowledge that a particular phrasing is an Internet meme). ...
... Using a specialized corpus of 'And then he said…' image macros, this chapter investigates how intersubjectivity (Sumin Zhao & Zappavigna, 2017) is co-construed through visual and verbal meanings. Developing a system network for analyzing the quoted social media voice (Zappavigna, 2017(Zappavigna, , 2018, the chapter explores how these meanings combine to produce different kinds of perspectives/points of view. The aim is to expand social semiotic modelling of intermodal intersubjectivity, as well as to explore how political ideas are negotiated in highly intertextual ambient arenas. ...
... This involved iteratively sampling instances of this image macro for the image-caption-post-tag relations summarized in Figure 4. Sampling ceased when saturation of description was reached, that is, at the point at which collecting additional data did not appear to modify the description of these relations (i.e. the description of the relations was exhausted). I then began to qualitatively consider how these relations could be integrated with the framework for considering intersubjectivity and the quoted voice in social media developed in Zappavigna (2017). This framework is described in the next section. ...
... 'retweeting' on Twitter, 're-pinning' on Pinterest, or 'reblogging' on various blog platforms. In addition, social media texts will often quote other texts without using any punctuation resources such as quotation marks, instead relying on the ambient audience's ability to resolve important cultural moments from, either their observations of what has been happening in the social stream, or from knowledge of the relevant contextual meaning, particularly in relation to political or crisis events that are prominent at the time (Zappavigna, 2017). ...
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.
... In tandem with these practices eroding the status of experts are ongoing discourses seeking to destabilise the status of 'facts', as well as counter-discourses ridiculing both of these tendencies (Zappavigna, 2017). For example, frequent hashtags, visible in agnate discourses at the time of the Brexit debate, include #FakeNews and #AlternativeFacts. ...
... Gove's phrasing 'had enough of experts' was heavily quoted on social media platforms. Its prevalence was seen in a previous corpus-based study by the author of the types of voices involved in Brexit discourse about experts (Zappavigna, 2017). The corpus in this present study was created by querying the Twitter API for posts containing one or more of the words 'expert', 'experts' and 'expertise' together with the hashtag '#brexit' from 2 July 2016 to 23 October 2017, resulting in a dataset of 35,020 tweets. ...
... Gove's statement spawned a phrasal template meme, with social media users producing large volumes of posts referencing the phrase via various forms of quotation. Many of these posts humorously mocked the 'had enough of experts' viewpoint (Zappavigna, 2017), for example: (7) So Gove has had enough of experts. I'd love to be his Doctor, "Mr Gove this is Dave, he's a builder, he'll be doing your prostate exam today". ...
Discourses of Brexit provides a kaleidoscope of insights into how discourse influenced the outcome of the EU referendum and what discourses have sprung up as a result of it. Working with a wide variety of data, from political speeches to Twitter, and a wide range of methods, Discourses of Brexit presents the most thorough examination of the discourses around the British EU referendum and related events. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the discursive treatment of Brexit, while also providing detailed investigations of how Brexit has been negotiated in different contexts. Discourses of Brexit is key reading for all students and researchers in language and politics, discourse analysis and related areas, as well as anyone interested in developing their understanding of the referendum.
... In tandem with these practices eroding the status of experts are ongoing discourses seeking to destabilise the status of 'facts', as well as counter-discourses ridiculing both of these tendencies (Zappavigna, 2017). For example, frequent hashtags, visible in agnate discourses at the time of the Brexit debate, include #FakeNews and #AlternativeFacts. ...
... Not for distribution Gove's phrasing 'had enough of experts' was heavily quoted on social media platforms. Its prevalence was seen in a previous corpus-based study by the author of the types of voices involved in Brexit discourse about experts (Zappavigna, 2017). The corpus in this present study was created by querying the Twitter API for posts containing one or more of the words 'expert', 'experts' and 'expertise' together with the hashtag '#brexit' from 2 July 2016 to 23 October 2017, resulting in a dataset of 35,020 tweets. ...
... Gove's statement spawned a phrasal template meme, with social media users producing large volumes of posts referencing the phrase via various forms of quotation. Many of these posts humorously mocked the 'had enough of experts' viewpoint (Zappavigna, 2017), for example: ...
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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 media posts. It also investigates their role in calling together, or convoking, ambient communities to align around shared values or alternatively contest those values. A specialised corpus of tweets about the NSW state government’s COVID-19 pandemic response in Australia is used to show how emoji both interact with their co-text as well as support the tabling of bonds to potential audiences or interactants. The analysis reveals how emoji tended to both buttress and boost negative judgement by adding additional layers of negative assessment as well as to muster communities around the critical bonds which they had helped to enact.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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 linguistic co-text (punctuate) in a manner similar to punctuation or discourse markers. In terms of language, the key discourse semantic systems involved are identification and periodicity, which are crucial in tracking participants and organising information flow in texts. In terms of the SFL model of textual meaning, emoji appear to occupy a wavelength between clauses and higher-level periodicity, while the unique affordances of emoji also provide new opportunities for creating meaning in texts.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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 illustrate their co-text or integrate themselves into the ideational structure of the post. Embellishment, on the other hand, is where emoji make less congruent meanings by either metaphorising through figurative meanings or emblematising through symbols that activate preconfigured meanings for particular communities. The chapter draws on the discourse semantic system of ideation introduced in Chapter 3 to understand the concurrence of emoji and linguistic sequences, figures, and elements.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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 dependency on the meanings conveyed in their written co-text and their social context. The chapter highlights the significance of the social semiotic perspective to emoji-text relationships adopted in the book with its focus on understanding how they converge with the meanings made in other semiotic modes. It concludes by introducing the structure of the book and the focus of the upcoming chapters on both emoji-text relations and social affiliation.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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 (usually through attitudinally targeting particular ideation) and emoji which enmesh with the interpersonal meanings made in the co-text (usually through coordinating with linguistic attitude). We then explain the more delicate options in this resonance network where emoji can harmonise with the co-text by either echoing or coalescing interpersonal meaning, or can rebound from the co-text, either complicating, subverting or positioning interpersonal meaning. Following this traversal of the resonance network we considered two important dimensions of interpersonal meaning noted in the corpus: the role of emoji in modulating attendant interpersonal meanings in the co-text by upscaling graduation and emoji’s capacity to radiate interpersonal meaning through emblematic usage as bonding icons.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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 graphicons. The chapter aims to give the reader a sense of how a social semiotic intermodal approach furnishes a flexible toolkit for an analyst to explore emoji’s relations with other modes. It primarily analyses the meanings made through combinations of emoji, language and GIFs in tweets. The analysis reveals how graphicons such as GIFs and digital stickers often realise a salient ‘New’ of the posts wherein they occur, and thus foreground interpersonal meaning.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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. Affiliation is a framework developed within social semiotics for describing how language and other semiotic resources support both social connection and disconnection, and aid in the construction of social relations more generally. The corpus used for the analysis undertaken in the chapter is a specialised dataset of TikTok comment threads made on a video series reviewing the food delivered during hotel quarantine in New Zealand in 2021. The TikTok comment exchanges featured users negotiating social bonds about food, daily life, and the pandemic. Most exchanges involved convivial alignments around shared values, with the occasional heated discussion about whether quarantine was a justifiable approach to the pandemic.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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. The chapter also deals with emoji design and aesthetics, and explains how emoji are visually rendered as glyphs by different ‘vendors’ such as social media platforms. The chapter then examines the role of semiotic technologies in both enabling and constraining the ways they are used. It concludes by discussing the implications of emoji encoding and rendering on corpus construction, annotation, and concordancing.
... However, we will leave detailed exploration of the role of emoji in the construction of alignment to Chapters 7 and 8, where we explore Di al o g i C and C o m m u n i n g a f fi l i at i o n . The model of evaluation we will draw upon for exploring linguistic meaning is the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), as introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies of emoji recognise their significant involvement in expressing attitudes and sentiment, and social media is resplendent with evaluative language with which emoji can coordinate (Zappavigna, 2017a). In particular, pragmatic studies have considered the role of emoji in modifying the tenor of a message through adjusting the meaning of linguistic co-text. ...
... There is a projection relation between this block of items and the material in the body of the post (relation (1) in Figure 9.6). This is a convention seen throughout social media and read as the origin of the voice projecting the verbiage in the post (Zappavigna, 2017b). Posts can also retweet or quote other posts, although in these cases the profile of the relevant The body of a post is constituted by the written text and emoji relations that we have explored in earlier sections of this book, which we will put aside for now. ...
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 exploring the linguistic meanings with which emoji coordinate in subsequent chapters. The chapter then introduces the concept of ‘intermodal convergence’ used in social semiotics to describe how semiotic modes such as language and images coordinate to make meaning. The chapter outlines the principles that we use for determining emoji-text convergence, including proximity, minimum mapping, and prosodic correspondence. It concludes with an overview of the system of emoji-text convergence, presenting the system network guiding the close textual analysis conducted on the social media corpora used in the book.
... Neither of these practices require direct communication with another user; yet, both often generate mass sharing of collective feeling. Ambient affiliation has been used to explore bonding in relation to Twitter discourses about motherhood (Zappavigna 2014c), everyday life (Zappavigna 2014a(Zappavigna , 2014b, food (Drasovean and Tagg 2015), language learning (Solmaz 2017), celebrity (Zappavigna 2013), organic farming (Kozaki and Akoumianakis 2014), feminism (Han 2015), Brexit (Zappavigna 2017(Zappavigna , 2019a and politics (Persson 2017, Zappavigna 2014d, 2020. For an overview of social semiotic research into social media and affiliation, see Zappavigna (2019b). ...
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 research and more practical guidance for advanced study.
Fully updated, revised and restructured to take account of developments over the last decade, in particular the innovations in digital communication and new media, this second edition features:
- 6 new chapters, covering the discourse of media, multimedia, social media, politeness, aging, and English as lingua franca.
- 6 completely rewritten chapters, covering conversation analysis, spoken discourse, news, intercultural communication, computer mediated communication, and identity.
- An expanded and updated glossary of key terms.
Identifying and describing the central concepts and theories associated with discourse and its main branches of study, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Discourse Analysis makes a sustained and compelling argument concerning the nature and influence of discourse and is an essential resource for anyone interested in the field.
... This framework was originally developed for considering affiliation in microblogging, focusing on the microblogging platform Twitter (Zappavigna 2011). it has since been used to explore bonding in relation to Twitter discourses about motherhood (Zappavigna 2014c), everyday life (Zappavigna 2014a(Zappavigna , 2014b, food (Drasovean and Tagg 2015), language learning (Solmaz 2017), celebrity (Zappavigna 2013), organic farming (Kozaki and Akoumianakis 2014), feminism (Han 2015), Brexit (Zappavigna 2017(Zappavigna , 2019a and politics (Persson 2017;Zappavigna 2014d, forthcoming). it has also been used to interpret self-representation practices in selfies across visual social media such as instagram and Tumblr (Zappavigna 2016;Zhao 2017, 2020;Zhao and Zappavigna 2017, 2018a, 2018b. ...
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, Appliable Linguistics and Social Semiotics examines the theoretical insights, questions, and developments that have emerged from the application of Systemic Functional theory to a range of fields.
Beyond simply reporting on the application of SFL to particular sites of communication, both linguistic and semiotic, this volume demonstrates how SFL has critiqued, developed and transformed theory and practice and foregrounds the implications of application for Systemic Functional theory itself. Covering established fields for application, such as education, medicine and media, to relatively uncharted areas, such as software design and extremist propaganda, this volume provides an overview of recent linguistic and semiotic innovations informed by SFL and examines the advances that have been made from many years of productive dialogue between theory and practice.
... Users can reply to a tweet, but it is not necessarily expected on this platform. Tweets can also be 're-tweeted' in their original or modified form, which pushes the tweet to their 'followers' news feeds (Zappavigna, 2017). ...
This study investigated the effects of Facebook and Twitter on foreign language (Chinese) learners’ written production in both short- (10 days) and long-term (50 days) pseudo-experimental settings. Adopting two concepts (i.e. symmetric vs. asymmetric) from matrix theory in social network analysis, we categorized Facebook as a symmetric social networking site (SNS) and Twitter as an asymmetric SNS. Results show that Facebook participants were more conservative or not highly engaged in building their social connections. In both settings, Facebook participants posted more sentences than Twitter participants per day, and more posts on Facebook were interactive. The Facebook participants believed more strongly that reading others’ posts improved their reading skills. Facebook also displayed evidence on promoting explicit corrective feedback. More interestingly, Facebook appeared to be a more dynamic system; the quality of writing seemed to change over time. There were more grammatical errors on Facebook than on Twitter in both settings. In the long-term setting (not in the short-term setting), a moderate positive correlation was found between the number of characters and the number of grammar errors for Facebook, but not for Twitter. We conclude that symmetric SNSs facilitate more interactions, potentially providing a more effective platform for peer-to-peer corrective feedback compared to asymmetric SNSs.
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 food is the avocado which is an important bonding icon in semantic domains from veganism, clean eating, keto/low-carb eating, ethical/sustainable eating to fitness. We explore how values associated with avocado toast are enacted intermodally through the interplay of meanings made in the images, captions, and tags in a corpus of 64,585 Instagram posts tagged #avotoast. The study draws on previous social semiotic work on visual intersubjectivity and everyday aesthetics in social photography ( Zhao and Zappavigna 2018a ) to interpret the visual meanings made in these posts. It also draws on research into intermodal coupling (image-text relations) and ambient affiliation (online social bonding) ( Zappavigna 2018 ) to understand how different values are construed in these texts. A modified grounded theory approach is used to isolate and exemplify the visual and textual features at stake, and then to explore ideological positionings through close multimodal analysis. A particularly interesting pattern in the corpus is the interaction of aesthetic and moralising discourses. For instance, a regulative metadiscourse realised through hashtags is used to project an instructional discourse about how to eat and what is considered ethical, sustainable, and nutritious food consumption. Rather than being directly encoded as judgement of behaviour these assessments tended to be expressed as appreciation of food items and their aesthetics or worth (e.g., clean, healthy, etc.).
This study investigates how speakers of American English use multimodal articulation when quoting characters in personal narratives. We use the concept of role shift, adapted from signed languages, where it refers to a device used to represent one or more characters with one or more bodily articulators, to describe multimodal role shift practices. In a regression analysis, four bodily articulators were found to predict the impression of a role shift: character intonation, character facial expressions, character viewpoint gestures, and changes in body orientation; gaze was not a significant predictor. Most of the 704 quotes in our data are accompanied by activation of two or three articulators (55.3%) and very few (2.6%) occur without any of the articulators we have annotated. The extent of multimodal articulation depends on the type of quoted utterance: quotations of actual, witnessed speech events tend to garner fewer articulators than constructed (‘fictive interaction’) quotations. These findings demonstrate that speakers, like signers, use a range of bodily articulators when they take on another’s role in quotation and thus underpin the importance of investigating the systematic use of the visual modality in quotation and, more generally, in ordinary interaction.
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 texts. This paper uses the concept of linguistic metafunctions, to explore how hashtags enact three simultaneous communicative functions: marking experiential topics, enacting interpersonal relationships, and organizing text. Corpus-based discourse analysis of linguistic patterns in a 100 million word Twitter corpus is used to investigate these functions and how they relate to the notion of social search.
The thesis explores the rhetorical properties of the modern news report. In order to account for the distinctive style of news reporting it extends Systemic Functional Linguistic theories of the interpersonal to develop new analyses of the semantics of attitude, evaluation and inter-subjective positioning. It applies these analyses to identify three distinct interpersonal modes of news reporting style which will be termed journalistic 'voices'. These analyses are used to explicate the rhetorical properties of the voice most typically associated with 'hard news' reporting, to be termed 'reporter voice'. The thesis also examines the textual structure and genre status of two sub-types of news report, those items grounded in material activity sequences and those in communicative events such as speeches and interviews. Several chapters explore the functional connections between these two media text types and traditional narrative and argument genres. The chapters present the argument that linear, syntagmatic models of text structure of the type developed previously for analysis of, for example, the narrative are unable to account for the functionality of these news reports. An alternative 'orbital' model of textuality is presented by which relationships of specification are seen to operate between a central textual nucleus and dependent satellites.
A tenable genre development of Internet memes is introduced in three categories
to describe memetic transformation: spreadable media, emergent meme, and meme.
We argue that memes are remixed, iterated messages which are rapidly spread by
members of participatory digital culture for the purpose of continuing a conversation.
We understand that memes develop from emergent memes, which we define as altered
or remixed spreadable media. We have adapted and modified Jenkins’ term “spreadable
media” to refer to original or non-parodied messages. Our analysis benefits from the
inclusion of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory to aid in understanding how memes
as artifacts of participatory digital culture are created. Our genre development of memes
demonstrates the generative capacity for continued memetic transformation and for
participation among members of digital culture. We use structuration to position these
dynamic components as the core of a duality of structure for Internet memes.
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 the announcement of Barak Obama’s victory in the 2008 US presidential elections. This analysis examines the evaluative language used to affiliate in tweets. The article shows how a typographic convention, the hashtag, has extended its meaning potential to operate as a linguistic marker referencing the target of evaluation in a tweet (e.g. #Obama). This both renders the language searchable and is used to upscale the call to affiliate with values expressed in the tweet. We are currently witnessing a cultural shift in electronic discourse from online conversation to such ‘searchable talk’.
This paper reconsiders the concept of 'evaluation of status' and applies it to visual as well as to verbal texts. The paper explores the relationship between 'status' and other related concepts such as epistemic modality. It is argued that a conceptual notion of status is useful in analysing texts, particularly those which construe knowledge. Examples of texts where the status of propositions has high social significance are discussed. The paper then demonstrates how notions of status may be applied to visual images, taking as an example a television documentary film. The status of the various images in the film, and how those images interact with the concurrent verbal text, is then explored.
The microblogging service Twitter is in the process of being appropriated for conversational interaction and is starting to be used for collaboration, as well. In an attempt to determine how well Twitter supports user-to-user exchanges, what people are using Twitter for, and what usage or design modifications would make it (more) usable as a tool for collaboration, this study analyzes a corpus of naturally-occurring public Twitter messages (tweets), focusing on the functions and uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges. The findings reveal a surprising degree of conversationality, facilitated especially by the use of @ as a marker of addressivity, and shed light on the limitations of Twitter's current design for collaborative use.
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on
the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent
along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral
marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds
a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological
theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The
conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news
media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we
explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information
diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been
shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic
measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is
different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social
relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be
more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative
news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive
sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A
complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of
tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train
a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news
information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in
the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the
relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the
findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet
talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'.
This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, affect or appraisal. Evaluation (a) expresses the speakers opinion and thus reflects the value-system of that person and their community; (b) constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader); (c) plays a key role in how discourse is organized. Every act of evalution expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative, subjective, and value-laden. In linguistic terms it may be analysed lexically, grammatically, and textually. These themes and perspectives are richly exemplified in the chapters of this book, by authors aware and observant of the fact that processes of linguistic analysis are themselves inherently evaluative. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture.
This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.
In this paper, we outline a study of the Twitter microblogging platform through a sample of French users. We discuss sampling methodology and compare three "issues" taken from the collected set of tweets. Based on the empirical findings we make a case for extending the notion of "information diffusion" to take into account questions of meaning, values, and ideology. We propose the concept of "refraction" to take a step toward this end.
In this article, we discuss the function of quoting and information sharing in social media services and argue that certain aspects of quoting point to similarities with oral culture, where the social functions of sharing complement the aim to inform or disseminate information. We approach the issue by first providing a brief historical account of content sharing practices from the early days of the Internet to the contemporary social media environment, in which content sharing is both prevalent and facilitated by platform architecture. We then conduct an exploratory quantitative content analysis of three Twitter hashtags relating to different topics, and link their structural variation to the different content sharing practices prevalent in them. We conclude by arguing that the social use of quotation in social media discourse can be a predictor of community structure, but that the degree to which this is the case differs locally.
There have been many attempts to provide accounts of visually expressed narratives by drawing on our understandings of linguistic discourse. Such approaches have however generally proceeded piecemeal --- particular phenomena appearing similar to phenomena in verbal discourse are selected for discussion with insufficient consideration of just what it means to treat visual communication as discourse at all. This has limited discussions in several ways. Most importantly, analysis is deprived of effective methodologies for approaching visual artefacts so that it remains unclear what units of analysis should be selected and how they can be combined. In this paper, we articulate a model of discourse pragmatics that is sufficiently general to apply to the specifics of visually communication information and show this at work with respect to several central aspects of visual narrative. We suggest that the framework provides an effective and general foundation for reengaging with visual communicative artefacts in a manner compatible with methods developed for verbal linguistic artefacts.
http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1P-8~1L-ngxFoc
Spreadable Media maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content. It contrasts "stickiness"-aggregating attention in centralized places-with "spreadability"-dispersing content widely through both formal and informal networks,some approved, many unauthorized. Stickiness has been the measure of success in the broadcast era (and has been carried over to the online world), but "spreadability" describes the ways content travels through social media. Following up on the hugely influential Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this book challenges some of the prevailing metaphors and frameworks used to describe contemporary media, from biological metaphors like "memes" and "viral" to the concept of "Web 2.0" and the popular notion of "influencers." Spreadable Media examines the nature of audience engagement,the environment of participation, the way appraisal creates value,and the transnational flows at the heart of these phenomena. It delineates the elements that make content more spreadable and highlights emerging media business models built for a world of participatory circulation. The book also explores the internal tensions companies face as they adapt to the new communication reality and argues for the need to shift from "hearing" to "listening" in corporate culture. Drawing on examples from film, music, games, comics, television,transmedia storytelling, advertising, and public relations industries,among others-from both the U.S. and around the world-the authors illustrate the contours of our current media environment. They highlight the vexing questions content creators must tackle and the responsibilities we all face as citizens in a world where many of us regularly circulate media content. Written for any and all of us who actively create and share media content, Spreadable Media provides a clear understanding of how people are spreading ideas and the implications these activities have for business, politics, and everyday life.
This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarship which is interested in the rhetorical, axiological workings of what are sometimes termed ‘hard news’ or ‘objective’ news stories—a style of news journalism typically associated with the ‘quality’ or ‘broadsheet’ news media and involving a regime of ‘strategic ‘impersonalisation’. It is interested in the communicative mechanisms by which such texts are often able to advance or favour particular value positions while employing a relatively impersonal style in which attitudinal evaluations and other potentially contentious meanings are largely confined to material attributed to quoted sources. It reviews previous research on the evaluative qualities of these texts, with special reference to the literature on attribution and so-called ‘evidentiality’ in news discourse. It is proposed that understandings of the axiological workings of these text can be enhanced by referencing some of the key insights emerging from what is termed the ‘Appraisal ‘framework’, an approach to the analysis of evaluative language developed within the Systemic Functional Linguistic paradigm of Michael Halliday and his associates. In particular it is proposed that understandings of the workings of these texts can be enhanced by referencing proposals in the Appraisal literature with respect to implicit or ‘invoked’ attitude and by reference to an account of attribution and so-called ‘evidentiality’ which is grounded in Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, rather than in notions of truth functionality and certainty-of-knowledge claims.
This paper uses a text-driven approach to explore epistemological positioning (the expression of assessments concerning knowledge) in English newspapers. The notion of epistemological positioning (EP) often overlaps with evidentiality-the linguistic marking of the basis of speaker/writer knowledge. This is a relatively modern concept in linguistics and, compared to the amount of research it has attracted concerning other languages, it has been somewhat neglected in research focusing on English. Newspaper texts are a particularly good source for looking into EP and evidentiality, because the news story is a genre that is preoccupied with knowledge. The analysis shows that EP in English can be very complex, and that the distinction between attribution and averral (Sinclair 1988) needs to be taken into account when discussing it in naturally occurring texts (particularly in news texts). The resulting elements of EP that are identified for the English language offer a first glance at the possibilities to express EP in English, and open up future research on EP in different registers and text types.
This article discusses two crucial issues in the social semiotics of visual communication. The first is the move from accounts of specific semiotic modes towards an integrated multimodal approach to visual communication in which the analysis of images becomes less central than the analysis of semiotic resources such as composition, movement and colour, which are common to a range of semiotic modes including images, graphics, typography, fashion, product design, exhibition design and architecture. The second is a new emphasis on the discourses, practices and technologies that regulate the use of semiotic resources, and on studying the take‐up of semiotic resources by users in relation to these regulatory discourses, practices and technology. Here, the article will discuss a number of semiotic ‘regimes’, including codification, tradition, expertise, best practice or role modelling, and technological control. The article ends with a discussion of the way normative discourses are built into the latest visual communication technologies (e.g. PowerPoint, HTML, Photoshop, Illustrator) and an affirmation of the need for a critical and well‐contextualised semiotics of visual technology.
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'#feminism is not a dirty word': Axiology, ambient affiliation and dialogism in discourses surrounding feminism in microblogging
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