33.105, Review: Pragmatics: Xie, Yus, Haberland (2021)

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Subject: 33.105, Review: Pragmatics: Xie, Yus, Haberland (2021)

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Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2022 12:07:07
From: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky [zsubrinszky at gmail.com]
Subject: Approaches to Internet Pragmatics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1619.html

EDITOR: Chaoqun  Xie
EDITOR: Francisco  Yus
EDITOR: Hartmut  Haberland
TITLE: Approaches to Internet Pragmatics
SUBTITLE: Theory and practice
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 318
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky, Budapest University of Technology & Economics

SUMMARY

Edited by Chaoqun Xie, Francisco Yus, and Hartmut Haberland, “Approaches to
Internet Pragmatics” examines several theoretical, methodological, and
empirical aspects of internet communication from a broadly conceived pragmatic
perspective. It aims to explore new pragmatic phenomena and challenges that
appear as people tend to spend more and more time interacting on the internet,
or in different forms of technologically mediated communication. Since
pragmatics deals with communication in context and how more gets communicated
than is said (or typed), applications of pragmatic phenomena to internet
interactions in internet specific communication on WhatsApp, WeChat and
Twitter, are not only welcome, but necessary. 

The internet, as a new life action space “seamlessly” connected with the
physical world, has become a crucial “social field” bringing both convenience
and inconvenience, information and misinformation in our lives. With the
emergence and development of internet technologies, internet pragmatics also
progresses and presents a functional perspective on every facet of linguistic,
visual, and/or multimodal behaviour/(inter)action that occurs on and via the
internet. Relying on a prototypical act of internet-mediated communication,
the volume addresses issues of how to engage in interactions online, what
contextual constraints exist in every act of communication, how internet
users’ intentions are expressed by speech acts, how the coded versus
contextualized discourse is interpreted, how online interactions are triggered
and structured, and, finally, what effects are produced on addressees
depending on their conceptualization of the broader social and cultural
context.

The volume brings together 11 chapters and is divided into three parts. Part
I, “Theoretical and methodological perspectives”, consists of five
contributions addressing theoretical and methodological issues pertinent to
internet pragmatics. The second part, “The discursive management of self on
the internet”, with three chapters, focuses on how users manage self and
identity on and via the internet. Finally, the third part, “Pragmatics of
internet-mediated texts”, contains three chapters addressing the pragmatics of
internet-mediated texts across different genres.

In Part I, Chapter 1, “Expanding pragmatics: Values, goals, ranking, and
internet adaptability”, Jacob L. Mey engages in a discussion of how expanding
pragmatics is necessary and possible by attaching importance to the central
concepts of the “pragmeme” and of “adaptability” in societal connections. His
contribution shows how pragmatics, when studying the use of our senses and
gestures in communication, needs to situate itself within the confines of
value- and goal-oriented human interaction, both in its voice- and/or
writing-based forms on the internet. In order to help us envisage our adapting
actions in a more consistent and transparent manner, Mey gathered speech,
along with gestural, mediatized, artistic, and other communicative activities.

In Chapter 2, “Computer-mediated discourse in context: Pluralism of
communicative action and discourse common ground”, Anita Fetzer examines the
contextual constraints and requirements of CMD (Computer-Mediated Discourse),
considering their particularisation resulting from the interdependencies of
CMD’s multi-layered participation framework, logical typing, and pluralism of
communicative action. Utilizing data, metadata, and meta-representations from
the coverage of a former refugee taking up a Lord Mayor post, the author shows
how the pragmatic universals undergo medium-specific particularisation.

In Chapter 3, “Cyberpragmatics in the age of locative media”, Francisco Yus
deals with various stages of internet interaction mediated via locative media
as follows: constraints, intended manifest and mutually manifest information,
inferred information, and non-propositional effects (e.g., self-concept and
identity, sense of community and group membership, feeling of being connected
and personal feelings). He argues that in any instance of virtual
communication the addressees also infer the information provided in the shared
location and derive a number of (ir)relevant effects from it.

In Chapter 4, “Interpreting emoji pragmatics”, Ashley R. Dainas and Susan C.
Herring describe the methods and overall findings of the Understanding Emoji
Survey, which explores the pragmatic functions of 13 popular emoji in comment
postings in public Facebook groups. They find that the function chosen most
often in response to the emoji survey item was “tone modification”, followed
by “action”, “mention”, “softening”, “reaction”, “multiple functions”,
“decorative”, “other”, “I don’t know” and “physical”. They argue that emoji
are not functionally interchangeable, but rather specialize to some extent for
specific functions.

Chapter 5, “Speech acts and the dissemination of knowledge in social networks”
by Paolo Labinaz and Marina Sbisà, analyses how social media participants
engaged in discussions under a public post contribute to knowledge
dissemination through their verbal behaviour in the light of an Austin-based
speech act theoretical framework and the four main classes of illocutionary
acts (verdictives, exercitives, commissives, and behabitives). The authors
discuss examples from comments on Facebook posts concerning health- and
politics-related issues.

Part II, “The discursive management of self on the internet”, has three
chapters and focuses on how users manage self and identity on and via the
internet.

Carmen Maíz-Arévalo, in Chapter 6 “Humour and self-presentation on ‘WhatsApp’
profile status”, investigates the use of humour as a self-presentation
strategy based on both quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of
206 WhatsApp statuses in Spanish. She argues that recurrent patterns (e.g.,
intertextuality and incongruity) do exist in people’s display of humour in
profiles and that the variables of gender and age seem to play a crucial part
in determining whether or not users choose humour as a self-representation
strategy to invite rapport-building with present and potential future
contacts.

In Chapter 7, “Inviting a purchase: A multimodal analysis of staged
authenticity in WeChat social selling”, Chaoqun Xie and Ying Tong explore how
people doing social selling on WeChat present themselves in Moments and group
chats and how emoji contribute to both self-presentation and social selling on
WeChat. The results of the multimodal analysis of both screen data and user
data of Moments show that the meticulously intertwined and multimodally
presented communicative acts of social selling on WeChat are the outcome of
frame-shifting and frame-overlapping strategies on the one hand and highly
crafted staged authenticity on the other.

Chapter 8, “Online nicks, impoliteness, and Jewish identity in Israeli Russian
conflict discourse” by Renee Perelmutter, examines how online interlocutors
manipulate the nick(name), an important form of self-presentation and identity
construction online. Studying an online community of ex-Soviet migrants to
Israel, the author shows how interlocutors discuss, modify, substitute,
combine with insults, and/or translate an opponent’s nick involving
impoliteness (IIM- inappropriate identity markers) and jocular mockery. She
argues that nick manipulation plays a crucial role in how individual or group
identities are supported or attacked in online discourse.

Part III, “Pragmatics of internet-mediated texts”, contains three chapters
addressing the pragmatics of internet-mediated texts across genres.

Chapter 9, “Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2016 Austrian presidential
campaign” by Helmut Gruber, explores the content level, the use of rhetorical
actions, and selected aspects of the interpersonal level of Twitter messages
the candidates posted during the 2016 Austrian presidential campaign. Results
show that the candidates’ communication strategies cannot be fully explained
either by innovation or normalization hypotheses, and, consequently, the two
proposed hypotheses are too broad to account for contextual aspects of
specific political communication situations.

In Chapter 10, “A study on how cultural and gender parameters affect emoticon
distribution, usage and frequency in American and Japanese online discourse”,
Barry Kavanagh compares how American and Japanese bloggers resort to emoticons
to express semantic and pragmatic meaning in text-based online asynchronous
blog comments. In addition, an examination of how emoticons interact with the
linguistic text and other unconventional means of communication such as
unconventional phonetic spelling is also given consideration. In sum, the use
of emoticons is highly personalized and subjective, therefore, further studies
will need to investigate why users use them, in what contexts, and with whom.

Finally, Chapter 11, “Migration through the English-Greek translated press” by
Maria Sidiropoulou, focuses on pragmatic shifts in web-retrieved English-Greek
translated press news text on the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. She analyses
cross-cultural variation of shifting patterns in verbally mediated instances
of suffering and migration in the Greek translated press, arguing that the
English news reports take a more threatening perspective on the issue of
migration. She concludes that local perceptions of global conflicts may
de/mobilize public sentiment and construct ethical intended sensibilities and
citizenship roles.

EVALUATION

This publication is well-structured and breaks ground in the field of internet
pragmatics by exploring new pragmatic phenomena and communicative needs, as
well as the major similarities and differences between the online and offline
worlds and their impact on people’s language use and interactions. 

Following an introduction by the editors, each chapter provides valuable
content and user-friendly terminology, which makes it easy to read. Taken as a
whole, the individual articles build upon each other and add a variety of
perspectives with respect to existing research and literature on the
theoretical and methodological perspectives of pragmatics. However, I would
like to make a small comment in connection with the order of the articles
dealing with emoji. The pragmatic functions of emoji and emoticons are
discussed in several chapters (i.e., Chapters 4, 6, 7, and 10), approaching
them from different perspectives (e.g., intercultural or social media
contexts), but they appear under different subheadings in the volume. For the
reader  it would perhaps have been better to have them under one subheading.
As regards the contents and visual representations of the articles on emoji,
they deserve praise as they are very informative, and the taxonomy presented
in Chapter 4 can be applied to other types of graphicons-in use, such as
stickers or GIFs on other social media platforms. In addition, I could not
agree more with the authors that, even within the same culture, internet users
often disagree on the interpretations of emoji as their pragmatic functions
vary in authentic contexts.

For me, two of the contributions in the book are of particular interest: the
one by Jacob L. Mey, which presents how values impact both human and animal
behaviour from a very personal perspective, namely, from that of his cat and
that of his wife, and the other, Anita Fetzer’s paper, which suggests that CMD
can no longer be based on monolithic conceptualisations of intentionality and
communicative action but should be captured from a holistic perspective (e.g.,
with an image selection).

In an age when the role of political discourse is gaining ground, it is
important to be aware of the norms (e.g., politeness) and the many pitfalls
(e.g., unintended connotations) one might fall into (Chapters 8, 9, and 11). 

In conclusion, the book “Approaches to Internet Pragmatics” constitutes a
solid set of resources for researchers, linguists, specialists in political
discourse, language learners, and all those interested in delving into the
historical evolution and/or on-going revolution in digital human interaction.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky is a full-time Senior Lecturer at Budapest University of
Technology and Economics, Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, Centre of
Modern Languages. Her research interests involve Business English language
teaching, Intercultural Communication and Diplomatic Discourse.





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