37.2667, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of TikTok: Exploring Interaction on Short-form Video Platforms (Finland)

Fri Aug 14 14:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2667. Fri Aug 14 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2667, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of TikTok: Exploring Interaction on Short-form Video Platforms (Finland)

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Date: 13-Aug-2026
From: Ylva Biri [ylva.biri at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of TikTok: Exploring Interaction on Short-form Video Platforms

Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of TikTok: Exploring Interaction on
Short-form Video Platforms

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Ylva Biri
Contact Email: ylva.biri at helsinki.fi
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

Short-form video platforms have emerged as significant sites for
social interaction, reshaping the ways users communicate, express
their identities, and form communities. The unique features of
platforms like TikTok and Douyin facilitate innovative forms of
interaction that blend video, audio, and textual elements, resulting
in multimodal and cross-modal communicative practices (Jiang & Vásquez
2025). For this panel, we invite papers that delve into the pragmatics
of these platforms, focusing on how users navigate and construct
meaning in these dynamic environments.
Analysing interaction on these platforms is particularly intriguing
due to their inherent affordances, which influence user behaviour and
engagement. The mechanisms of duetting and stitching, for instance,
create opportunities for co-construction of meaning, the negotiation
of identity, and the shaping of community norms among TikTokers and
their audiences (Darvin 2022). The comment section provides yet
another mode of interaction between content creators and viewers (Xie
2025, Zappavigna 2026). Yet, short-form video platforms remain
underexplored in terms of how users establish rapport (but see
Christiansen et al. 2026), convey humour, and perform
self-presentation, often within the constraints of brevity that these
platforms impose.
To deepen our understanding of pragmatics of short-form video
platforms, the panel welcomes diverse methodological perspectives,
including (but not limited to) corpus-assisted discourse analysis,
interactional pragmatics, and digital conversation analysis, to
explore how interaction unfolds within these multimodal digital
spaces. Panel participants can present empirical as well as
theoretical or methodological papers on these topics.
Panel organizers: Ylva Biri, Routa Hallapaju & Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
(University of Helsinki)
References:
Christiansen, Alex, Shioma-Lei Craythorne, Paul Crawford, Michael
Larkin, and Ruth Page. 2026. Mental health advice on TikTok. Journal
of Pragmatics, 257, 26-38.
Darvin, Ron. 2022. Design, resistance and the performance of identity
on TikTok. Discourse, Context & Media 46, 100591.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2022.100591.
Jiang, Yaqian, and Camilla Vásquez. 2025. Sharing as informal
teaching: identity construction of an English learner/teacher
microcelebrity on Douyin’. Discourse, Context & Media 65, 100888.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100888.
Xie, Fang. 2025. “This looks so good 😭”: Emoji functions in
compliments on TikTok and DouYin’. Internet Pragmatics.
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00131.xie.
Zappavigna, Michele. 2026. Emoji as resources for negotiating
affiliation and taste in TikTok comments. Internet Pragmatics.
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00144.zap.

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