37.2343, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of Short Videos: Embodies Communication in Algorithmic Environments (Finland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2343. Wed Jul 15 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2343, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of Short Videos: Embodies Communication in Algorithmic Environments (Finland)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 13-Jul-2026
From: Simon Meier-Vieracker [simon.meier-vieracker at tu-dresden.de]
Subject: Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of Short Videos: Embodies Communication in Algorithmic Environments


Panel at IPC20 - Pragmatics of Short Videos: Embodies Communication in
Algorithmic Environments
Short Title: IPC20

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Simon Meier-Vieracker
Contact Email: simon.meier-vieracker at tu-dresden.de
Meeting URL: https://ipra2027.exordo.com/

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Pragmatics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

People who create short videos for social media platforms like TikTok
or Instagram communicate with their bodies. TikTok’s predecessor
musical.ly started as an app for lip-sync and dance videos that
confine creators’ expressive means to their bodily behaviour, and
these genres are still popular on the platform today (Meier-Vieracker
2025). But even in original sound videos – often recorded as selfie
videos – creators use their bodies in a variety of ways for their
multimodal meaning-making. The semi-otic resources range from vocal
and prosodic means to proxemics, gestures, and facial expressions to
playful alterations by digital means like film editing or filters as a
way of “synthetic embodiment” (Jones 2023: 27). Indeed, the platform’s
technical affordances shape creators' bodily communication in a
variety of ways: The 9:16 ver-tical frame compresses the periphery of
the gesture space and privileges centre-front upper-body
articulations, so that creators noticeably reorganise where and how
their hands move (Meier-Vieracker to appear). Highly expressive
intonation and rhythmic patterns are used to attract the viewers’
attention (Han & Zappavigna 2024) scrolling through their feeds,
shaping embodied performances of gender identity (Weiß et al. 2025)
and affect (Backes 2026), and the camera shake caused by taking the
selfie is deliberately employed as a stylistic device to convey
immediacy. In turn, the adaptations of established genres or activity
types to the short-video format like, e.g., news (Luginbühl 2025),
teaching (Hartung et al. 2023), or political activism (Sigurdardottir
& Rautajoki 2024) are notably characterised by alterations in bodily
behaviour.
In our panel, we want to bring together scholars doing empirical
research on short videos and short-video platforms to discuss the
complex interrelationships between the platforms’ digital affordances
– the video recording and editing techniques, the algorithmic feeds,
etc. – on the one hand and the multiplicity of embodied communi-cation
patterns as social affordances on the other. We invite contributions
dealing with specific genres of short-video content, as well as those
that examine particular semiotic resources in a variety of contexts.
Contributions might deal with, but are not limited to the following
questions:
 - How do the attention economies of the algorithmic feeds of
short-video plat-forms affect the ways people communicate with their
bodies?
 - What multimodal profiles do different genres of short-video content
exhibit?
 - How do creators orchestrate their bodily behaviour with other
semiotic re-sources like text inserts, stickers, greenscreen filters,
or music?
 - How does brevity affect embodied communication in short videos when
com-pared to, say, long-format videos on YouTube or TV?
 - How are gestural repertoires of established activity types (e.g.
Ladewig 2025 on political talk shows) repurposed or replaced when
these are adapted to the short-video format?
 - How can bodily communication as part of the complex multimodal
wholes of short videos be annotated in a systematic way (Grzenkowicz &
Wildfeuer 2025)?
 - How are short-video-typical ways of embodied communication
metapragmat-ically reflected upon and enregistered?
Please submit your abstract (up to 500 words) via the conference
website (https://ipra2027.exordo.com/) by 15 October 2026. In step 4
(‘Topics’) of the sub-mission process select the panel ‘Pragmatics of
Short Videos’. Further information on submitting abstracts can be
found in the IPC20 Call for Papers
(https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027). Please note that an
active IPrA membership is required to submit an abstract. If you have
any further questions re-garding the panel, please feel free to
contact us directly (mail at silvaladewig.de,
mar-tin.luginbuehl at unibas.ch, simon.meier-vieracker at tu-dresden.de).



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Australian Linguistics Society https://als.asn.au/Home

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2343
----------------------------------------------------------