37.2399, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Reacting to Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse, Uptake and Affective Alignment (Finland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2399. Fri Jul 17 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2399, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Reacting to Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse, Uptake and Affective Alignment (Finland)

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Date: 17-Jul-2026
From: Karina Frick [karina.frick at uibk.ac.at]
Subject: Panel at IPC20 - Reacting to Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse, Uptake and Affective Alignment


Panel at IPC20 - Reacting to Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse,
Uptake and Affective Alignment

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Karina Frick
Contact Email: karina.frick at uibk.ac.at
Meeting URL: https://ipra2027.exordo.com/

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

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

Digital platforms are increasingly organised around practices of
reacting. Across platforms, reactions are shaped by affordances and
emic labels, from low-threshold uptake such as likes, comments,
quotes, reposts, or stitches to elaborate audiovisual formats such as
live responses and reaction videos. At this end of the spectrum,
reception becomes a "vernacular form of visual production" (Kim 2016:
333): prior content is watched, paused, felt, discussed, and
repackaged before an audience. Positioned "in-between media text and
media reception" (Bliss & Nansen 2023: 751), reaction media offer a
privileged site for analysing how users take up, reuse, evaluate, and
align with existing digital content.
The panel examines reacting as a pragmatic, multimodal, and affective
practice of digital participation. It builds on work on
recontextualisation, quotation, linguistic recycling, and the
pragmatics of sharing, which has shown how communicative material
changes when it is quoted, shared, screenshotted, remediated, or
re-embedded in new participation frameworks (Haapanen & Perrin 2020;
Pfurtscheller 2020; Zappavigna 2022; Dynel 2024). Sequentially,
reaction formats are placed in second position: they comment on,
respond to, or rework already available digital content. By selecting,
transforming, and recontextualising earlier resources, reactors
position themselves affectively, epistemically, and deontically
towards both content and participants, including forms of convergent
audience alignment (Pelttari 2023). Such practices connect diverse
scales of multimodal action, from button clicks and comments to memes,
screenshots, GIFs, stickers, livestreams, timed comments, and videos
(Dainas 2025; Sampietro 2025; Messerli & Locher 2021, 2024; Song &
Licoppe 2024), and they coordinate talk, gaze, gesture, text, sound,
and platform-specific metrics in a "crisscross of modalities" (Dutt &
Graham 2023: 2).
We invite empirically grounded and theoretically oriented papers on
reactions across languages, platforms, and communities. Contributions
should approach reaction through specific empirical cases while
engaging with the broader pragmatic problem. Comparative,
ethnographic, corpus-pragmatic, media-linguistic, multimodal, and
interactional approaches are welcome.
Contributions might address, but are not limited to, the following
questions:
- What makes a digital contribution recognisable as a reaction rather
than as a stand-alone post?
- How is prior content selected and transformed in the production of a
reaction?
- How do platform-specific conditions shape the timing, visibility,
and audience of reactions?
- How is the relation between source material, reactor, and audience
organised multimodally?
- How do reactions position their producers towards the content and
participants they take up?
- How do users themselves define, contest, and evaluate what counts as
a reaction?
With this panel, we want to test how far reaction can serve as a
pragmatic concept across digital formats. Bringing work from different
research traditions into conversation should help us refine the
concept without fixing its boundaries in advance. This is our way of
taking up the conference theme Building Bridges.
How to Submit:
We welcome abstracts of up to 500 words presenting (nearly) completed
research with a clear research question and, for empirical work, a
concise description of the data and approach. Please submit each
contribution separately through the IPrA2027 conference platform by 15
October 2026, midnight CEST. This also applies to invited
contributions. In step 4 (Topics), select the panel Reacting to
Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse, Uptake and Affective Alignment.
An active IPrA membership is required to submit an abstract. Each
person may be first author of only one conference contribution,
whether a panel paper, lecture, or poster.
Please consult the official IPC20 Call for Papers for the complete
submission instructions; further conference information is available
on the IPrA website. Questions about the panel may be sent to Carolin
Dix (carolin.dix at uibk.ac.at) Karina Frick (karina.frick at uibk.ac.at) or
Daniel Pfurtscheller (daniel.pfurtscheller at uibk.ac.at)



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