Les modalités iconiques dans le discours médié par ordinateur: du neuf dans l'interaction?

Graphic modalities (emoticons, emoji, GIF…) are often presented as one of the distinctive features of computer-mediated interaction. In what may be the first reference book on computer-mediated communication (also known as CMC), American linguist Susan C. Herring goes as far as calling them a “unique feature” of digital interaction (Herring 1996, 3). Since then, many linguists have tempered this view and shown that graphic modalities are by no means specific to CMC. However, they remain one of its salient features. Are they, then, to be considered as an evolution or a revolution in interaction? The real question is indeed what they bring to computer-mediated communication, and their status …

Polyphonie et script dans les sketches du Monty Python Flying Circus

National audience

#pdfdebate: une tentative de débat politique sur Twitter

International audience; Le 20 Juin 2008 s’est ouvert #pdfdebate, premier débat présidentiel organisé sur Twitter. A l’initiative d’une fondation privée dédiée à l’étude des rapports entre la politique et les nouvelles technologies, ce débat d’un nouveau genre devait opposer jusqu’au 24 Juin, et par comptes Twitter interposés, un représentant de chacun des deux candidats à la présidentielle américaine de 2008 et être animé par la créatrice d’un blog politique alors très en vue.L’initiative, restée sans véritable postérité, n’a pas manqué de susciter remarques et commentaires, pour beaucoup négatifs ou au mieux sceptiques. Plus que sur le fond, l’essentiel des critiques s’est concentré sur la…

Twitter rhetoric ? Argumentation in a Twitter debate : a case study

International audience; On the 20th June 2008, “#pdfdebate”, the first presidential campaign debate to be held on Twitter, was launched. For five days, a representative of each of the two major candidates to the US presidential election used their Twitter account to engage in a debate on technology and government, moderated by a famous political blogger. This initiative of Personal Democracy Media, a private foundation dedicated to the study of new technologies in politics, has had no real posterity to this day and was generally considered as a failure. Commentators, both in the press and on Twitter, mostly blamed this failure on the fact that Twitter and its interface are not really suitab…

Metaphorical GIFs and humour online: the case of “when” posts on Tumblr

International audience; “When” posts have now become a staple of microblogging platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. They consist of two things: a verbal caption opening with “When” followed by an assertive clause describing a situation of life on the one hand, and a static or moving image presenting a visual elaboration of the situation described in the caption on the other hand. “When” posts rely on the striking relationship between what the caption describes and what the image shows. In the case of the posts selected for the present study, this relationship is metaphorical: the caption and the image, which are juxtaposed without mediation, act respectively as a verbal tenor and …

GIFs in online interaction: embodied cues and beyond

International audience; Recent research has characterized GIFs as a means for speakers to reproduce nonlinguistic cues such as bodily actions and facial expressions in online written interaction, which is first and foremost text-based. They make it possible to translate in digital interaction what those nonlinguistic cues enable to do in face-to-face conversation: express emotion and affect, and elaborate on what is being said. This article explores further the role and functions of GIFs as embodied cues and goes beyond, where GIF use diverges from body language in face-to-face conversation.

The meaning of LOL: patterns of LOL deployment in YouTube comments

International audience; LOL may be one of the most popular words of internet slang. It is generally taken to be the acronym of ‘laughing out loud’, but, as some studies have already shown (for example Baron 2004 and Markman 2013), it is not always used to indicate a humorous response and it really is multifunctional. Building up on previous studies of the different functions of LOL, this paper seeks to explore a possible correlation between position and function of non-lexicalized LOL. The hypothesis is that the function of LOL largely depends on its position: clause-initial LOL is not used with the same functions as clause-final LOL. The data for the study come from the comment threads of …

Coding emotions in computer-mediated communication: the example of YouTube comments

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is essentially text-based. This is generally said to result in a “paucity of paralinguistic and non-linguistic cues” (Bieswanger, 2013: 468), but it is also considered to be the main reason for the development of other characteristic non-verbal modalities, such as emoticons and emoji. How are, then, emotions expressed in such a specific context? Are verbal modalities as limited as they are said to be? Do non-verbal modalities complete or replace them? This paper will try to answer those questions using discourse analysis tools applied to a sample of comments on a YouTube video.

Systematized impoliteness in the nonsense world of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

International audience; Theories of conversation very often revolve around the idea of cooperation, an idea dear to their founding father H.P. Grice (see Grice 1975). In a similar fashion, as Jonathan Culpeper points out in the introduction to his article “towards an anatomy of impoliteness”, theories of politeness often define the latter as a set of strategies “employed to promote or maintain social harmony in interaction” (Culpeper 1996:349). For those familiar or accustomed to this vision of conversation, reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) might be quite an interesting (and enjoyable) experience. In Carroll’s imaginary lan…

La métaphore : l’expressivité par l’écart ? Le cas étrange du nonsense de Lewis Carroll

Cet article réexamine le lien, de prime abord évident, entre l’écart qui caractérise la métaphore et son expressivité. Pour cela il s’appuie sur un corpus pour le moins original en la matière: la littérature nonsense de Lewis Carroll. On parle en effet le plus souvent de la métaphore en termes d’écart: écart de la signification au sens mais aussi écart par rapport à la norme, à l’usage linguistique, aux formes non-marquées. Mais à bien y regarder, l’association transgressive définitoire de la métaphore n’est pas toujours créatrice d’une mise en relief particulière: les métaphores sont aussi des objets du langage quotidien et beaucoup de celles qui ont intégré le lexique courant finissent pa…

Les modalités linguistiques du commentaire sur internet comme prise de position ("stance-taking"): l'exemple des commentaires sur YouTube

International audience; Sur Internet, le commentaire est par essence un lieu argumentatif. Réagir à un article, une vidéo, une image ou à n’importe quelle prise de parole, est l’occasion pour l’utilisateur du Web 2.0 de donner son opinion, de contredire, confirmer, infirmer, interpeller, dénoncer, c’est-à-dire dans tous les cas prendre position. En effet, comme l’écrivent David Barton et Carmen Lee dans Language Online : Investigating Digital Texts and Practices, commenter est un acte qui consiste à se positionner et positionner les autres, c’est-à-dire une véritable prise de position (« Commenting is an important act of positioning oneself and others, that is stance-taking », Barton et Lee…

A pragmatic study of nonsense, from Lewis Carroll to the Monty Python

This dissertation consists in a study of verbal exchanges in nonsense literature, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and one of the two fathers of the genre, Lewis Carroll, to the last quarter of the twentieth century and his glorious heirs, the Monty Python. The corpus is taken from the whole of English-speaking nonsense literature, be it English (Lewis Carroll, the Monty Python, N.F. Simpson), Canadian (Stephen Leacock), or American (Robert Benchley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Joseph Heller and the Marx Brothers). As the title indicates, the study of verbal exchanges will rely on pragmatic analysis, pragmatics being the study of how language works as a practice, in social context.…

Compte-rendu de lecture: "L'esthétique du jeu dans les Alice de Lewis Carroll", par Virginie Iché

Exprimer ses émotions en ligne : l'exemple des commentaires sur Facebook

International audience

"Haters gonna hate": characterizing hater comments on YouTube thanks to impoliteness theories

International audience; Previous studies have shown that comments on YouTube tend to show a “low degree of neutral stance” (Sindoni, 2014: 203). Comments are often either strongly positive or negative. Negative comments themselves commonly display all forms of aggressive and impolite behaviour (sarcasm, name-calling, hostility, ad personam attacks and a whole variety of other deliberate face-threatening acts). The epitome of this behaviour is the so-called “hater”, a commenter that deliberately posts abusive comments (“you suck”, “”Miranda sings is shit”, “fuck you Miranda sings”), generally unconnected to the content of the video and/or not constructive (see definitions in Lange: 2007). Ev…

Multimodal tropes in academic Tumblrs: the case of metaphor and hyperbole

Posts which combine a verbal caption describing a situation of life (often starting with “when” or “me”, e.g., “When I present my poster” or “Me presenting my poster”) and a static or moving image mirroring the situation in question (e.g., a picture showing a raccoon standing next to a painting) have become a staple of internet social media such as Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr. This study is intended at analysing such posts, which rely on two different sign systems (verbal and visual), within the framework of multimodal studies and pragmatics. It proposes to focus more precisely on multimodal tropes in academic Tumblr posts combining a verbal caption and a GIF, with a special interest for me…

Where lol is: function and position of lol used as a discourse marker in YouTube comments

Lol is probably one of the most popular words in computer-mediated communication. It is generally taken to be the acronym of “laughing out loud”, but it is not always used to indicate a humorous response; rather, it is multifunctional. Drawing on previous studies of the different functions of lol, this paper explores a possible correlation between the position and function of non-lexicalized lol in the specific context of YouTube comments. The hypothesis is that the function of lol largely depends on its position: clause-initial lol is not used with the same functions as clause-final lol. The data for the study come from the comment threads of three popular YouTube videos posted in 2017, 20…

THE INTERPLAY OF EMOJI, EMOTICONS, AND VERBAL MODALITIES IN CMC: A CASE STUDY OF YOUTUBE COMMENTS

International audience

Enseigner la phonologie en option LLCER anglais

National audience