0000000000520623
AUTHOR
Nuria Lorenzo-dus
On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of postings sent in response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube video
Abstract The overall aim of this paper is to investigate impoliteness in a particular on-line polylogal setting – YouTube postings (c. 13,000 words) triggered by the ‘Obama Reggaeton’ video, which was released during the 2008 US democratic primaries. This is done through integration of quantitative/qualitative analytic tools and of (im)politeness1 and (im)politeness 2 approaches. A two-prong experimental study is used in order to examine impoliteness realisation and interpretation in the corpus. Findings reveal clear patterns in the realisation of impoliteness strategies, including a preference for on-record impoliteness saliently oriented towards attacking the positive face needs of one's …
A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular Spanish and British English. The role of (in)formality and (in)directness
This paper examines the email discursive practices of particular speakers of two different languages, namely Peninsular Spanish and British English. More specifically, our study focuses on (in)formality and (in)directness therein, for these lie at the heart of considerable scholarly debate regarding, respectively (i) the general stylistic drift towards orality and informality in technology-mediated communication, and (ii) the degree of communicative (in)directness – within broader politeness orientations – of speakers of different languages, specifically an orientation towards directness in Peninsular Spanish vis-à-vis indirectness in British English. The aim of this paper is thus to invest…
Social Interaction in YouTube Text-Based Polylogues: A Study of Coherence
Since YouTube was launched, its emblematic video-sharing facility has attracted considerable attention as a social networking system of cultural production. In addition to vlogging, YouTube offers a text facility through which YouTubers share and negotiate opinions. However, research into the latter is scarce, especially within language-based disciplines (Androutsopoulos & Beiβwenger 2009; Zelenkauskaite & Herring 2008). This article contributes to addressing this imbalance by focusing on YouTube text-based ‘conversation’ (Herring 2010a). Specifically, it examines coherence in a corpus of YouTube postings in Spanish. Although coherence has been the object of much academic debate in other fo…