Cover not available
Discussion published In:
Internet Pragmatics
Vol. 2:1 (2019) ► pp.1–33
Discussion

An outline of some future research issues for internet pragmatics

| University of Alicante
Internet communication has evolved a lot since it first became popular in the early nineties of the last century. Pragmatics has also evolved and has tried to come to terms with the non-stop changes that internet is constantly producing in our lives and especially in how we communicate and interact. We are probably now at a stage of internet development in which we can make some sound predictions regarding certain challenges that a pragmatics of internet communication will have to face in the next few years to deal with the radical changes that are taking place in today’s internet use. This article will be devoted to listing some of these research issues and to discussing what pragmatics can do to address them accurately, ranging from those issues centred upon the interpretation of online discourses to those involving interfaces and their options for contextualisation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What is said versus what is meant (and interpreted)
  • 3.Application of pragmatic research to multimodal discourses
  • 4.Typed messages with visual support
  • 5.Voice-based communication (but not necessarily synchronous and oral)
  • 6.Increasing importance of the physical in supposed-to-be virtual communication
  • 7.Varying sources of mutuality in the physical-virtual interface
  • 8.Decreasing importance of substantive content in exchange for phatic interactions
  • 9.Elements that frame virtual communication (contextual constraints)
  • 10.Increasing importance of non-propositional effects (feelings, emotions)
  • 11.Big data and their impact on users’ interactions
  • 12.Pragmatics of virtual agents
  • 13.Social networking sites and identity-shaping
  • 14.Online polylogues
  • 15.Media convergence and multiple simultaneous areas of interaction
  • 16.Blurring of traditional elements in communication (author, discourse, audience)
  • 17.Interactions in scenarios where a virtual layer of information is superimposed on the physical
  • 18.Need of ethnographic approaches and analyses of data, for example on Facebook
  • 19.Cross-cultural issues
  • 20.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00018.yus
References
Adams, Tim
2018 “How can I tell if I am talking to a real person online?” The Guardian 18 November, 12–15.Google Scholar
Alexander, Brian, and Alexander Levine
2008 “Storytelling: Emergence of a new genre.” Educause Review 43(6): 40–56.Google Scholar
Bondi, Marina
2018 “Blogs as interwoven polylogues: The dialogic action game.” Language and Dialogue 8(1): 43–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
2012 “Social interaction in YouTube text-based polylogues: A study of coherence.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 171: 501–521. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
2014 “Conflict management in massive polylogues: A case study from YouTube.” Journal of Pragmatics 731: 19–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carr, Caleb T., D. Yvette Wohn, and Rebecca A. Hayes
2016 “[Like] as social support: Relational closeness, automaticity, and interpreting social support from paralinguistic digital affordances in social media.” Computers in Human Behavior 621: 385–393. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dayter, Daria
2016 Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech Acts, Stories and Self-praise. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flores Salgado, Elizabeth, and Teresa A. Castineira-Benitez
2018 “The use of politeness in WhatsApp discourse and move ‘requests’.” Journal of Pragmatics 1331: 79–92. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forceville, Charles, and Billy Clark
2014 “Can pictures have explicatures?” Linguagem em (Dis)curso 14(3): 451–472. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frith, Jordan
2015 Smartphones as Locative Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Grice, Herbert P.
1975 “Logic and conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Grundlingh, L.
2018 “Memes as speech acts.” Social Semiotics 28(2): 147–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hjorth, Larissa, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell
(eds.) 2017 The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography. Abingdon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jewitt, Carey
2016 “Multimodal analysis.” In Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, ed. by Alexandra Georgakopoulou, and Tereza Spilioti, 69–84. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Langlotz, Andreas, and Miriam Locher
2013 “The role of emotions in relational work.” Journal of Pragmatics 581: 87–107. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Licoppe, Christian
2013 “Merging mobile communication studies and urban research: Mobile locative media, ‘onscreen encounters’ and the reshaping of the interaction order in public spaces.” Mobile Media and Communication 1(1): 122–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, and Patricia Bou-Franch
2011 “On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of postings sent in response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube video.” Journal of Pragmatics 431: 2578–2593. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lutzky, Ursula, and Matt Gee
2018 “ ‘I just found your blog’. The pragmatics of initiating comments on blog posts.” Journal of Pragmatics 1291: 173–184. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcoccia, Michel
2004 “On-line polylogues: conversation structure and participation framework in internet newsgroups.” Journal of Pragmatics 361: 115–145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McKeown, Jamie, and Qilin Zhang
2015 “Socio-pragmatic influence on opening salutation and closing valediction of British workplace email.” Journal of Pragmatics 851: 92–107. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Matthew K., John C. Tang, Gina Venolia, Gerard Wilkinson, and Kori Inkpen
2017 “Conversational chat circles: Being all here without having to hear it all.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017), 2394–2404. Denver, CO, USA. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Vincent
2008 “New media, networking and phatic culture.” Convergence 141: 387–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morrow, Philip R.
2017 “Requesting and advice giving.” In Pragmatics of Social Media, ed. by Christian R. Hoffmann, and Wolfram Bublitz, 661–689. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pariser, Eli
2011 The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Paulus, Trena, Amber Warren, and Jessica Nina Lester
2016 “Applying conversation analysis methods to online talk: A literature review.” Discourse, Context & Media 121: 1–10. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pink, Sarah, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi
2016 Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Placencia, María Elena, Amanda Lower, and Hebe Powell
2016 “Complimenting behaviour on Facebook: Responding to compliments in American English.” Pragmatics & Society 7(3): 339–365. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sampietro, Agnese
2016 “Exploring the punctuating effect of emoji in Spanish WhatsApp chats.” Lenguas Modernas 471: 91–113.Google Scholar
Schubert, Christoph
2017 “Discourse and cohesion.” Pragmatics of Social Media, ed. by Christian R. Hoffmann, and Wolfram Bublitz, 317–343. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, Raz
2015 “Online Place Attachment: Exploring Technological Ties to Physical Places.” In Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, ed. by Adriana de Souza e Silva, and Mimi Sheller, 85–100. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Scott, Kate
2018 “The pragmatics of hashtags: Inference and conversational style on Twitter.” Journal of Pragmatics 811: 8–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sjöblom, Max, Maria Törhönen, Juho Hamari, and Joseph Macey
2017 “Content structure is king: An empirical study on gratifications, game genres and content type on Twitch.” Computers in Human Behavior 731: 161–171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd edn.). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stöckl, Hartmut
2004 “In between modes: Language and image in printed media.” In Perspectives on Multimodality, ed. By Eija Ventola, Cassily Charles, and Martin Kaltenbacher, 9–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Storrer, Angelika
2002 “Coherence in text and hypertext.” Document Design 3(2): 156–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turkle, Sherry
2015 Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
van Kleef, Gerben A.
2016 The Interpersonal Dynamics of Emotion: Toward an Integrative Theory of Emotions as Social Information. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo
2015 “Multimodality.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (2nd edn.), ed. by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 447–465. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Vetere, Frank, Jeremy Smith, and Martin Gibbs
2009 “Phatic interactions: Being aware and feeling connected.” In Awareness Systems: Advances in Theory, Methodology, and Design, ed. by Panos Markopoulos, Boris de Ruyter, and Wendy Mackay, 173–186. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Victoria, John V. Tucker, and Tracey E. Rihll
2011 “On phatic technologies for creating and maintaining human relationships.” Technology in Society 33(1–2): 44–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre
2017 “Communication, comprehension and ‘non-propositional’ effects.” Paper presented at the First International Conference on Beyond Meaning. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 13–15 September 2017.
Wiseman, R.
2013 “What boys want.” Time 2 December, 24–31.Google Scholar
Yus, Francisco
1998 “A decade of relevance theory.” Journal of Pragmatics 301: 305–345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 “Attitudes and emotions through written text: The case of textual deformation in Internet chat rooms.” Pragmalingüística 131: 147–174.Google Scholar
2008 “Inferring from comics: A multi-stage account.” Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis de Comunicació III1: 223–249.Google Scholar
2010 “Relevance theory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, ed. by Bernd Heine, and Heiko Narrog, 679–701. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2011 Cyberpragmatics: Internet-Mediated Communication in Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2104 ““Not all emoticons are created equal.” Linguagem em (Dis)curso (special issue on relevance theory) 14(3): 511–529. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015a “Discourse and identity.” In: International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd edn.). Volume 61, ed. by James D. Wright, 498–502. Oxford: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015b “The role of cognition and relevance in new digital narratives.” Prospettive multilingue e interdisciplinari nel discorso specialistico, ed. by Elena Carpi, 81–107. Pisa: Pisa University Press.Google Scholar
2016a “Discourse, contextualization and identity shaping. The case of social networking sites and virtual worlds.” In Technology Implementation in Higher Education for Second Language Teaching and Translation Studies: New Tools, New Approaches, ed. by María Luisa Carrió-Pastor, 71–88. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016b Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016c “Online identity: A (non)propositional account.” Paper presented at the Seventh International Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics (EPICS VII). Pablo de Olavide University (Seville), 4–6 May 2016.
2017a “Contextual constraints and non-propositional effects in WhatsApp communication.” Journal of Pragmatics 1141: 66–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017b “Putting relevance at centre stage in research on human activity on the Internet.” In Applications of Relevance Theory: From Discourse to Morphemes, ed. by Agnieszka Piskorska, and Ewa Walaszewska, 86–102. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
2018a “The interface between pragmatics and Internet-mediated communication: Applications, extensions and adjustments. In Pragmatics and its Interfaces, ed. by Cornelia Ilie, and Neal Norrick, 267–290. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018b “Cyberpragmatics of interactions through locative media.” Paper presented at the International CoCoLaC-Conference. University of Helsinki, 22–23 March 2018.
2018c “Attaching feelings and emotions to propositions. Some insights on irony and internet communication.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 22(1): 94–107. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018d “Relevance from and beyond propositions: The case of online identity. In Relevance and Irrelevance: Theories, Factors and Challenges, ed. by Hisashi Nasu, and Jan Strassheim, 119–140. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018e “The future of internet pragmatics.” Keynote speech presented at the First International Conference on Internet Pragmatics. Fuzhou (China) 21–23 September 2018.Google Scholar
2019a “Multimodality in memes. A cyberpragmatic approach.” In Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions, ed. by Patricia Bou-Franch, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 105–131. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019b “A cognitive pragmatics of the phatic Internet.” In Emotion in Discourse, ed. by Laura Alba, and Lachlan Mackenzie, 161–188. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Žegarac, Vladimir
1998 “What is ‘phatic communication’?” In Current Issues in Relevance Theory, ed. by Villy Rouchota, and Andreas H. Jucker, 327–362. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhao, Shanyang, Sherri Grasmuck, and Jason Martin
2008 “Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships.” Computers in Human Behavior 241: 1816–1836. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 14 other publications

Calude, Andreea S., Amber Anderson & David Trye
2023. Intensifying expletive constructions and their use on social media: Innovative functions of the hashtag #wokeAF in English tweets. Discourse, Context & Media 56 ► pp. 100741 ff. DOI logo
Ellis, Raissa
2022. Testing the impact of paraverbal irony signals. Experimental study on verbal irony identification in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. Psychology of Language and Communication 26:1 ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo
Esposito, Eleonora & Ruth Breeze
2022. Gender and politics in a digitalised world: Investigating online hostility against UK female MPs. Discourse & Society 33:3 ► pp. 303 ff. DOI logo
Jiang, Yaqian & Camilla Vásquez
2020. Exploring local meaning-making resources. Internet Pragmatics 3:2 ► pp. 260 ff. DOI logo
Jiang, Yaqian & Camilla Vásquez
2022. Exploring local meaning-making resources. In The Pragmatics of Internet Memes [Benjamins Current Topics, 120], ► pp. 122 ff. DOI logo
Kunch, Zoriana, Oksana Mykytyuk, Liliia Kharchuk & Myroslava Hnatyuk
2023. Lexical Norms in Business, Informal and Internet Communication. In Developments in Information and Knowledge Management Systems for Business Applications [Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, 466], ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo
Lei, Rong
2022. Book Review: Kate Scott, Pragmatics Online. Discourse Studies 24:5 ► pp. 662 ff. DOI logo
Xie, Chaoqun & Ying Tong
2019. Constructing ‘ordinariness’. In The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 307], ► pp. 179 ff. DOI logo
Xie, Chaoqun & Francisco Yus
2021. Digitally Mediated Communication. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 454 ff. DOI logo
Xie, Chaoqun, Francisco Yus & Hartmut Haberland
2021. Introduction. In Approaches to Internet Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 318], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Xu, Wenjin & Bingyun Li
2023. Review of Mazzone (2018): Cognitive Pragmatics: Mindreading, Inferences, Consciousness. Internet Pragmatics 6:1 ► pp. 139 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2023. Pragmatics and the Internet. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2023. Contextual Constraints on Internet Humour. In Pragmatics of Internet Humour, ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 247 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.