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The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres
Edited by Anita Fetzer and Elda Weizman
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 307] 2019
► pp. 209–236

Constructing ordinariness in online commenting in Hebrew and Finnish

| Bar-Ilan University, Israel
| Turku University, Finland

This chapter studies how ‘ordinariness’ and mostly ‘ordinary’ are being constructed in on-line commenting in Hebrew and Finnish. Starting with the premise that “being ordinary” is dynamically and co-operatively constructed, we adopt the notion of “positioning” to account for the ways ordinary commenters position third parties as ordinary and thus “do being ordinary” and the accountability related to it. The study relies on corpus-based methods: using corpora of commenting in each language, the equivalents of ‘ordinary’, i.e. tavallinen (Finnish), ragil and pashut (Hebrew), are identified and the attitudinal meanings implied by their collocations are examined. The findings indicate that both Hebrew and Finnish commenters position ordinary people in the contexts of politics and politicians, social injustice, social norms, moral and ethics. Culture-specific contexts include military service and orthodox/secular conflicts in Hebrew, self- and other- positioning as having positive qualities coupled with the feeling of being excluded from society in Finnish.

Keywords: accountability, concordances, computer-mediated genre, corpus-based, ordinariness, ordinary, positioning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Commenting and mediatization
  • 3.Ordinariness
  • 4.Positioning
  • 5.Data and methods
    • 5.1Methodological rationale
    • 5.2The Hebrew data
    • 5.3The Finnish data
  • 6.Similar categories in the Hebrew and the Finnish data
    • 6.1Ordinary people vs. politicians and politics
    • 6.2Social injustices: State vs. ordinary
    • 6.3Ordinary citizen, social norms and control
    • 6.4Moral and ethics of the ordinary person
  • 7.Specific categories in the Hebrew data
  • 8.Specific categories in the Finnish data
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 12 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.307.09wei
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