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Article published In:
Dialogicity in Political Discourse
Edited by Elda Weizman and Zohar Livnat
[Pragmatics and Society 13:5] 2022
► pp. 861–884

Resemblance in comments/posts interaction

Forms and functions of dialogicity

| Bar-Ilan University
| David Yellin College of Education

This paper studies dialogicity in posts and their comments. Focusing on political slogans in the Facebook page of Israel PM Binyamin Netanyahu, we examine the ways comments meta-represent the posts in various degrees of resemblance. Starting with the premise that comments/post interactions are dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense, we argue that comments are dialogic in yet another way, which is related to the form and degree of resemblance between them. The conceptualization draws on the notion of meta-representation supplemented by insights gained from accommodation theory and Bakhtin’s dialogism. We argue that through resemblance, the propositional content, ideology and viewpoint conveyed by the initiating slogan are incorporated in the comment, and a tacit dialogue is constructed between them. An additional layer of polyphony is added to the multiplicity of ratified voices otherwise manifest in the interaction between separate posts and comments.

Keywords: dialogue, dialogicity, resemblance, meta-representation, accommodation, commenting, Facebook posts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Two approaches to resemblance
    • 2.1Meta-representation through resemblance
    • 2.2Accommodation theory
  • 3.Data and context
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Netanyahu’s rhetoric
    • 3.3Political slogans
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1A scale of resemblance
      • 4.1.1Type A: Full resemblance: The chameleon effect
      • 4.1.2Type B: Discursive resemblance
      • 4.1.3Type C: Resemblance with stance explicitation
    • 4.2Type D: Ironic echoic mention
    • 4.3Ambiguity
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21022.wei
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