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Discursive self in microblogging : speech acts, stories and self-praise
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Place of Publication
Amsterdam
ISSN/ISBN
978-90-272-5665-2
Series title
Pragmatics and beyond. New series
Volume
260
Keywords
microblogging, twitter, discourse community, self-praise, small stories, narrative, social media discourse
Abstract
This volume examines the language of microblogs on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.
