Motives, frequency and attitudes toward emoji and emoticon use

Electronic Mediated Communication (EMC) has become highly prevalent in our daily lives. Many of the communication formats used in EMC are text-based (e.g., instant messaging), and users often include visual paralinguistic cues in their messages. In the current study, we examined the usage of two of such cues - emoji and emoticons. Specifically, we compared self-reported frequency of use, as well as attitudes (6 bipolar items, e.g., “fun” vs. “boring”) and motives for their usage (9 motives, e.g., “express how I feel to others”). We also examined these indicators according to age and gender. Overall, participants (N = 474, 72.6% women; Mage = 30.71, SD = 12.58) reported using emoji (vs. emoticons) more often, revealed more positive attitudes toward emoji usage, and identified more with motives to use them. Moreover, all the ratings were higher among younger (vs. older) participants. Results also showed that women reported to use emoji (but not emoticons) more often and expressed more positive attitudes toward their usage than men. However, these gender differences were particularly evident for younger participants. No gender differences were found for emoticons usage. These findings add to the emerging body of literature by showing the relevance of considering age and gender, and their interplay, when examining patterns of emoji and emoticons use.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Gender Politics and Discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites

More emojis, less :) The competition for paralinguistic function in microblog writing

Many non-standard elements of ‘netspeak’ writing can be viewed as efforts to replicate the linguistic role played by nonverbal modalities in speech, conveying contextual information such as affect and interpersonal stance. Recently, a new non-standard communicative tool has emerged in online writing: emojis. These unicode characters contain a standardized set of pictographs, some of which are visually similar to well-known emoticons. Do emojis play the same linguistic role as emoticons and other ASCII-based writing innovations? If so, might the introduction of emojis eventually displace the earlier, user-created forms of contextual expression? Using a matching approach to causal statistical inference, we show that as social media users adopt emojis, they dramatically reduce their use of emoticons, suggesting that these linguistic resources compete for the same communicative function. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the adoption of emojis leads to a corresponding increase in the use of standard spellings, suggesting that all forms of non-standard writing are losing out in a competition with emojis. Finally, we identify specific textual features that make some emoticons especially likely to be replaced by emojis

Languaging School into Being : A Discourse Analysis of Online ELA Classes Within the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, school buildings across the United States shut their doors and transitioned students and teachers to remote learning, most often utilizing internet-based technology to provide either asynchronous or synchronous lessons. I was a high school English Language Arts teacher in Stone Valley School District in Northeastern New Jersey when the unprecedented school closures moved my classes online for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year. As a teacher researcher who specialized in New Literacy Studies, I was particularly sensitive to how students and I used technology to continue lessons after the school building shut its doors. At first, students and I interfaced using the multimedia components of the BigBlueButton platform, an interface which my school district had mandated that teachers use to host synchronous classroom lessons. Soon enough, however, I noticed that students were more frequently turning off their cameras and microphones, sitting in unseen silence on the other end of their school-issued laptops; however, as the cameras and microphones were turned off, the Public Chat box came to life as students began to write messages as their means of participating in class. Without school buildings, classrooms, whiteboards, classroom desks, passing time, or athletics, “school” nevertheless continued on. I came to the realization that the pandemic had yielded a unique circumstance—a critical instance—during which a teacher researcher could explore the fundamental components of what made “school” (i.e., the institution of school) into what it was. Furthermore, since school now comprised, nearly entirely, dialogue between myself and my students, I started to conceive of school as something “languaged into being” by individuals who were interacting in roles along certain ways with words. I began to save the Public Chat transcripts, email messages, and notes pages that emerged from 47 synchronous sessions for three Grade 10 English Language Arts classes from March to June 2020. Using discourse analysis to unpack the ways in which language was used in the Public Chat, I found that students and I had indeed made discursive moves that languaged school into being. Students, for example, wrote in ways that positioned themselves to appear to me as “good” students, those who show to the teacher compliance, achievement, and perceived intelligence. Both students and I also seemed to write under the assumption of routinized habits and routines according to what we believed an English Language Arts class to be. Even when students used non-standard or untraditional discursive moves (e.g., emoji), they did so in ways that anchored them to the curriculum. And in the case of a student who used an expletive in class, it was other students who admonished him and circumscribed his behavior. Although language was how school appeared to be conjured into being through the dialectic among students and me—as might be expected from a social constructivist epistemology—there were also deeper structures at play that, perhaps, manifested the linguistic moves. The limitations and design of BigBlueButton interface, for example, reproduced traditional classroom learning styles rather than harnessing the full extent of the internet’s capabilities. Buoyed by counternarratives in the media about failing schools and ‘learning loss’ during the pandemic, an adherence to schedules, deadlines, and curricula strongly continued to reify school grades as important markers of success for my students. Furthermore, what I have called social routines—ways in which individuals habitually interact with tools and technology (broadly encompassing both new and old forms of technology)—manifested certain ways of engaging in roles, such as teacher and student. With the initial lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic now in the past, fully online classes for public high school students have become an anomaly of a particular critical instance in history in retrospect. Still, the ways that students and their teacher interacted during these lessons as seen in the discursive moves that people use to language school into being, sheds light on the deeper structures and social routines of schooling that operate on a daily basis. Such insights may help future researchers, whether they examine in person or online schools, to identify social routines, mappable through discourse analysis, that individuals perform as ways of taking part in the educational system. This may be of particular interest for demographics in which these discursive moves and social routines do not appear, for it suggests that there are particular ways of using language that perpetuate the institution of school. Individuals who are predisposed to these habits and routines may be better able to succeed in schools, for they can not only anticipate what is to come in classes, but they also work synergistically with teachers to literally bring a certain kind of education into existence

The laws of "LOL": Computational approaches to sociolinguistic variation in online discussions

When speaking or writing, a person often chooses one form of language over another based on social constraints, including expectations in a conversation, participation in a global change, or expression of underlying attitudes. Sociolinguistic variation (e.g. choosing "going" versus "goin'") can reveal consistent social differences such as dialects and consistent social motivations such as audience design. While traditional sociolinguistics studies variation in spoken communication, computational sociolinguistics investigates written communication on social media. The structured nature of online discussions and the diversity of language patterns allow computational sociolinguists to test highly specific hypotheses about communication, such different configurations of listener "audience." Studying communication choices in online discussions sheds light on long-standing sociolinguistic questions that are hard to tackle, and helps social media platforms anticipate their members' complicated patterns of participation in conversations. To that end, this thesis explores open questions in sociolinguistic research by quantifying language variation patterns in online discussions. I leverage the "birds-eye" view of social media to focus on three major questions in sociolinguistics research relating to authors' participation in online discussions. First, I test the role of conversation expectations in the context of content bans and crisis events, and I show that authors vary their language to adjust to audience expectations in line with community standards and shared knowledge. Next, I investigate language change in online discussions and show that language structure, more than social context, explains word adoption. Lastly, I investigate the expression of social attitudes among multilingual speakers, and I find that such attitudes can explain language choice when the attitudes have a clear social meaning based on the discussion context. This thesis demonstrates the rich opportunities that social media provides for addressing sociolinguistic questions and provides insight into how people adapt to the communication affordances in online platforms.Ph.D

Gendered discourses and discursive strategies employed in Twitter-hashtagged debates about Saudi-women’s issues

This study is motivated by Twitter’s growing popularity as a space where Saudi men and women discuss issues pertaining to their lives without being stigmatised in an otherwise gender-segregated society. It aims to shed light on the multiple perspectives adopted by them to reveal an existing tension between tradition and modernity in SA (Yamani, 2000). Adopting an eclectic qualitative method, I draw from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) tools to analyse the constellation of discourses that are related to gender and the discursive strategies used as resources for stance taking in a corpus of 1000 unique text-based tweets derived from two selected topical hashtags collected in June, 2015. These two hashtags mark the public reaction to a) newly-announced travel controls for Saudi women and b) statistics about the percentages of unmarried Saudi women. in. The data provides evidence that voices of difference, protest, and dissent regarding women’s rights and their social role are in a dialogic relation with dominant conservative discourses. The analysis reveals that hashtag contributors mainly engage in the evaluation of gendered discourses, epitomised by a predominant Discourse of Patriarchy, and a Discourse of Gender Equality and Human Rights. A Discourse of Patriarchy manifests in two mutually-supporting discourses: a discourse of dominance that privileges men and gives them control over women, and a discourse about the subordination of women. The Discourse of Gender Equality discusses women’s retrieval of their full citizenship status, without the need for guardianship, and an equal social respect for their life choices, including those related to marriage and mobility. While drawing on these discourses, contributors position themselves on a spectrum of conservative (anti-change) and progressive (pro-change) stances. By way of critiquing them, and sometimes, constructing new democratic social worldviews, the contributors show signs of engaging in a form of linguistic intervention to promote social change. Invocations of these discourses were manipulated for the macro-functions of perpetuating, undermining, or transforming existing discriminatory practices against women. Within these macro-strategies, other meso-discursive strategies were employed, namely referential and predicational strategies, assimilation and differentiation, legitimation and delegitimation, intensification and mitigation, and humour. These meso-strategies were fulfilled drawing on linguistic and semantic means including sarcasm, laughter, mock suggestions, comparison, metaphors, etc. I argue that the identified patterns found in the Twitter data reflect as well as facilitate (on the discursive level) an ongoing gradual social change in the Saudi society since the unheard can now be heard and the dominant social practices involving women are being presented for public deliberation. In addition to contributing to the Arabic literature on discourse and gender, this study engages in an act of historicising these changes in SA and provides an assessment of the transformative potential of Twitter