Is implicit communication quantifiable? A corpus-based analysis of British and Italian political tweets

Twitter is nowadays a powerful means of political propaganda. Its effectiveness can be easily appreciated in the large amounts of messages exchanged by politicians every day. This wealth of data, together with the interactive nature of the social medium, provides an ideal basis for the analysis of a striking feature of political messages, i.e., their implicitness, often achieved using presuppositions, among other strategies. The present work proposes a comparative analysis of British and Italian politicians' use of Twitter by focusing on implicit communication (notably, presuppositions) and the pragmatic functions of tweets. Based on a sample of about 400 tweets, our analysis shows that some of these functions tend to associate either with presuppositional or non-presuppositional communicative devices. Moreover, a critical methodological discussion is offered in order to address the main challenges of quantitative corpus-based pragmatics

Twittering the Boko Haram Uprising in Nigeria: Investigating Pragmatic Acts in the Social Media

This paper investigates pragmatic acts in the discourse of tweeters and online feedback comments on the activities of Boko Haram, a terrorist group in Nigeria. The tweets and comments illustrate acts used to express revolutionary feelings and reflect what people say and imply in times of crisis. Tweets about Boko Haram are speech and pragmatic acts that denounce the Nigerian government, reject Western education, and call for support. Tweets and reactions from non-Muslims and nonradical Muslims condemn terrorism and denounce the terrorist group. While some tweets simply offer suggestions on how to curtail the Boko Haram insurgency, others seek the breakup of Nigeria, granting political and religious independence to the north and the southeast of the country

How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations

We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions. Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed, with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook

Social Media Networks and the Discourse of Resistance: A sociolinguistic CDA of Biafra Online Discourses

This study focuses on how Social Media Networks (SMN) have been used in recent times to champion social protests and resistance against oppression and political power abuse. Hence, ‘discourse of resistance’ takes a cue from the current waves of resistance and political revolutions in North Africa and the Arab world, which have been largely attributed to the vibrant SMN. In Nigeria, SMN have been used to mobilize support and active participation in popular efforts to achieve socio-political reforms. The corpus comprises mainly blogs and discussion forums hosted by the Biafra Online Campaign Groups (BOCG). The BOCG consist of persons and groups of the Igbo ethnic group of Nigeria, living in and outside of the country, that advocate a separate nation for the Igbos and accuse the government of Nigeria of marginalizing them. The study applies a sociolinguistic-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate how sociolinguistic issues such as virtual community, identity, language variations and social interaction are used to project self-determination and the struggle for political independence. It further examines how ideology is reflected in this context via the discourses produced by BOCG in relation to the Nigerian state

Community and Social Interaction in Digital Religious Discourse in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon

Since the advent of the Internet, religion has maintained a very strong online presence. This study examines how African Christianity is negotiated and practised on the Internet. The main objectives are to investigate to what extent online worshippers in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon constitute (online) communities and how interactive the social networks of the churches are. This study shows that some important criteria for community are met by African digital worshippers. However, interaction flow is more of one to many, thus members do not regularly interact with one another as they would in offline worship. Worshippers view the forums as a sacred space solely for spiritual matters and not for sharing social or individual feelings and problems. However, the introduction of social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and interactive forums is an interesting and promising new development in religious worship in Africa

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Has the Power of Language been Compromised by the Influence of Social Media?

In discrete linguistic terminology, the power of discourse hinges on hedging together a host of key elements including conversational maxims, speech acts, situational context, reference, pragmatics, and language functions. The main instruments which lend power to these elements feature an elaborate array of lexis, grammar, phonology, and graphology. Another source of power in discourse resides in the personal characteristics of the participants/interlocutors in persuading and reaching out to their audience. In the last decade, however, the pure linguistic influence on discourse has been minimized and challenged by the growing power of social media in shaping and influencing all discourse types.This study investigates the role of social media and its networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. in influencing discourse. The study builds on the hypothesis that the different modes of social media communication have been effective in determining an individual person’s or a party’s power of discourse. Social media can create an alternative source of power which supports the creation of ideologies, cultural attitudes, and political views.The data for the present study have been compiled from materials and information shared on You Tube, Facebook and other social networking applications. The data have also been drawn from tweets on political, social, cultural, human rights issues, presidential campaigns, recent waves of immigration, etc. The data were analyzed to show how the sharing of social media memes has done the work more efficiently than the most linguistically eloquent discourse

A syntactic and pragmatic study of nominal vocatives in the Twitter exchanges of rappers’ fans

This study aims to examine nominal vocatives in Twitter through the analysis of 1500 posts extracted from the accounts of five well-known female and male rappers. From this total, a sample of 550 vocatives were analysed. Attention is paid to their frequency, class, position, type of clause and the polarity in which they occur, and the pragmatic functions they express. The factor of gender is also investigated. The analysis reveals that those posting to these Twitter accounts make use of a very large and varied repertoire of nominal vocatives. The group of familiarisers clearly prevails over other categories of vocatives and this high frequency of familiarisers contrasts to the situation in spontaneous conversations where first names tend to be the most common. Vocatives in final position clearly prevail over initial and medial position. Besides, Twitter posts containing nominal vocatives in final position tend to be short while those in initial position are far longer. Polarity does not seem to have a strong influence. Some differences, however, are also observed according to the use of nominal vocatives with respect to gender. As in spontaneous conversation, vocatives in Twitter generally serve to strengthen social relationships (creating solidarity, complimenting, expressing appreciation, reinforcing the group identity) while discourse-oriented functions relating to topic and turn management are not so commonFor generous financial support, I am grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Education, Innovation and Universities (grants PG2018-093622-B-100, PID2021-122267NB-I00), the European Regional Development Fund, the University of Santiago and the Regional Government of Galicia (grant ED431B 2021/02)S