Participation as a tool for interactional work on Twitter: A sociolinguistic approach to social media 'engagement'

This work approaches the concept of social media engagement through a lens of participation theory. Following the work of Goffman (1981) and others, this dissertation uses the concepts of the participation framework and the participant role to explore engagement as a function of participation in interaction. The purposes of this dissertation are three-fold: to model participant roles as they are built in interaction on Twitter, to discover the ways in which participation is established through the linguistic choices enacted by participants, and to demonstrate the role of the medium as an important factor influencing possibilities for participation. Using discourse analysis as a methodology, tweets from accounts associated with National Hockey League (NHL) organizations are analyzed for the linguistic resources that are used to reference interactional roles traditionally understood as “speaker” and “hearer”. In turn, the linguistic and discursive resources deployed in team tweets are used to reveal these speaker and hearer roles as more detailed and complex production and reception frameworks. The modal affordances of Twitter are also investigated as to their role in influencing the building of participation frameworks through talk, including unique linguistic forms that are available to Twitter users and possibilities for hiding or revealing participants through the Twitter screen. The findings of this investigation reveal three primary models for production frameworks for NHL accounts: an Impersonal Model that eschews identification of the parties in production roles, an Interpersonal Model that highlights the individuals involved in the interaction, and a Team Model that obscures the individual to focus on the team or organization as a primary participant. Additionally, a framework for understanding recipient audiences on Twitter is proposed, incorporating both actual and intended audiences. Consistent patterns in the language choices used to construct participatory identities for production and reception roles are demonstrated, highlighting the value of using linguistic data as a resource for investigations of participation. Finally, Twitter’s modal affordances are shown to be an integral part of the ways that users enact participatory concepts, such as co-presence and address, revealing the importance of considering the role of the medium in participation studies

Connecting with fans in under 140 characters: Participation frameworks in the NHL's use of Twitter

As social media become more prevalent, they provide opportunities for both individuals and organizations to communicate in new and innovative ways. Many professional and collegiate sports teams have taken advantage of these media to reach their fan bases, with Twitter in particular taking a strong hold in the sports world. Twitter has been shown to provide a way for sports organizations to not only provide fans with updated news and information about the team, but also to provide so-called backstage information, showing off the personalities of players, coaches, and owners (Gregory, 2009). While there has been a significant push to use such ‘insider’ information to make fans feel more engaged with the team, participation structures are often overlooked as a potential tool for engaging fans via social media. Complex participation structures are available in interaction, and these structures can be manipulated to display stances and alignments to both the interaction and its participants and to the talk itself (Irvine, 1996; Hill and Zepeda, 1992). In order to understand how these participation structures can be manipulated to evoke different stances, a vocabulary and framework for discussing these structures are needed. Using the National Hockey League (NHL) and its official team accounts as a case study, this paper adds to the current body of research on the interactional use of social media tool Twitter by analyzing Goffman’s (1981) concept of participation frameworks, examining the ways that language use on Twitter both embodies and challenges the traditional participation roles enacted in face-to-face conversation. Through analysis of a corpus of 4,266 tweets produced by the NHL team accounts in a one-week span in March 2011, this project looks to define the participant roles and frameworks available to sports organizations in producing talk for their fans via Twitter. This analysis suggests that while Goffman’s conventional participant roles can be extended to this medium, they are not sufficient on their own for describing the interactions between sports teams and their fans on Twitter, indicating the need for both new participant roles and revised conceptions of these traditional roles. Finally, linguistic tools specific to the Twitter medium, such as @mentions and #hashtag terms, are discussed in regards to their role in manipulating the participation frameworks available to NHL team accounts

Revisiting the Maori English Vowel Space:Exploring variation in /ɪ/ and /u/ vowel production in Auckland, New Zealand

REVISITING THE MAORI ENGLISH VOWEL SPACE: EXPLORING VARIATION IN /ɪ/ AND /u/ VOWEL PRODUCTION IN AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALANDFawn T. Draucker, M.A.University of Pittsburgh, 2009This study examines the correlation of proposed features of Maori Vernacular English (MVE)with ethnicity, gender, and Maori language ability. Earlier studies propose "decentralized" /ɪ/ and "extremely fronted" /u/ as features distinguishing MVE speech from a more standard form of New Zealand English (Bell, 1997, 1999). Bell (1997) also suggests that a high, close production of /ɪ/ could be the result of language transfer and would likely be correlated with Maori language ability. In this work, I investigate these claims within a generation of speakers born between 1915-1937. Interviews were used from a group of participants in an oral history project conducted by the Auckland Public Library in 1990, and include background on the participants' lives, including information about their ethnicity and languages used in their homes. Tokens of target vowels, /ɪ/ and /u/, were collected from the speech produced during these interviews, along with tokens of all other English monophthongal vowels. First and second formant measurements were taken from these tokens in Praat and the data were then normalized. Data were tested for correlation with ethnicity, Maori language ability, and gender using linear mixed effects regression and generalized linear modeling. Results showed that high, close productions of /ɪ/ are correlated with English-Maori bilingualism. This correlation is discussed within both a language transfer framework and a community-based sociolinguistic framework, with the proposal of a sound change in progress at different stages in different communities being the preferred interpretation. Results for the /u/ vowel show that extremely fronted production of /u/ could not be correlated with Maori ethnicity, but instead could be identified as a Pakeha female variant. These results are again discussed within a sociolinguistic framework, focusing on the /u/ variable as a possible sound change in progress. Ultimately, it is determined that neither decentralized /ɪ/ or fronted /u/ can be established as identifying features of the MVE dialect for this group of speakers

To RT or not to RT: Authorship and attribution on Twitter

In 2009, Twitter changed its interface to include a “retweet” function to accommodate a user-created convention for rebroadcasting text written by others. However, while the new retweet function did not allow for the range of use of the original user-created retweet. As a result, currently there exist two forms of retweeting: Twitter’s new retweet function and the older, user-generated retweet. Users deploy both of these forms to indicate different alignments to their talk. As Hill and Zepeda (1992) show in their work on vernacular narrative, users have different strategies for displaying alignment or distance with their own talk. Furthermore, authorship and responsibility for talk is a concern for Twitter users. The two styles of retweeting are one way to resolve these concerns. Based on evidence from a corpus of tweets, we argue that the two retweet styles allow users to manipulate available participation structures to indicate their relationship to the retweeted text. The new retweet is limited in function by not allowing new content added by the retweeter; the old retweet is broader in its affordances in that the retweeter can add a comment. The new retweet assumes implicit alignment, while the old retweet allows more options for alignment. Twitter changed its interface based on interaction patterns, and this change resulted in the emergence of a new pattern incorporating both the new feature and the old convention. This evolution of interaction patterns is built on complex arrangements of participant structures, and reveals a dialogic relationship between users and their technology