230192 Pragmatic Approaches to Online Genres (S) (WiSe 2023/2024)

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life and has changed the way we communicate with others. It has generated novel genres (e.g. e-mail, blogs, vlogs, etc.) and given rise to a variety of social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok) on which people interact with one another via (mobile) devices. In contrast to offline contexts, users draw on increasingly complex genre affordances (e.g. multimodality and hypertextuality), enabling them to produce interactional meanings in manifold ways.

This course is interested in the pragmatics of online genres, or how people use language in diverse online contexts to achieve interpersonal social goals. We will investigate the principles which govern communication by adopting an interpersonal pragmatics perspective. More specifically, we will discuss major theoretical approaches and concepts within the field of pragmatics (e.g. Gricean maxims, speech act theory, linguistic (im-)politeness, relational work, among others) and apply them to language data found in various online spaces. There will also be room to discuss examples from your favourite online spaces through a pragmatics lens, so feel free to bring your own ideas and suggest material for discussion. Further details will be made available in the first session.