“Hey there! I am using WhatsApp”: A Preliminary Study of Recurrent Discursive Realisations in a Corpus of WhatsApp Statuses

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• 作者：Alfonso Sá ; nchez-Moya^a ; Olga Cruz-Moya^b ; ^{asmoya@ucm.es" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author}
• 关键词：multimodality ; Whatsapp's statuses ; IM language and communication ; discourse ; pragmatics
• 刊名：Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences
• 出版年：2015
• 出版时间：2 December 2015
• 年：2015
• 卷：212
• 期：Complete
• 页码：52-60
• 全文大小：440 K

文摘

This paper seeks to contribute to the recent academic study of WhatsApp, the instant messaging (IM) tool that enables people to communicate in a multimodal way mainly via their smartphones and which has impressively become a core form of communication in many social communities (Church & Oliveira, 2013; Sultan, 2014). This study presents research on the most salient discursive realisations and pragmatic uses in WhatsApp statuses, this is, the communicative output of a 139-character blank where WhatsApp users are prompted to write any message in order to complete their profile information.

Research on both the discourse of Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) and communicative practices associated to it is vast (Barton & Lee, 2013; Crystal, 2006). Perhaps due to its more established status as communication media, studies in this field have mostly paid attention to the discourse of text messages (Thurlow & Brown, 2003), commonly referred to as textese. More specifically, possibly driven by the apocalyptic and somewhat mediatised visions attributed to the language used in these online communication tools (Thurlow, 2006), academic research has largely aimed to prove the not-so-negative effects of textese in communicative practices and contexts (Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008; Plester et al., 2009; Drouin, 2011). Nonetheless, due to its crucial role in plenty of social communities, research has gradually shed light on the discourse used in IM tools (Baron, 2005; Lee, 2007).

The great and rather recent impact of WhatsApp as a form of communication is triggering academic research on the discourse that characterises this IM system. In spite of being remarkably under-researched from a discursive perspective, existing studies explore some language features of WhatsApp (Calero-Vaquera, 2014), making great emphasis on its multimodal character. Far less attention has been devoted however to the discourse of the 139-character blank provided by WhatsApp to allow users update their statuses, even though similar types of communicative outcome has widely been investigated in other systems of online communication, namely Facebook (Garcia & Sikström, 2014; Eisenlauer, 2014).

As far as methodology is concerned, the objectives of this study are to examine recurrent discursive realisations and how these are realised from a discursive perspective, to identify the most frequent pragmatic uses and to put forward the possible reasons behind this choice. Thus, this paper analyses a corpus of 400 WhatsApp statuses randomly selected from the total sample of 523 contacts. Once the final corpus was computerised, a set of tags was designed in order to quantify the most frequent instances. As regards the analytical framework, partly driven by the character of the analysed status, this research relies on contributions in which multimodality is at core of their theoretical underpinnings (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin, 2013).

Findings outline the most common discursive realisations and pragmatic uses in a corpus of 400 WhatsApp statuses. Apart from elucidating already existing research on the discourse of WhatsApp, they also demonstrate the centrality of multimodal discourse in this sort of communication (Vincent, 2012) and pave the way for further research within this field of study.