Pragmatic Role of Offline Hashtags: Guide to Readers’ Inference
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53057/linfo/2022.4.4.2Keywords:
relevance theory, offline hashtags, inference, pragmatics, offline advertisementsAbstract
This research seeks to throw light on pragmatic role of hashtags used in the offline contexts. Guided by the relevance-theoretic perspective, the study shows that hashtags used in any utterance contribute to relevance by activating and making more accessible some contextual assumptions, therefore guiding the reader in inferring the utterance to reach the intended meaning of the addresser. The content of the hashtags helps the readers to derive both explicit and implicit messages of the context they are used in. In order to present more information in limited space, the hashtags have been adopted from the cyber space and appropriated for use in offline contexts. This study in particular highlights the use of hashtags in offline advertisements and the way they help in communicating the overall message to the audience.
Downloads
References
Bourhis, R., & Landry, R. (1997). Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), pp. 23-49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X970161002
Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cunha, E., Magno, G., Comarela, G., Almeida, V., Gonçalves, M. A., & Benevenuto, F. (2011). Analyzing the Dynamic Evolution of Hashtags on Twitter: A Language-Based Approach. Workshop on Language in Social-Media (LSM 2011) (pp. 58-65). Portland: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Daer, A. R., Hoffman, R., & Goodman, S. (2015). Rhetorical Functions of Hashtag Forms Across Social Media Applications. Communication Design Quarterly, pp. 12-16.
Gannes, L. (2010). The Short and Illustrious History of Twitter #Hashtags.
Giannoulakis, S., & Tsapatsoulis, N. (2015). Instagram Hashtags as Image Annotation Metadata. 11th IFIP International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations (pp. 206-220). France: Bayonne.
Honeycutt, C., & Herring, S. C. (2009). Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter. Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42) (pp. 1-10). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.
Huang, J., Thornton, K., & Efthimiadis, E. (2010). Conversational tagging in Twitter. 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 173- 178). Toronto: ACM.
Lindley, G. (2013). Public Conversations on Facebook.
Messina, C. (2007). Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels.
Mustofa, M. (2017). Illocutionary Acts in the Headlines and Slogans of Beauty Product Advertisements. Yogyakarta: Yogyakarta State University.
Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: the role of hashtags. Discourse and Communication, 6(2), pp. 181- 201.
Scott, K. (2015). The pragmatics of hashtags: Inference and conversational style on Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics, 81, pp. 8-20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.03.015
Searle, J. R. (1999). Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wikström, P. (2014). #srynotfunny: Communicative Functions of Hashtags on Twitter. SKY Journal of Linguistics, pp. 127-152.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2004). Relevance theory. In L. R. Horn, & G. Ward, The Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 607-632). Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yus, F. (2011). Cyber pragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Zappavigna, M. (2011). Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media Society, 13(5), pp. 788-806.
Zappavigna, M. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and Social-Media: How we Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London: Continuum.
Zappavigna, M. (2014). Enacting identity in microblogging through ambient affiliation. Discourse and Communication, 8(2), pp. 209–228.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Nosheen Irshad
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
License Terms
All articles published by MARS Publishers are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. This means:
- everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MARS Publishers' journals;
- everyone is free to re-use the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given.
