Pragmatic Role of Offline Hashtags:Guide to Readers’ Inference
Keywords:
relevance theory, offline hashtags, inference, pragmatics, offline advertisementsAbstract
This research seeks to shed light on the pragmatic role of hashtags used in 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 derive both explicit and implicit messages from the context they are used in. To present more information in a limited space, hashtags from cyberspace have been adopted and adapted for use in offline contexts. This study in particular highlights the use of hashtags in offline advertisements and the way they help communicate the overall message to the audience.
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Copyright (c) 2022 Nosheen Irshad (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Linguistic Forum – A Journal of Linguistics is an open-access journal. All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. Authors retain copyright while granting the journal the right of first publication. The CC BY 4.0 License permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction, adaptation, and commercial reuse in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and appropriate credit is given to the author(s) and the journal.
