TY - JOUR
T1 - HRT in DMC?
T2 - The orthographic representation of high rising terminals in WhatsApp
AU - Ilbury, Christian
N1 - Christian Ilbury: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Software, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.
PY - 2024/10
Y1 - 2024/10
N2 - Contemporary research has shown that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is productive in exploring patterns of Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC). In this paper, I demonstrate the analytical potential of this approach by studying the typographic representation of a prosodic feature of spoken language – High Rising Terminals (HRTs, e.g., that beer pong place I went for my birthday?) – in a large corpus of WhatsApp messages (96,471 messages; 594,183 words) sent by 15 young British adults. Combining methods and approaches from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, I show that the orthographic representation of HRTs patterns in pragmatically similar ways to the feature in speech in that it most frequently functions as a way of verifying the interlocutors’ comprehension of discourse-new information. The precise rate and pragmatic function of this feature, however, appears to be constrained by the textual modality of the platform. Concluding, I join others in arguing for the analytical potential of employing a multidimensional approach to studying variable patterns of DMC.
AB - Contemporary research has shown that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is productive in exploring patterns of Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC). In this paper, I demonstrate the analytical potential of this approach by studying the typographic representation of a prosodic feature of spoken language – High Rising Terminals (HRTs, e.g., that beer pong place I went for my birthday?) – in a large corpus of WhatsApp messages (96,471 messages; 594,183 words) sent by 15 young British adults. Combining methods and approaches from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, I show that the orthographic representation of HRTs patterns in pragmatically similar ways to the feature in speech in that it most frequently functions as a way of verifying the interlocutors’ comprehension of discourse-new information. The precise rate and pragmatic function of this feature, however, appears to be constrained by the textual modality of the platform. Concluding, I join others in arguing for the analytical potential of employing a multidimensional approach to studying variable patterns of DMC.
KW - DCM
KW - WhatsApp
KW - CMC
KW - high rising terminals
KW - variationist sociolinguistics
KW - interactional sociolinguistics
KW - <?>
U2 - 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100819
DO - 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100819
M3 - Article
SN - 2211-6958
VL - 61
JO - Discourse, Context and Media
JF - Discourse, Context and Media
M1 - 100819
ER -