A pragmatic analysis of the language of Facebook posts and status updates

Abstract EN

This study investigates the communicative functions of Facebook posts and status updates.

It depicts the formal features and the functions of digital discourse.

On account of that, posts and status updates are analyzed through Searle’s Speech Act framework, together with Grice's theory of cooperative maxims and implicature.

The sample data comprises data from males and females in the age between 21-35 years.

Ten statuses and posts with a number of randomly chosen comments are chosen for analysis and then, the data are categorized according to their semantic domain.

The results of the analysis show that digital discourse has some characteristics that are classified into formal features, which are related to the form of the post, and functional manifestations, which are associated with the function of the post.

Besides, it is observed that people tend to use indirect speech acts more often than using direct ones.

Some of the functions of digital discourse that are derived from the data include: preaching, prayers, supplications, spreading consciousness among people, greeting, revealing constructed online identities and addressing target audience.

As for the formal features, mingling verbal and pictorial elements is the most dominant and explicit digital formal feature that is extracted.

Furthermore, there are some pragmatic features related to meaning, such as the various inferences that can be drawn from a very few amount of given information.