A Pragmatic Analysis of the Language of Facebook Posts and Status Updates

Abstract

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. ‫لسنة‬ ‫عشر‬ ‫التاسع‬ ‫العدد‬ ‫اآلداب‬ ‫فى‬ ‫العلمي‬ ‫البحث‬ ‫مجلة‬ 8102 ‫الثامن‬ ‫الجزء‬ 3 ‫لسنة‬ ‫عشر‬ ‫التاسع‬ ‫العدد‬ ‫اآلداب‬ ‫فى‬ ‫العلمي‬ ‫البحث‬ ‫مجلة‬ 8102 ‫الثامن‬ ‫الجزء‬ 4 ‫لسنة‬ ‫عشر‬ ‫التاسع‬ ‫العدد‬ ‫اآلداب‬ ‫فى‬ ‫العلمي‬ ‫البحث‬ ‫مجلة‬ 8102 ‫الثامن‬ ‫الجزء‬ 5 Research QuestionsThis paper targets to answer the following questions:1-How can language be employed as a form of social interaction? 2-Which type of SA is used most frequently in Facebook status posts? 3-What are the different communicative functions that emerge from the analysis of status posts? 4-What are the different functions and prominent formal features manifested in the selected Facebook posts and status updates?5-How can Facebook be an extension of real-life identities? Scope and limitationThe study comprises theories from pragmatics and discourse analysis. It deals with posts with different semantic domains; religious and social. Political posts are one of the ubiquitous posts found on Facebook; yet being one the controversial issues, they are excluded from the selected data. Though the study analyzes posts with images that are significant for the communicative effect and meaning, multi-modality is not included in the analytical framework because it is beyond the scope of the study. However, images are not totally ignored but are dealt with according to their communicative functions. The data are not categorized according to their speech act type, because one single post can fit into more than one category.