Riassunto Inglese II

WHAT MIGHT A LINGUIST SAY ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA?

Social media are a relatively recent phenomenon. There is a distinction between digital natives

(who grew up using social media and have never known a world without) and digital

immigrants (who adopted social media only as adults). Linguistic research which explores

social media platforms is rich and includes analysis of how elements of the language system

are reconfigured in online context and how the dynamics of interpersonal communication are

managed.

Linguistic are still arguing about what exactly language is. According to the traditional theories

of the role of language in communication, language is seen as a semiotic system (a system of

signs used to encode meaning that senders intend to communicate). The signs may be

abstract but take a conventional meaning, the meaning can be transmitted in spoken, written

or signed forms. Other kinds of signs (such as the colour of a written letter) may influence the

meaning; all communication is multimodal. Language is also a way for individuals to interact

with other, it is always situated in a particular context and acquires meaning only in its context.

Linguistic and non-linguistic practices are used together. Almost uses of language are linked

with past and future uses of language. Analyzing Youtube comments, we realise the

importance of context and the relationship of each comment to other previous. There has been

a move away from the idea of there are distinct languages, the boundaries between languages

are not clear. In social media is a mix of different semiotic resources. Through the punctuation

and font, the user can express meaning. Some visual resources cannot be classified as

belonging to one language rather than another (like emoticons, used with many language

varieties). Researchers are developing new ways of conceptualising language: some of them

have used the idea of polylanguagaging, which refers to the ways in which users

simultaneously use features associated with different languages. Some researchers sustain

that traditional notions of diversity in sociolinguistics don’t work in the contemporary world.

Superdiversity is closely related to changes in communication media and it means that notions

of diversity are difficult to sustain. One important aspect for someone doing research on social

media is that there is constant change online. Language can be analysed at different levels,

such as: linguistic practices (what people do with language), texts (collection of words, clauses

and sentences that have a clear communicative function), clauses and sentences (words

arranged in a structure), words (units of meaning consisting of one or more morphemes),

morphemes (the smallest units of meaning) and phonemes (individual sounds or signs). Users

in social media contexts code-switch using several different languages or varieties in the

course of an interaction, or style-shift, using formal and less formal language in different parts

of a text.

The relationship between different form of communication in social media can sometimes

make it hard to identify the boundaries or the textual units you need to collect. This relates to

two pair of terms: text and context. Deciding what counts as the text is not always easy, but it’s

important because the decision will guide what material you might collect for a research project

and the ethical considerations you might need to do and because your choice of textual unit

will be linked to the ways you choose to analyse the material. There is no a rule about what

kinds of unit will work best for analyzing language use, it’s important to consider the text into a

particular context. Linguistic and sociological researchers have payed attention to the

contextual factors that might be important when interpreting data, such as:

Participants: the people who take part in the interaction and their relationship to others,

Imagined context: the projected context created cognitively by participants on the basis of their

world knowledge,

Extra-situational context: the offline social practices in which the participants are involved,

Behavioural context: the physical situation in which the participants interact via social media,

Generic context: the social media site in which the communication takes place including the

site’s purpose, rules and norms.

Some users are used to combine punctuation marks in creative ways to indicate tone of voice

or other kind of meaning, these are called emoticons. Some other typical orthographic features

of written CMC are acronyms (like LOL for laugh out loud), word reductions (like hv for have)

or letter homophones (like U for you). They are used in informal text. Emoticons aren’t a

synonymous whit Internet language as a whole.

Each new social media platform generate descriptions of how language is used, and how

language use has changed or is changing as a result of particular technologies. According to

Herring, CMC researchers have to consider more deeply the question of what determines

people’s use of mediated communication, she said that technological innovation is mostly

superficial in CMC. There is a distinction between spoken, written and in-between language

use. The netspeak is the written language in digital context. Linguistic research has searched

to define language use in digital contexts with reference to earlier genres, such as

conversations compared with instant messaging or letters compared with emails. More recent

approaches have emphasized the linguistic practices in social media contexts and the way

people use language to construct and negotiate their identities. The different domains of

language are: structure, meaning, interaction, social behaviour, participation and multimodal

communication. There is a rich and diverse range of research that has begun to emerge in

social media sites contexts. Even if many of these studies consider verbal forms of language

as the primary feature for analysis (such as register or word choice) they also include

multimodal resources (such as gesture and image) used in communication. Each study varies

in the kinds of questions and in the methods of analysis that are used.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO RESEARCH?

Research means investigating a particular phenomenon in order to bring a new knowledge to

light. The fast-changing forms of communication that take place via social media sites are an

attractive material for researchers. On the one hand, research is an exciting activity, but on the

other hand, acquiring the skills needed for the research can seem hard cause there are varied

ways in which both languages and social media can be investigated. Research should involve

systematic inquiry, it might be experimental, it requires careful planning and includes a

decision of the project’s aims and question. The planning process can take time and involve

making decisions which are then revisited, revised or rejected. The research process usually

contains the same elements: identify an area of interest, define the aims of the research,

formulate research questions, select an appropriate methodology, select and collect data,

analyse the data, interpret results and draw conclusions and present the research. There are

different research interests.

Academic disciplines are communities of scholars who develop particular norms and practices

for their scholarship. The research of how language is used in social media is relevant to

different disciplines, including psychology or sociology. It’s an interdisciplinary research and

the collaborations of researchers of the different disciplines leads to many results and

conclusions. However, the research it’s not always easy cause the boundaries which

demarcate one discipline from another can sometimes act as barriers which make research

more difficult. The methods used for selecting and collecting data might vary in one discipline

compared with another. Different scholarly organizations can have different guidelines for

ethical procedures. Seeing your own work from another point of view can bring to light its

limitations and value that are sometimes left implicit. The process of critical reflection from one

discipline’s perspectives to another can help you define your object of study and approach.

Methodology refers to the logic for a particular approach to research and is distinct from the

methods that are used to make the research itself. There are three key paradigms which are

used to describe differences in methodology: quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. All

three paradigms are used across different disciplines, but can be applied in different ways and

for different ends. Quantitative methodologies tend to examine the phenomenon in question in

a way that measures it, instead of qualitative methodologies that are more interested in

discover particular perspectives and models. A quantitative methodology might measure the

frequency of particular words or trace trends relate to macro-level perspectives, a qualitative

approach might be more interested in how the interaction is organized or in the pragmatic

choices made by participants. All research includes elements of qualitative and element of

quantitative research. Quantitative approaches use procedures for analysis that can be

standardized and so re-applied to measure other sets of data. In experimental design, the

researcher assigns participants to particular groups and them asks them to engage in activities

that will test the participants’ responses to particular phenomena. The results of a quantitative

study usually involve numerical outcomes, and are calculated using mathematical operations,

including statistical tests, it give the appearance of objectivity and use categories that are

already established by the researcher. Qualitative work tends to deal with a smaller number of

people but it has more details, it’s more openly interpretative about the data, it’s more

emergent, the researcher doesn’t establish a clear hypothesis to test but collect data and then

sees which features emerge as prominent from the collected material, the researcher includes

a critical reflection. There are many studies which includes elements from qualitative and

quantitative paradigms, referred to as a mixed methods. There are different ways to combine

qualitative and quantitative approaches, for example by including a range of questions or using

different types of data collection. There are many advantages for using mixed methods, such

as a quantitative analysis may be able to provide contextualising information about large-scale

trends in language use, while qualitative analysis can allow the researcher to focus on just one

aspect. Another advantage of combining multiple perspectives is described as triangulation,

that uses more than one source of information in the research design and co-ordinates the

perspectives which result from each source to provide a fuller picture of the phenomenon

under investigation. Sometimes triangulation is used to value if the same results apply across

different contexts confirm how representative the research results of a project might be