A contrastive analysis of the discourse of English and Spanish influencers on X and Instagram
This proposal focuses on the study of communication in social media from a pragmatic point of view. The study involves the contrastive analysis of the discourse from an intercultural perspective (Kecskés 2022) by Spanish and English influencers on X and Instagram. Therefore, digital communication (Page 2012), evaluative language (the words that help to show a judgment, opinion, or point of view about a person, character, place, or thing), and appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005) are considered as the theoretical background of this analysis. The objectives of this research are, first, to identify if there are differences between male and female influencers in social media communication and second, to study the comments they receive considering a gender perspective. The material for this study was gathered from X and Instagram accounts of four male and four female Spanish influencers and four male and four female British influencers. The corpus was selected from May to November 2023. The different categories of Appraisal theory were used to identify and classify the evaluative language used by influencers and their followers, adding some classes considering their function in social media. After that, differences between males and females were identified and discussed and finally, the results were contrasted to identify a taxonomy that includes gender differences.
References
Kecskés, I. (Ed.). (2022). The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Martin, J. R. & White, P. R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Continuum.
Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: the role of hashtags. Discourse and Communication, 6(2), 181-201