Searchable talk: the linguistic functions of hashtags |
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Authors: | Michele Zappavigna |
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Affiliation: | School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia |
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Abstract: | An important dimension of social media discourse is its searchability. A key semiotic resource supporting this function is the hashtag, a form of social tagging that allows microbloggers to embed metadata in social media posts. While popularly thought of as topic-markers, hashtags are able to construe a range of complex meanings in social media texts. This paper uses the concept of linguistic metafunctions, to explore how hashtags enact three simultaneous communicative functions: marking experiential topics, enacting interpersonal relationships, and organizing text. Corpus-based discourse analysis of linguistic patterns in a 100 million word Twitter corpus is used to investigate these functions and how they relate to the notion of social search. |
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Keywords: | social media microblogging Twitter hashtags systemic functional linguistics discourse analysis |
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