Category Archives: Sociolinguistics

Ethics in Internet Research (Part 1): Responses to Online Harrassment

This post is the first in a series that will explore ethical issues in digital media research.

This week’s RDM guest blogger, Brooke Nelson, is a second year student at USF’s Master’s program in Applied Linguistics.  In addition to her studies focusing on Teaching English as a Second/Foreign language, Brooke has developed an interest in multimodal digital discourse analysis.  She recently presented her research at the SECOL and A-MODE conferences.

Brooke writes:

I’ve been working on this project about women’s responses to online sexual harassment since Fall 2018. Instagram accounts such as “ByeFelipe” have emerged as spaces where women can share and document instances of harassment and – in some cases – their own responses to such acts of online aggression. Women who have been targets of online harassment on Instagram as well as on popular online dating platforms (e.g., Tinder, Bumble) can post screenshots of abusive messages they have received to the “ByeFelipe” account and, by doing so, share their experiences with others.

I got it interested in this phenomenon because of my own experiences on dating apps and social media. I always knew how I responded to online harassment- with the utmost sass. My favorite was to give them the fictitious number- 1-800-NAH-PASS. I was also partial to sending their Tinder profiles to their girlfriends or wives. However, I had no idea about the creativity that other women employed.  Some of the interesting things I’ve found include the unexpected ways that women exploit different platform affordances as well as the types of intertextual references they draw on when they “clap back” to those who have harassed them.

The first example shows an instance of how one woman creatively incorporates a familiar  intertextual reference when responding to an unwelcome sexual message from a man.  In it, she responds with a slightly modified monologue from the classic film, The Godfather. This iconic movie scene is recontextualized by the female user for the purposes of objecting to the message sent by the male user, while at the same time humorously informing him that such a message is not only inappropriate but also disrespectful.

Next, in the following example, a woman shows how she exploited the platform affordances of Instagram to respond to a male user who sent her a sexually explicit photo.  After receiving the unwelcome photo from this man, the female recipient took a screenshot of a list of his Instagram followers, and threatened to forward his original message and photo to all of his female followers on the social media platform.

Along with this verbal threat, she also included a photo of the doll used in the Saw franchise, which the antagonist in the films uses to deliver horrifying ultimatums.  So in her response, this female user not only exploits the affordances of Instagram (forwarding the harassing message to the sender’s followers), but she also includes a multimodal resource (image of the doll from Saw), which happens to also be an intertextual reference to a popular film series.


Recently, I’ve been thinking about some of the complicated ethical issues that my research raises. My main question revolves around the second example. Is the (re-)posting of this image a type of “revenge porn”?

Revenge porn is typically considered the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their permission. For instance, websites like IsAnyoneUp,dedicated to sharing user-generated content, often featured revenge porn – unauthorized images of users’ former partners along with identifying information about them. As a response, several years ago local governments began to take action against revenge porn and its distribution. But getting back to my own research, Example 2 includes a screenshot that was posted to a public Instagram account, and it was likely posted without the subject’s permission. This begs the question: Is this a new form of revenge porn?

This question seems to evade an easy yes/no answer.  Yes, the example I provided is certainly sexually explicit, and yes, it was likely posted (on ByeFelipe, by the recipient of the image) without the permission of the individual depicted in the photo. However, the individual’s name is blocked out, his face is hidden, and his genitals are covered. Furthermore, the page’s creator edited the images, thus left no identifying information about him included in this post: no address, no social media handles, no location. (It is also worth pointing out that the person who was sent this photo likely did not give her permission to receive this type of image in the first place!) I would argue that the reposting of the image by the female social media user who received the uninvited image (along with her response to it) onto Bye Felipe is intended to draw public attention to the inappropriateness of this more widespread type of behavior (sending unsolicited sexually explicit photos) – and perhaps to also empower other women who are also the targets of online sexual harassment – rather than to publicly shame the individual person responsible for sending this one specific image.   While this question is too large to be thoroughly addressed in one blog post, it appears that with the rise of social mediapages like ByeFelipe, the debate over revenge porn is about to become even more complex.

Novelty Twitter Accounts

I’m preparing for my upcoming presentation at the ADDA-2 conference. ADDA is the perfect-sized conference, plus all of the presentations have something to do with online discourse, so it’s always inspiring and a great place to meet researchers with similar interests.  ADDA-2 will be held in Turku, Finland next month.

This year, I’ll be presenting a case study of two of the seven novelty Twitter accounts that are described in more detail in my forthcoming book.

For this presentation, I’ve decided to focus my analysis on the 2 novelty accounts that originally got me hooked on this topic: Kim Kierkegaardashian and Shit Academics Say.

There are some interesting differences between these accounts.  For example, Shit Academics Say speaks more from a voice of collective experience, whereas Kim Kierkegaardashian blends the voices of two real individuals, one living (mega-celebrity Kim Kardashian West) and one dead (19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard).  The focus of my talk is on how, in spite of these differences, both accounts rely on a similar discourse strategy to construct their tweets: register incongruity.  Register incongruity refers to as a situation where you have a text in which most of the language is in a particular style or tone, except for a few words which are in a tone, or register, that is radically different from the rest.  While register is not a precisely defined concept, it is related to factors such as formality, literariness, standardness, and so on.  Register incongruity creates a clash of styles.

So, for instance, in the following Kim Kierkegaardashian tweet, we can see how two sociohistorically distinct voices, which represent extremely different concerns and realities are juxtaposed.

The Kardashian voice tends to center on themes such as fashion trends and beauty tips – as well as self-promotional discourses that are typical of celebrity tweets.  A novel twist is provided by the inclusion of additional elements that represent the voice of nineteenth-century existential philosopher, Kierkeggard: these include more profound themes of contemplation, despair, suffering, and so on.  Having these two distinct voices (or registers) appear side-by-side in every individual tweet – and the incongruity between those two registers – is the “formula” that underlies the verbal humor in the tweets posted on this account.

Similarly, several tweets from Shit Academics Say start out in one linguistic register, but end in a different one.  For instance, the tweet below begins with a cliché (X is like a box of chocolates), that is traceable to the popular film, Forrest Gump.  But the text following the colon continues in what might be called “academese,” a linguistic register that is characterized by its syntactic complexity, as well as specialized vocabulary specific to this register (words like scope, magnitude, competencies).

Therefore, even though the content and the topics posted on the two accounts are very different from one another, they both rely on the same discourse strategies to create humor.

How pronouns help attract online audiences

Today’s RDM guest blogger, Katharina Lohmann comes from the University of Bonn, in Germany. RDM is very pleased to be able to share Katharina’s work, about a very timely topic — language use in gaming videos. Katharina writes:

Photo: Controller by superanton

If you’re into video games or if you scroll through YouTube from time to time, chances are you’ve stumbled upon a “Let’s Play”. Although many variations of this type of video exist, the essence of it is easily explained: a gamer – the Let’s Player – records him/herself playing a game and simultaneously comments on their gameplay. Let’s Plays are highly popular on YouTube. The Let’s Players I’ve been studying have between 2-22 million YouTube subscribers. This means that Let’s Players are able to attract a huge anonymous audience to watch their videos without being able to immediately interact with them. So how do they do this?

YouTube’s Participation Framework

Linguist Marta Dynel suggests that communication on YouTube has two levels. The first consists of a speaker talking in front of a camera – either with the viewer in mind or addressing the viewer directly. On the second level the hearer interprets what the speaker has said. Building on this, I propose that Let’s Plays have three levels of communication. The first level takes place inside of the game. On the second level the Let’s Player interprets the in-game communication. On the third level the Let’s Player’s audience interprets the Let’s Player’s reaction to the game and the speech the Let’s Player addresses directly at them. Since the audience can’t interpret the first level communication on their own as they could when playing the game themselves, Let’s Players might try to make their videos appear more unmediated through their language. How can this be achieved with the help of personal pronouns?

The Pronoun “I”

To answer this question I transcribed the first 10 minutes of 9 Let’s Play videos and analyzed how often which personal pronoun is used, because personal pronouns demonstrate who we identify ourselves with and have an impact on the way we perceive relationships. When Let’s Players use the first person pronoun “I”, however, they do not always mean themselves. Instead they can equate themselves with the character they are playing.

10 I: just got MURDERD.

Obviously it’s not the Let’s Player who got murdered, but it’s his character that he is referring to. (Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to tell us about it :-).) The Let’s Player doesn’t simply talk about what has happened to his in-game self. He is his in-game self. This equation makes the Let’s Play appear more immediate to the viewer, as one level of mediation is erased in his talk.

“I do” vs. “We do”

One big challenge for Let’s Players is the conflict of trying to present the Let’s Play as a mutual experience shared by the Let’s Player and their audience, without being able to hide the fact that the Let’s Player is the only one who initiates the actions in the video. If the Let’s Player uses the pronoun “I”, they emphasize their role as the actual decision maker, as in the example below:

348 i don’t know if i’m gonna be able to beat this,

349 but i wanna at least lea:rn..,

350 how these work,

If, on the other hand, a Let’s Player uses the pronoun “We”, meaning the Let’s Player and the audience, the Let’s Player instead emphasizes the mutuality of the experience that is happening in the gameplay:

92 .t alright,

93 we’re in again.

94 (1.4) let’s see where we’re goin’.

When the Let’s Players seem to be unable to connect both concepts, there is a rapid change in the use of personal pronouns in their speech, as in this example:

424 we got a lot of stuff i wanted to do with you,

Here, the “we” indicates a collective decision, but the “i wanted” emphasizes that the decision was initiated by the Let’s Player.

All of this shows that language and the use of personal pronouns has the power to influence “the way we interpret our relationship with others” (Proctor & I-Wen Su). It can emphasize the distance between two people, but it can also help to reduce it, even if those people are being separated by two screens, time and space.

References

Dynel, M. (2014). Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 37-52.

Lohmann, K. (2018). “We got a lot of stuff I wanted to do with you“ How personal pronouns help capturing the audience’s attention in Let’s Play videos on YouTube. (unpublished).

Proctor, K. & I-Wen Su, L. (2011). The 1st person plural in political discourse – American politicians in interviews and in a debate. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3251-3266.

Example 1&4: EthosLab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meSIp50ymkU Example 2: Markiplier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA5OMtKTbzc Example 3: Jacksepticeye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9nL9qISMc

This post is based on my term-paper, written for my B.A. studies “English Studies” at the University of Bonn (Germany). Thank you to my lecturer Dr. Stefanie Pohle for her support!

Memes, old and new

Just when you thought the “cash me ousside” meme had come and gone…

My colleague, Erhan Aslan, and I have recently had an article appear in the Journal of Sociolinguistics about how YouTube users describe and assess the speech of Danielle Bregoli (the “cash me ousside” girl). The abstract is available online here , or you can email me if you’d like a copy of our article.

And a discussion about our article has already appeared on Reddit! Ah, how I love the endless recursivity involved in studying internet phenomena…

In case you haven’t been following the life of Danielle Bregoli, she’s got an active career as a rapper (she goes by the name of Bhad Bhabie), and a small country’s worth of followers on social media (over 15 million on Instagram alone).

Erhan and I have just launched Phase 2 of our study, in which we’ll be analyzing over 200+ different variations of the image macro shown above. Our focus this time will be on how meme creators exploit word play and other forms of linguistic humor.

And speaking of playful and humorous memes, this recent article in the Guardian showcases some delightful examples of parodies of the #himtoo campaign. These examples really highlight parody’s potential for serious critique!

“Das sind tollwütige Tiere“ (“They are rabid animals”): How metaphors can be used to de-humanise immigrants

Today’s RDM guest blogger, Hanna Bruns, comes from the University of Bonn, in Germany. Although her data come from a set of German What’sApp Chats, her larger topic (how immigrants are dehumanized through the use of metaphors) is one with much broader international relevance today. RDM is very pleased to be able to share Hanna’s work:

We are all familiar with metaphors. After all, we know that when Robert Burns rhymes about the red red rose, he is talking about love, and that the white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is supposed to represent God, nature, the subconscious, and so on… But metaphors are not only found in poems, literary works and poetic speeches: they are everywhere!

Conceptual Metaphors
In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson introduced a linguistic framework called “conceptual metaphor theory,” which described metaphors as one of “our principal vehicles for understanding” the world around us (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 159). Metaphors facilitate our “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 5). In other words, metaphors are often used to make difficult and abstract concepts (“target domain”) easier to understand by using clearer and easier terms (“source domain”). Take, for example, the metaphor of life is a journey. Since life is a complicated thing which is not so easily grasped (grasp, another metaphor 😉), people try to make it easier by imagining it as a journey, which has a starting point (birth) and an end (death). In fact, this is a very popular conceptual metaphor. You can find it in a lot of contexts, for example when people say you have to move on, or you are on the right path, or that you are lost. So you see, in a way, these conceptual metaphors are made up out of a lot of smaller parts which are all connected to form one big picture. Everybody uses these conceptual metaphors, and there are a lot of them, for all kinds of situations. And metaphors can be powerful, especially because they highlight one specific aspect of the target domain while ignoring other aspects.
Although some metaphors can be helpful as tools for understanding the world around us, there are other metaphors that can be harmful. For instance, metaphors can be used to spread and justify damaging ideas about others, without people even realising this!

My focus in this post is on the metaphors found in xenophobic discourse which are used to talk about immigrants in a negative way. By using specific metaphors to refer to immigrants, immigrants can be portrayed in a very bad way without actively saying that they are “bad.” As one linguist who does research on metaphors says: “Ideological patterns […] arise when text-producers select one set of metaphors instead of alternative ones” (Hart 2010: 127).

A typical conceptual metaphor that is used often in anti-immigrant discourse is that of floods of immigrants. This belongs to the conceptual metaphor of immigration as natural disaster. In this concept, immigrants are portrayed as floods, coming in waves, or as a stream, flowing into the country, and destroying the country. Other popular xenophobic concepts portray immigrants as diseases, which makes the (national) body ill; or as animals and beasts. What all of these metaphors have in common is that they portray the immigrants as not being human, and as dangerous.

The WhatsApp group chat “AfD Info LSA”
In the past few years, the German political party “Alternative für Deutschland” (“Alternative for Germany”, in short “AfD”) has caused a lot of debate in the German political field mostly because of their (for some, not so apparent) xenophobic, nationalistic, and Islamophobic viewpoints. In June 2017, a WhatsApp group chat was leaked with the group name “AfD Info LSA”. In that group, members of the AfD from the state Saxonia-Anhalt discussed several topics.
My home-town is Dresden in Saxonia, where the AfD has a strong influence on people. I have seen how people have changed and have started being mean and openly racist because they felt supported by the opinions expressed by the AfD, so this matter is very personal for me. But I am a scientist too. So instead of basing my opinions about the party solely on my personal feelings, I decided to analyze the language in that leaked WhatsApp chat from June 2017. More specifically, I looked at racist and xenophobic metaphors.

Metaphors found in the AfD chat
I started by looking at what other studies have identified as “typical” racist and xenophobic metaphors. I found a long list of metaphors that were used by the National Socialists. These are summarized in the table below (click on table to enlarge it).

Once I knew what I was looking for, I started reading through the WhatsApp chat and searching for any of these metaphors. Let me give you some examples of what I found (they are, of course, in German, but you can find my English translations below). As you read them, maybe you can think about which category they belong to.

Example 1

06.02.17, 16:02:11: [telephone number]: I know a family in my neighbourhood, there’s a single mother. Her boy is 8 years and is in 2nd grade. He told me that he has never been on holidays. It is disgraceful, when you see these parasites here…

Example 2

17.02.17, 09:36:03: [name of sender]: These people are like water – it always finds a way. And if we don’t close it up quick enough, then we are soon under water (lit. land under)!
17.02.17, 10:05:23: [name of sender]: [Name], the land is already under water and if nothing is done about it, we will drown mercilessly. And a lifeboat is far away.

Example 3
28.02.17, 16:21:08: [name of sender]: I am at the main station in Nuremberg and feel foreign in my own country, there are invaders from Africa or from Arabic countries just everywhere
28.02.17, 16:21:34: [name of sender]: Just saw a grandma who was using the other side of the street just so that she didn’t have to walk straight towards these invaders

These are of course just a few examples, but in my analysis of the chat, I actually found that ALL of the typical racist and xenophobic metaphors were used! The most frequent conceptual metaphor was war and military, where immigrants were, for example, described as invaders of the country. The members of the AfD then described themselves a bastion against the enemies that are attacking the German nation. But, as you can see from the example, immigrants were also described as a flood, that tries to drown the German people – or as parasites feeding on the German people. To see even more kinds of metaphors used in the chat, have a look at the table below (click on the table to enlarge it).


What I have tried to show in this post is that metaphors don’t only exist in poems – they are all around us, and we use them every day. Metaphors can be really useful and cool: especially if you know what you are using them for – as well as if you can recognize how other people are using them. Sometimes, a person’s real message is actually hidden in the metaphors they use. So maybe, the next time you describe one thing in terms of another, take a minute to ask yourself about why you’re saying the things you’re saying, in the specific way that you are saying them – and pay close attention to how other people use metaphors as well. Because HOW people say things is every bit as important and meaningful as WHAT they say.

References

Bruns, H. (2017). „Scheint ein bösartiges Geschwür am Volkskörper zu sein“ – National Socialist metaphors in a WhatsApp group chat of members of the German party Alternative für Deutschland. (unpublished).
Burns, R. (1794). A red red rose. Retrieved from: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43812/a-red-red-rose
Hart, C. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New perspectives on immigration discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Melville, H. (1851). Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Foto (Featured image): Lizard by: Free-Photos
https://pixabay.com/en/lizard-reptile-graffiti-wall-you-1210069/
Foto: Migration by: Capri23auto
https://pixabay.com/en/migration-integration-migrants-3129299/
Foto: Whatsapp-Icon by: geralt
https://pixabay.com/en/whatsapp-icon-communication-social-2317206/

Note: This blog-post is based on my term-paper, which I wrote for my M.A. studies “Applied Linguistics” at the University of Bonn, Germany. Special thanks to my lecturer, Dr. Stefanie Pohle, for her support (regarding this post and everything else).

Digital Media as Interactional Resources in the Research Interview

From time to time, I like to share technology-related observations about things that  happen in my classes.  This weekend, as I was grading papers, I was fascinated by a new trend that I’ve observed: interview participants using digital media in various ways while being interviewed.

I am currently teaching my “Cross-Cultural Issues in ESL” course, which is one of the required courses for our Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics.  I teach it every Spring semester.  For one of the course requirements, I’ve developed a multi-phase experiential project that introduces students to different aspects of the ethnographic process.  Each student selects a “New Cultural Experience” (NCE) that they attend as a participant-observer, and then write about the cultural practices they observed.  This is followed by an interview with a member of that particular community.  These interviews enable students to triangulate their outsider (etic) observations with an insider (emic) perspective, in order to better understand some of the tacit cultural meanings.  I ask my students to transcribe those interviews and submit their transcripts to me to receive a grade for this interview assignment.  Interestingly, this year’s interview transcripts had multiple instances of references to various digital tools.

Smartphone homescreen (Unsplash)

For instance, one student who attended a local Thai temple for his NCE, was discussing representations of the Buddha with his interviewee (another university student who is a member of the Thai temple community), and in the middle of the interview his interviewee pulled out his phone to show the student some other images of the Buddha.   Similarly, a different student who attended our university’s Bhangra Team tryouts for her NCE, interviewed a member of the team whose family came from India.  Their interview extended to topics well beyond Bhangra to more personal topics, and at one point in the interview, as he was discussing his travels to India with his family, her interviewee showed her (again, on his phone) an image of the city where his father was born.  (In both cases, neither of my students remarked at all on the images they had been shown by their interlocutor and the conversation just continued on, which tells me that this is a completely normal, taken-for-granted, interactional practice that has been seamlessly integrated into many forms of talk.)  This same interviewee went on to describe how one of the famous temples in India he has visited is known for feeding 100,000 people a day, adding “there’s videos on YouTube about it.”  In this instance, the interviewee’s reference to YouTube serves as a form of evidence and bolsters his claim about a practice that is geographically removed from the current interaction.

I thought to myself: “Ok, these are university students in their 20s who interviewing other so-called ‘millenials.’  It’s really not that surprising that they variously integrate digital technologies into all of their activities – including while they are being interviewed.”  But then I found a few additional intriguing examples.

One of my students selected greyhound racing as her NCE.  After attending the dog races for an afternoon, this student returned to the site to interview the manager of the track.  As their conversation turned to the more sensitive topic of animal welfare, her interviewee (a man in his 40s or 50s) spoke emphatically about how the employees of the track are all dog lovers, telling her that she can even “go on Facebook and look” at all of the posted photos of track employees with dogs .  So here is another instance of an image, or video, posted on social media serving an evidential function.  Both of these examples also reveal something about our contemporary “semiotic ideologies”: that is, if we can point to a YouTube video, or a Facebook photo, about some phenomenon… then it must be true/real.  It seems that these days, we are treating visual images as more trustworthy than language, without very much acknowledgement of the fact that visuals (just like language) are subject to multiple interpretations – as well as to manipulation.

The final example is from an interview where neither participant is a ‘millenial’: in fact, both interviewer and interviewee are retired.  This particular student decided to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends (aka “Quakers”) for his NCE.  As my student asked his interviewee about the historical origins of this community,  his interviewee impressed me with his vast knowledge of early American history.  He supplied numerous details about important 17th century figures and events that were relevant to the discussion.  But when he started to speak about contemporary demographics – that is, the distribution of the Quaker population around the world – he provided a few percentages, ending his response with “It’s available if you Google it.”  And I totally understand this: we tend to treat historical facts as static or “fixed,” whereas current information is less stable, which encourages us to rely less on memorizing such information, knowing that the most current data will surely be available online somewhere.

Although they were completed as part of a class assignment, these transcripts actually shed light on much wider social practices, and specifically, on some of the many ways in which we interweave the “digital” into our “offline” interactions.  These  include using our phones to show images which would take much longer to describe using words; using references to images or videos on social media as forms of “evidence” for the existence of some given phenomenon that is remote from our immediate experience; and relying on online sources for current information rather than committing it to memory.

mansplain, mansplaining, mansplained

Metapragmatics refers to the phenomenon of language use itself becoming the object of discourse.  As Judith Bridges (a current Ph.D. student in our Linguistics and Applied Language Studies program) has observed, the word “mansplain” is a perfect example of metapragmatics.  When a person says that someone else has “mansplained” a given topic, that speaker is not just providing a neutral account of what happened; instead, s/he is providing a particular interpretation of a prior interaction.

Furthermore, as Judith points out, “mansplain” is an especially interesting example to explore because it sheds light on gender-related norms, dynamics, and expectations in  communicative interactions.  In her article, just published in the journal, Discourse, Context and Media, Judith examines how the various meanings of “mansplain” (and related forms) are constructed and negotiated in a sample of 200 tweets and Facebook posts.

New research on Tumblr

In spite of being such a popular (and fascinating!) social media platform, not much academic research has been published about Tumblr.   A recent study suggests that this may be due to some of the following constraints:

“Severe research limitations are caused by the lack of demographic, geo-spatial, and temporal metadata attached to individual posts, the limited API, restricted access to data, and the large amounts of ephemeral posts on the site”

While these are limitations for carrying out certain types of research, they do not pose problems for the textual analysis of linguistic creativity and humor that I’ve been working on recently.  In fact, a former graduate student and I have just published a paper about popular “Chat” posts on Tumblr. Our article is available at Discourse, Context & Media: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695817300326  In it, we illustrate  some of the discourse strategies that Tumblr content creators exploit in order to construct playful and humorous texts.

Pragmatics in the Media!

It’s not often that stories about pragmatics — and matters of linguistic politeness, especially — make it into the mass media.  However, I just came across this interesting article in the NYT, which reports on a study of major social relevance involving language, race and police interactions.

A group of Stanford social scientists studied recordings from police body cameras, which were made during traffic stops.  Applying well-known models of linguistic politeness (e.g., Brown & Levinson) to transcripts made from these interactions, they then analyzed whether there was any difference in the language officers used with white motorists compared to the language officers used with black motorists.  Specifically, they  focused on “levels of respect,” expressed via a combination of different language features.  I like this figure that the researchers included in their report, which shows how these features were identified and quantified.  As you read this top to bottom, the examples in the figure go from least polite to most polite.  In which of these ways would you prefer to be addressed, if you were to be pulled over by a police officer?  (click on the figure to enlarge it)

The full research article with all the details is available online here.

(Spoiler alert: Yes, they did find differences.  The title of the NYT article kind of gives that away.)

A Few Media Updates

Just wanted to share a few (unrelated)  items that have captured my attention recently…

  • This surprising story about a Dean at Yale getting suspended from her job over a couple of “insensitive” Yelp reviews. Actually, I am still figuring out what I think about all of this.  (Who found these reviews?  Why were they reported?  Was suspension of employment perhaps an excessive response?)  I DEFINITELY welcome your comments as I try to make sense of this situation myself. (This story was sent to me by former student, Dr. Erhan Aslan – thanks, Erhan!)
  • super interesting podcast featuring 2 of my favorite “celebrity linguists,” Deborah Tannen and John McWhorter, talking about some of my favorite topics: intercultural communication, interruption, language & gender, and, as most of my former students will likely remember… “complementary schismogenesis”!!! (Thanks to Taylor for the link & thanks to Nathan for the photo!)
  • And I just finished reading this engaging book by Marcel Danesi.

The main points of this book can be boiled down to a few sentences.  Basically, emoji add support to a text: they primarily communicate affective (rather than referential) meaning. In other words, what emoji contribute to a message is more of an emotional nuance than actual content – that is, they help cue readers on how to interpret the main message (just like our intonation, or facial expressions, provide in F2F communication).  The bulk of the message is still realized, by and large, linguistically. One final point: the overwhelming majority of emoji are used to communicate positive feelings, which means that 🙂  is much more common in our communication than 🙁 .  That’s the book in a nutshell.  (However, as an added bonus…for anyone who’s ever wondered about what “semiotics” is all about, this book offers a very friendly and approachable introduction to the topic.)