This article investigates how the structural affordances of communication media alter the interactional pragmatics of political argumentation. Through a diachronic, mixed-methods analysis of the 2016 and 2024 U.S. presidential campaigns, we compare synchronous broadcast television debates with asynchronous social media (Twitter/X) discourse. Combining manual annotation of argumentative moves with automated sentiment and incivility scoring, we demonstrate that platform architectures rewrite the rules of political argumentation. In TV debates, institutional constraints incentivize self-referential supports of ethos (face enhancing acts) and pragmatic mitigation of uncivil language. Conversely, Twitter’s algorithmic affordances like quote-tweeting incentivize aggressive attacks on opponents’ ethos (face threatening acts) and digital impoliteness. Furthermore, we observe a difference in how speakers build ethotic arguments: TV demands contrastive ethos positioning, whereas social media primarily facilitates lay testimony. Ultimately, this study provides evidence that media affordances are associated not only with differences in rhetorical style but also with variation in the interactional objectives manifested in political discourse.
The current study provides a critical analysis of the discourse practices involved in the mismanagement of a K-pop concert and the resultant protest movement spearheaded by Indonesian fans on X. Specifically, the study analyzes tweets posted using any one of the following hashtags: #KawalRefundMecima, #MyDayTagihMecima, #MECIMA_NOT_PROfessional, and #MyDayBerserikat. The four hashtags are related and form a collective narrative of the disorganized planning of a DAY6 concert managed by Mecimapro. To analyze the language practices of the above discourse, the researcher adopts the sociocognitive Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology advocated by Teun A. van Dijk. Qualitative coding is performed based on repetitive, intensification, narrative, and pronoun discursive strategies. In addition, intercoder agreement was adopted to enhance the relevance and reliability of the analysis. Data collection was done between March and May 2025 through thematic analysis. Results show that the fans employed affective language, identification markers, and direct critique of institutional power in shaping the discourses for contesting the promotional authority of the concert promoter. This study is important because it contributes to existing literature on fan activism, media accountability, and social media as a tool for resistance and agency. The findings demonstrate how online discourse reflects broader issues of consumer rights and corporate responsibility within contemporary cultural industries.
This paper examines four centuries of change in three English speech acts: thanking, threatening, and invoking harm. Using purpose-built manually coded corpora, we trace shifts in form, function, and context with the aim of identifying broader changes in communicative conventions. Gratitude moved from sincere expressions of indebtedness to routine politeness among equals, while threats became less overtly aggressive and more common among interlocutors of similar status; invocations of harm declined sharply in frequency and were increasingly performed in the absence of the person targeted. These developments can be taken to reflect sociocultural transformations, especially social pacification and the rise of individualism as British society shifted from feudal hierarchies to dense networks of social interdependence and greater emphasis on self-related psychological needs.
This study examines modality as a resource for moral positioning in 215 digitised Friday sermon infographics published on Instagram by Brunei Darussalam’s Ministry of Religious Affairs. Drawing on the Corpus of Brunei English (CoBE) and employing Palmer’s (2001) tripartite framework of deontic, epistemic, and dynamic modality, we analyse 500 modal verb tokens extracted via Sketch Engine and coded for pragmatic function. The findings reveal a ‘soft deontic’ profile: epistemic modality dominates (63.4
