Abstract This study examines the multifunctional nature of ēn’ēn 嗯嗯 , a reduplicated pragmatic marker frequently used in Chinese social media communication. Based on an analysis of 5,750 instances from private WeChat conversations and interview data from sixteen participants, we identify eight functions that 嗯嗯 performs that differ from its single form 嗯 : upgrading, mitigating, inviting elaboration, marking irony, pivoting topics, consolidating responses, maintaining continuity, and signaling closure. These functions operate simultaneously across two interconnected levels — interpersonal meaning management and conversational structure organization. Distributional analysis reveals that 嗯嗯 occurs disproportionately in high-power-gap and high-social-distance contexts, reflecting what participants described as “politeness anxiety” in asynchronous messaging. Our findings demonstrate that reduplication creates — rather than merely intensifies — pragmatic functions, offering new perspectives on conventional backchanneling frameworks. This study contributes to digital pragmatics by showing how morphological resources are repurposed to meet the interactional demands of text-based communication.
Abstract We analyze the use and distribution of Spanish synthetic and periphrastic future-inflected wh -interrogatives in a corpus of informal Spanish conversations, within Linell’s (2009) Dialogical Theory of Language. Our corpus analysis reveals that future-inflected interrogatives realize three types of discourse functions: information requests, interactional challenges, and requests for inference, each clearly distinguishable in terms of their distribution at the sentence and discourse level. The results highlight the importance of speaker attitude and, particularly, their expectations regarding the answerability of the request. Use of the synthetic future is common in requests to inference, in which the hearer is not expected to be able to answer the question, whereas use of the periphrastic future is prototypical in requests for information and interactional challenges, indicating a grammaticalization path towards modal meanings. Our findings underscore the value of corpus-based pragmatic analysis for understanding how grammatical choices reflect interactional meaning-making.
Abstract Playing cute has become a corporate branding strategy, but its integration with translanguaging on social media remains underexplored. This study proposes an analytical framework for playing cute as a pragmatic act on corporate social media and conducts a cross-platform analysis of how a leading Chinese corporation adopts translanguaging resources to play cute strategically. Findings show that the dominance of the strategy orienting towards playing babyishly cute across both Weibo and Twitter underscores its universal appeal, and the preference of playing whimsically and kindly cute on Weibo than on Twitter is attributable to linguistic-cultural proximity in intracultural communication and linguistic-cultural complexity in intercultural communication. Similarly, hashtag and text are employed more significantly on Weibo while emojis are deployed more significantly on Twitter, and mono-resource translanguaging pattern is more used than bi-resource and N -resource patterns. This study enhances understanding of playing cute and sheds light on globalized digital governance of Chinese state-owned corporations.
Abstract Metadiscourse has been a major focus of research over the last twenty-five years, attracting methodological approaches from the areas of textual pragmatics and discourse studies, many of which are supported by corpus linguistics. A major challenge in corpus-based discourse studies, however, is subjectivity, which may affect their quality and undermine their methodological rigor. To reduce subjectivity and guarantee consistency, assessing reliability of coding is essential. This study advocates combining quantitative with qualitative approaches to reliability. We argue that this mixed-method approach will provide a better assessment of reliability. To this aim, this methodological synthesis surveyed research covering empirical corpus-based studies on metadiscourse published in indexed and peer-reviewed journals. One major finding is that most studies did not report conducting any reliability measure. Issues in reliability accounts were also identified for those that did. Another major finding is a pervasive lack of transparency and comprehensiveness in reliability reports. Recommendations for enhancing reliability are listed.
This study conducts a comparative analysis on the use of multimodal interactional metadiscourse by U.S. and Chinese companies on Twitter. Six hundred tweets generated by twelve U.S. and Chinese online retailing, technology, energy, and automobile companies were analyzed. The results indicate that corporate tweets are highly interpersonal in nature, rich in interactional metadiscourse. Attitude markers, self-mentions, and a series of engagement markers are particularly prominent. Various non-textual devices, such as pictures, videos, @-mentions, hashtags (#), and hyperlinks, are co-deployed with textual elements to construct interpersonal meanings. Overall U.S. companies used more engagement markers, while Chinese companies employed more stance markers, with other salient differences observed in different subcategories. These variances can be attributed to various sociocultural and contextual factors. The study contributes to the still scarce research on multimodal metadiscourse in online business discourse and uncovers the influence of sociocultural and contextual factors on the use of interpersonal resources in digital business genres.
