Event overview
'The pragmatics of hashtags', Dr Kate Scott.
In this talk I will consider the pragmatic function of hashtags on the social networking site Twitter. I take a relevance theoretic perspective, and argue that as part of an ostensive stimulus the hashtags should have a role to play in achieving optimal relevance for the intended audience.
I argue that they contribute to relevance by providing a means by which a tweeter can add a layer of activation to certain contextual assumptions, while remaining within the 140 character limit. I suggest that the hashtag functions procedurally in the sense of Blakemore (1987; 2002; 2007) in that it indicates that the content of the tag should be used to guide the reader’s inferential processes.
I discuss a range of examples to show that information in a hashtag may contribute to inferential process at both levels of interpretation: explicit and implicit. According to relevance theory, ‘the more information [a speaker] leaves implicit, the greater the degree of mutual understanding’ she assumes (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95, p. 218). Thus, the use of hashtags has stylistic consequences.
Twitter facilities one-to-many, asynchronous communication which is largely text based. As such, tweeters are unlikely to be able to assume that they share contextual assumptions with all or any of their audience.
Despite this, the communication on Twitter remains largely informal and personal in style. By allowing tweeters to make their intended contextual assumptions accessible to a wide range of readers without making the main part of the message more explicit, hashtags allow tweeters to maintain a familiar, casual style, even in the unpredictable and largely anonymous discourse context of Twitter.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Nov 2016 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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