Discussing the “other” in online news comments: a cross-cultural pragmatic perspective
Jan Chovanec
Masaryk University, Brno
Abstract
This paper deals with verbal interaction between users of online news discussion forums in the context of the recent migration crisis in the European Union. Adopting the perspective of cognitive pragmatics (Cap 2013) and the positioning theory (Davies and Harré 1990), it looks at how the readers use their comments to construct and articulate their collective membership in specific ingroup(s) (van Dijk 1998), doing so in highly evaluative terms.
Based on a corpus of approximately 4,000 comments obtained from popular mainstream online news sites, the analysis shows how two different cultural communities – those of British and Czech readers – navigate the space of online comments to discursively construct various in- and out-groups that are in multiple mutual oppositions. The analysis of key words related to self and other-representation reveals that the two communities assign different meaning to the same extralinguistic phenomena (migration crisis; the ‘other’): the strong anti-other rhetoric in the Czech comments contrasts with the feeling of being let down by local politicians in the British data. At the same time, however, a qualitative analysis shows that there are some marked similarities in how the two communities construct the other as a ‘threat’ (through various kinds of topoi, cf. Reisigl and Wodak 2001, and adopting the position of the victim) and how they compress, through spatial and temporal deixis, the symbolic discourse space between the in-group and the out-group in order to increase the urgency of the threat. The analysis has also revealed some novel findings about the role of humor and irony: these appear to be applied by users in order to withhold accountability for their extreme views (by being able to avail themselves of the protection of the non-serious mode), to achieve a positive a likeable self-representation, and to invite agreement and approval from other commenters.
The research shows that online comments have an important ideological and political dimension. A close textual and contextual reading of the comments can reveal how the macro-level of social practice (Fairclough 1992) is organized, with the cross-cultural approach being capable of revealing subtle but salient differences between various communities (Chovanec and Molek-Kozakowska 2017).
References
Cap, Piotr (2013) Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Discourse Crossing. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Chvoanec, Jan and Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, eds. (2017) Representing the Other in European Media Discourses. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Davies, Bronwyn and Rom Harré (1990) Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1), 43-63.
Fairclough, Norman (1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.
Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak (2001) Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge.
Van Dijk, Teun A. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage.