Pragmatic analysis of humorous stickers in WhatsApp groups
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25267/Pragmalinguistica.2024.i32.01Info
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- M. Belén Alvarado Ortega (ES) Universidad de Alicante https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7685-6583
- Esther Linares Bernabéu (ES) Universitat de València https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7862-9840
Abstract
The aim of this work is to carry out a pragmatic analysis of the use of humorous stickers in a WhatsApp group. Mobile instant messaging applications have become the common mode of long-distance interpersonal communication. Among them, we find WhatsApp. The use of WhatsApp implies that one of the phenomena that can arise is humor, especially in WhatsApp groups where there is a certain degree of familiarity and trust among the participants. Our initial hypothesis is that stickers are one of the cues for humorous contextualization to correctly index and reinforce the illocutionary force of the message. Likewise, we believe that the use of stickers serves to avoid possible misunderstandings during communication and mitigate any type of threatening act towards the interlocutors’ image. Our corpus consists of 44,362 words and 273 stickers, from which 10 humorous conversational sequences have been selected for analysis.
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Copyright (c) 2024 M. Belén Alvarado Ortega, Esther Linares Bernabéu
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