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Heteroglossia Online

Translocal Processes of Meaning-Making in Facebook Posts

by Caroline Schilling (Author)
©2017 Thesis 284 Pages

Summary

The nature of communicative practices today, particularly in the context of digitalized media, has revealed that earlier paradigms on language contact do not prove to be fully satisfactory. Based on 1,507 Facebook posts of German university students participating in the Erasmus exchange program, the analysis aims at exploring how posters draw on their entire repertoire of local and «translocal» semiotic resources in interactions among speakers with diverse language backgrounds. The students under examination participate in actual processes of meaning-making by refashioning the semiotic potential of various features. As a result, the interlocutors create heteroglossic and polycentric posts to decollapse collided and fuzzy contexts and to negotiate potentially large and multiple audiences.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Series editor’s introduction to Heteroglossia online – Translocal Processes of Meaning-Making in Facebook Posts
  • Table of Contents
  • List of Figures, Tables, Charts and Schematic Representations
  • Charts
  • Tables
  • Schematic representations
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Theoretical Background
  • 2.1 The Theoretical Background and History of Research on Language Contact
  • 2.2 The Theoretical Background and History of Research on Multilingualism
  • 2.3 Recent Approaches to Language Contact and Multilingualism
  • 2.3.1 Plurilingualism
  • 2.3.2 Polylingualism
  • 2.3.3 Metrolingualism
  • 2.3.4 Heteroglossia
  • 2.3.5 Language as Local Practice
  • 2.3.6 Language as Mobility of Resources
  • 2.3.7 Multimodality
  • 2.3.8 A Comparison of Recent Approaches
  • 2.4 The Role of English in Situations of Language Contact: Spread, Localization, Glocalization and Translocalization
  • 2.5 Language Contact and the Role of English in Online Environments: Perspectives Past and Present
  • 2.5.1 Considerations on Choosing the Internet for Studies on Language Contact
  • The novelty of the New Media
  • 2.5.2 The Flagship of the Internet?: On the Role of English Online
  • 2.5.3 Research on Switching, Mixing and Blending Online
  • 2.6 Essentials on the Communication on Social Network Sites and Facebook
  • 2.6.1 Social Network Sites and Facebook
  • 2.6.2 Posting on Facebook
  • 2.6.3 Effects on Communication Practices
  • Large, multiple and invisible audience(s), collapsed contexts and the blurry boundary between public and private
  • Participant Constellation and the Negotiation of Audiences
  • 3. Research Questions
  • 4. Methodological Background
  • 4.1 Data Basis and Participants
  • 4.2 The Erasmus Program
  • 5. A Framework for the Analysis: Basic Assumptions and Hypotheses
  • 5.1 Basic Assumptions
  • 5.2 Hypotheses
  • 6. “bon journo miss sweden … alles jutzen! ;)”: The Analysis of Erasmus Students’ Facebook Posts31
  • 6.1 Contextualizing Features Provided by Facebook
  • 6.1.1 Customizing the Settings
  • 6.1.2 Properties of Networked Publics
  • 6.1.3 Multimodality and (Inter-)Connectivity
  • 6.2 Status Updates Posted by the Participants
  • 6.2.1 Status Updates Aimed at the Entire Imagined Audience
  • English as a Functional Repertoire of Globally Shared, Mobile Resources
  • English as an Ideational Repertoire of Globally Shared, Mobile Resources
  • The Choice of Standard English and CMC Features as a Functional Repertoire
  • Multimodality
  • Intertextuality – Exemplifying Processes of Relocalization and Reaccentuation
  • Functional Perspectives on Direct and Indirect Translations
  • Perspectives on the Ideational Value of Direct and Indirect Translations
  • 6.2.2 Status Updates Tailoring the Imagined Audience
  • Forms of Direct and Indirect Reader-Address
  • A Heteroglossic Perspective on the Negotiation of Audiences in Status Updates Tailoring the Imagined Audience
  • 6.2.3 Comparison of CMC Features in GRAs and SRAs
  • 6.2.4 The Role of the Actual Audience
  • 6.2.5 Conclusion: Status Updates Posted by the Participants
  • 6.3 Wall/Timeline Posts
  • 6.3.1 The Choice of the Standard and CMC Features as a Functional and Ideational Repertoire
  • 6.3.2 A Heteroglossic Perspective on the Functional and Ideational Value of Wall/Timeline Posts
  • Friends from the Erasmus Context from German Universities
  • Friends from the Erasmus Context from Non-German Universities
  • Friends from the Non-Erasmus Context
  • 6.3.3 Conclusion: Wall/Timeline Posts
  • 6.4 Birthday Posts
  • 6.4.1 “Happy Birthday”
  • 6.4.2 A Heteroglossic Perspective on the Functional and Ideational Value of Birthday Greetings
  • Friends from the Erasmus Context
  • The Choice of the Erasmus Friends’ Native Language
  • The Choice of German by Friends from the Erasmus Context
  • Friends from the Non-Erasmus Context
  • The Adoption and Refashioning of Translocal English Resources by Friends from the Non-Erasmus Context
  • 6.4.3 Conclusion: Birthday Posts
  • 7. Concluding Remarks
  • 8. Bibliography
  • Non-Academic Internet Sources:
  • Acknowledgements

Caroline Schilling

Heteroglossia Online

Translocal Processes of Meaning-Making in Facebook Posts

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About the author

Caroline Schilling studied English and History at Greifswald University and later became a Doctoral Student and Lecturer at the Chair of English Linguistics. The focus of her research lies in the field of contact linguistics, social semiotics, English as a globally shared mobile resource and digitalized communication.

About the book

The nature of communicative practices today, particularly in the context of digitalized media, has revealed that earlier paradigms on language contact do not prove to be fully satisfactory. Based on 1,507 Facebook posts of German university students participating in the Erasmus exchange program, the analysis aims at exploring how posters draw on their entire repertoire of local and “translocal” semiotic resources in interactions among speakers with diverse language backgrounds. The students under examination participate in actual processes of meaning-making by refashioning the semiotic potential of various features. As a result, the interlocutors create heteroglossic and polycentric posts to decollapse collided and fuzzy contexts and to negotiate potentially large and multiple audiences.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Series editor’s introduction

Amei Koll-Stobbe (University of Greifswald)

Series editor’s introduction to Heteroglossia online – Translocal Processes of Meaning-Making in Facebook Posts

This is the eighth volume in the series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe, and the first that focusses on authentic language use of young Europeans that grew up in a digital communication environment. These young Europeans keep in touch before and during their ERASMUS exchange studies through Facebook posts. The topic, however, is not Facebook as a fairly new tool for keyboard mediated interactive communication, but the patterns and flows of how languages are used as resources and repertoires by the ERASMUS students in order to create and share meanings in a medial environment that facilitates non-linear and multi-modal processes of meaning-making. The objectives of Schilling’s basic research is to use Facebook posts as an easily accessible and highly visible platform displaying situations of language contact and polyphony that had been conceptualized as heteroglossia by Bakhtin (in the 1930s) long before the internet had been invented. Bakhtin conceptualized language (opposing de Saussurean structuralism) not as an abstract synchronic system, but rather as a medium through which language users as social actors participate in a historical flow of social relationships to create meanings as situated and variable social constructs. Schilling’s analysis is based on a collection of 1,057 Facebook Status Updates and Wall/Timeline Posts, and aims at examining how students as social actors in the discursive frame of posts draw on their entire repertoire of local and translocal semiotic resources to negotiate meaning-making in potentially multiple and heterogeneous audiences. Schilling examines and critically reflects how the posters relocalize and reaccentuate the socio-historical meaning potential of mobile resources to create and recreate shared meanings. Her study thus demonstrates a new empirical grounding of the sociolinguistics of mobility.

Schilling’s study does also represent a well-crafted analytical study of heteroglossia and hybridization as consequence of stable contact with English. The emerging repertoires of English, and its function as lingua franca and symbolic resource for acting out identities in multilingual social environments, constitute←5 | 6→ a red thread throughout the volume. Schilling shows that linguistic performance skills of ERASMUS students are challenging prevalent models of linguistic and communicative competence in the secondary and tertiary language education sector. The prevalent models simply ignore contact-induced skills of actual sign-making to create frames of meaningfulness, skills that are vital for social bonding in linguistically and semiotically diverse environments in real and virtual worlds of our decade.

Schilling’s study was reviewed and defended as doctoral thesis in English Linguistics for the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Greifswald in 2016 and marked as “summa cum laude.”

First reviewer: Prof. Dr. Amei Koll-Stobbe (University of Greifswald, Germany)

Second reviewer: Prof. Dr. Anastassia Zabrodskaja (University of Tallinn, Estonia) ←6 | 7→

Details

Pages
284
Publication Year
2017
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631701638
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631701645
ISBN (PDF)
9783653071979
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631680940
DOI
10.3726/b10491
Language
English
Publication date
2016 (November)
Keywords
Language Contact Social Semiotics Globalization New Media Contextualization Erasmus
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2017. 284 pp., 113 b/w ill., 1 b/w graph, 2 b/w tables

Biographical notes

Caroline Schilling (Author)

Caroline Schilling studied English and History at Greifswald University and later became a Doctoral Student and Lecturer at the Chair of English Linguistics. The focus of her research lies in the field of contact linguistics, social semiotics, English as a globally shared mobile resource, and digitalized communication.

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