Metadiscourse in and on social media (ESSE2026 seminar)

Wednesday Sep 2, 2026, 9:00 AM → 8:00 PM Europe/Brussels

Anna Piata, Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)

Call for papers for a seminar to be held as part of the ESSE2026 conference, Santiago de Compostela (31 August - 4 September 2026), on

Metadiscourse in and on social media

The call is now closed. Accepted abstracts are now available (see "Contribution list").

Convenors:

• Lieven Vandelanotte (BAAHE)
• Anna Piata (HASE)

 

S12 (1/1) Metadiscourse in and on social media

1 ‘I Have One Daughter’: Meta-Pragmatic Play in TikTok Sound Memes

TikTok’s affordance for reusing the audio track of an existing post enables a distinctive form of multimodal meta discourse where users communicate not only through what they say, but through how they re contextualise another creator’s discourse. This paper analyses the “I Have One Daughter” TikTok sound meme as a form of meta meme in which creators perform patterns of conversational breakdown, stereotype driven inference, and repeated pragmatic misunderstanding. Although the original audio was not produced as a meme template, its circulation through TikTok’s “Use sound” feature has generated a family of posts in which creators lip sync the original dialogue while overlaying incongruent captions that map the inferences associated with the original audio onto new discourse contexts. As performances of miscommunication, the memes offer meta-pragmatic commentary on social misunderstandings.

Through analysis of a corpus of meme tokens, including examples that explicitly break the fourth wall, I show how creators use a combination of audio, text, and non-verbal cues to guide the audience toward the intended interpretation. Drawing on assumptions from relevance theory, I argue that these meme variants function by deliberately manipulating layers of ostension and inference. To form a relevant interpretation of a meme token, viewers must access inferences that are highly accessible when listening to the audio and then attribute them to the discourse context represented via the sub-titles and other visual components.

The meme’s dual layer structure exemplifies a platform specific practice comparable to other social media native forms of meta discourse, such as quote tweeting or ironic alt text. The study contributes to emerging pragmatic research on meta memes and multimodal constructions, as well as to broader discussions of how discourse is used, recontextualized, and re performed in contemporary social media environments.

Speaker: Kate Scott (Kingston University)

2 Textual Metadiscourse and Humorous Framing in TikTok’s POV Genre

This paper examines how textual-layer features in TikTok’s POV genre, specifically textual overlays and captions incorporating emojis and hashtags, function as metadiscursive cues that guide humorous interpretation. Following Hyland’s (2005) account of metadiscourse as discourse that frames interpretation and signals stance, these textual elements are treated as resources that organise how viewers are oriented toward the audiovisual scene rather than as part of its diegesis. In POV videos, textual cues operate extradiegetically to structure interpretation across the video, contributing both to the establishment of initial expectations and to the interpretation of humorous outcomes.

Textual overlays and captions perform distinct but coordinated functions within this process. Overlays pre-structure interpretation by assigning the viewer a role and delimiting a set of plausible expectations before the audiovisual action unfolds. In doing so, they activate genre expectations shaped by shared meme conventions and establish an interpretive baseline against which subsequent audiovisual cues can be evaluated as humorous deviations (Shifman, 2014). Captions containing text, hashtags and emojis, instead, operate retrospectively, shaping how viewers interpret and align with the humorous resolution once it becomes available. Drawing on Zappavigna and Logi’s (2024) account of emojis as paralinguistic resources, this study examines how these cues, alongside text and hashtags within captions, shape affective tone, signal stance, and position viewers toward an intended humorous reading.

Extending earlier work on how audiovisual modes construct humorous incongruity through modal interplay in the POV genre (Willoughby, forthcoming), this study examines how textual-layer features function as metadiscursive cues that further organise interpretation and render humorous intent legible within shared communicative norms. By analysing these cues alongside the organisation of audiovisual modes, the study offers a more integrated account of how humorous incongruity is coordinated across modes in short-form digital video.

References
Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse. Continuum.
Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. MIT Press.
Willoughby, A. (forthcoming). Humour and modal interplay in TikTok’s POV genre. In A. Beville, F. Ciambella, & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Bridging the gap between pragmatics and multimodality (Special issue). Lingue e Linguaggi.
Zappavigna, M., & Logi, L. (2024). Emoji and social media paralanguage. Cambridge University Press.

Speaker: Audrey Willoughby (University of Milan)

3 “I know it’s basic, annoying, and cringe advice”: Metapragmatic negotiation of venting playframes on r/mentalhealth

Mental-health communities on social media have been critically discussed as sites that may foster epistemic closure and problematic forms of advice or self-understanding. Such concerns often presuppose a model of interaction centered on deliberation and epistemic consensus (Habermas 1981). This study instead conceptualizes these sites as interactional environments in which the norms of communicating about mental health are reflexively negotiated, and prevailing paradigms of advice and care are challenged. This metapragmatic orientation becomes particularly visible in venting discourse on Reddit, where platform-afforded metapragmatic labels (Haugh 2018) – so-called flairs – are employed to index the pragmatic function of posts, define desired responses, and delimit unwanted forms of discourse. By framing posts as expressions of negative affect rather than requests for advice or solutions, venting complicates models of intersubjectively established consensus and raises the question of how posters and respondents signal adherence to – or deviation from – the specified playframe, understood as an interactional dilemma in CA terms (Speer 2005).

Adopting a corpus-pragmatic approach, this study examines strategies of metapragmatic calibration in 200 venting-flaired post events on r/mentalhealth (Page 2019). The data were coded for explicit metapragmatic strategies (Hübler & Bublitz 2007) and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively to identify formal–functional patterns.

The analysis shows that both posters and respondents engage in extensive metapragmatic labor oriented toward managing the normative delicacy of venting. Posters routinely frame their contributions as potentially excessive or inappropriate, while respondents pre-emptively downgrade advice or explicitly account for offering it at all. These self-effacing moves, often playful, are accompanied by metadiscursive commentary on advice-giving norms and prior responses, through which discourse-external voices – such as generalized “advice-givers” or hegemonically perceived mental-health discourses – are invoked and delegitimized. What is often characterized as validation can thus be shown to involve systematic metapragmatic labor through which participation norms are interactionally produced and sustained.

References
Haugh, M. (2018). Corpus-based metapragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 619–644). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110424928-024
Habermas, J. (1981). The theory of communicative action (Vols. 1–2). Beacon Press.
Hübler, A., & Bublitz, W. (2007). Introducing metapragmatics in use. In W. Bublitz & A. Hübler (Eds.), Metapragmatics in use (pp. 1–26). John Benjamins.
Page, R. (2019). Self-denigration and the mixed messages of “ugly” selfies on Instagram. Internet Pragmatics, 2(2), 173–205. https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00035.pag
Speer, S. A. (2005). Gender talk: Feminism, discourse and conversation analysis. Routledge.

Speaker: Eva Triebl (University of Vienna, English Department)

4 Epistemic Contestation in Online Political Discourse: Metadiscursive Engagement with ‘Fake News’, ‘Disinformation’, and ‘Conspiracy Theory’ in User Comments on US Presidential Elections

The concepts ‘fake news’, ‘disinformation’, and ‘conspiracy theory’ are often perceived as denoting discrete and describable categories of problematic content. Yet in public discourse, besides functioning as classifications, these terms also function metadiscursively: their use reflects socially-mediated judgments on discourse, ideologically positions participants in interaction, and signals normative ideas about legitimacy in political discourse. This warrants a unifying analysis that explores how these terms are reflexively engaged with in online interactions.

The current paper analyses a corpus of user comments from The New York Times in response to the 2016, 2020, and 2024 US presidential elections, using the comments as a case of mainstream-platform political talk. It analyses how language users mobilized the epistemic labels ‘fake news’, ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘disinformation’ at various points in time, and how the terms’ usage shifted across these three pivotal moments. Through corpus-linguistic analysis (including collocation and frequency patterns) and qualitative coding, the analysis focuses on language users’ first-order (emic) interpretations: explicit metalanguage and metacommunication revealing participants’ views of the terms’ meanings, their usage, and how they are linked to stereotypical personae.

The concepts' shared orientation to truth and authority renders their usage across the dataset highly adversarial. The labels frequently function as a means of contestation, foregrounding not only disagreement about certain propositions, but about the terms of discourse themselves. As disputes recurrently target the legitimacy of labeling (rather than merely the factuality of propositions), they make shared epistemic frames harder to sustain. Over time, some terms increasingly attract metadiscourse, attesting to their entrenchment as flashpoints for contesting epistemic authority. The findings have implications for ongoing debates on polarization in contemporary democratic societies, as their usage may escalate disagreement.

Speaker: Cedric Deschrijver (Ming Chuan University)