Marta Dynel
Biographic Data
| ID | 148585 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marta Dynel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marta |
| FAMILY NAME | Dynel |
| SIGNATURE | DYNEL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lodz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4647-946X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 468 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
‘I will live by my own policies. I will sleep with a clear conscience. I will sleep in peace.’
This paper furthers discourse-driven research on parasocial grieving by shedding light on a previously unexamined type of collective online reaction following celebrity deaths. Contributing to the literature on celebrity mourning online, this study addresses a new avenue of digilante practice involving multiple social media users denouncing obituaries they consider inflammatory. These obituaries are deemed to violate the moral principle of protec…
Say what you want
ChatGPT caused a worldwide sensation upon its launch, as evidenced by the extensive coverage across traditional and new media. This paper delves into the diverse evaluative discourses about this AI chatbot both in YouTube news videos (originally, television broadcasts) and in user comments facilitated by YouTube’s interactivity. The qualitative-quantitative discourse analysis probes diversified evaluations within YouTube broadcast talk, together …
What would you do if you could narrate your wonder years
Beyond social polarisation
This paper contributes to the nascent research on Internet memes examined as items of (de)legitimising discourse, its empirical focus being memes addressing NFTs (non-fungible tokens). The mystifying NFT trade became hype in 2021, attracting massive media coverage and stimulating heated discussion across social media, which includes memetic content production. This study explores the multimodal discourses of (de)legitimisation in NFT memes. Based…
Impoliteness on Social Media
This entry aims to chart the landscape of impoliteness research on social media. Impoliteness is conceptualized as a theoretical framework with which to capture discursive aggression. Impoliteness is prevalent across social media, facilitated by their affordances. A number of key issues and notions relevant to pragmatic research on social media impoliteness are addressed: forms of discursive aggression online (notably, hate speech and cyberbullyi…
Do We Know Whether to Laugh or Cry? User Responses to @Ukraine’s Dark-humour Meme
This study investigates international users’ reception of a dark-humour meme tweeted by Ukraine’s governmental Twitter (X) account on 7 December 2021 as part of its exceptional cultural practice of posting humorous memes. Tweeters’ responses to the ‘headaches meme’ are examined through a discourse-analytic lens. An emphasis is placed on the appreciation of the humour (emanating from the meme or its contextual embedding) and other forms of humour …
The pragmatics of sharing memes on Twitter
This paper explores the interactional pragmatic characteristics of multimodal memetic content facilitated by Twitter affordances, notably the functions of retweeting and quote tweeting. These Twitter affordances enable reposting a previous multimodal tweet (with or without a preceding commentary), which is conducive to nested memetic posts involving entextualised multimodal quotations and/or to memes interwoven into conversational exchanges. Thes…
Enacting polyvocal scorn in #CovidConspiracy tweets
Fidelis ad mortem
This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as ‘Black Lives Matter memes’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter memes’. The central aim is to flesh out the memetic trends representing the discourses and ideologies on the Black and blue memescape, which is explored in the wake of the most infamous but interest-generating tragedy in the history of the Blue Lives Matter movement, namely …
Lessons in linguistics with ChatGPT
This paper discusses metalanguage, metadiscourse, metacommunication and metapragmatics testifying to users' conscious awareness enacted in human-AI interactions, based on a corpus of posts sent to Reddit's r/ChatGPT. The emphasis falls on users' foci of attention as they perform linguistic tests on ChatGPT and on how the "meta" practices manifest themselves interactionally on the selected subreddit, where human-AI interactions are showcased for e…
Hashtag swearing
This paper contributes to the fledgling pragmatic research on social media swearing. The concept of "hashtag swearing" is proposed to capture the practice of using hashtags centred on swear words. The empirical focus is on tweets marked with #FuckPutin and submitted in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, the article reports the findings of a multimodal discourse analysis of a randomised sample of 500 #FuckPutin tweets …
The life of Covid-19 mask memes
Taking as its point of departure a fine-tuned definition of an Internet meme (vis-à-vis a memetic construct), this paper reports the findings of the first diachronic study of memes, the focus being on mask memes on the vast COVID-19 mask memescape evolving in the wake of the pandemic, relative to the changing socio-political situation. The study capitalises on a diachronic corpus of user-tagged COVID-19 mask memes (posted online from January 2020…
Metarecipient parents' #Bluey tweets as a distributed fandom affinity space
This article explores children's and adults' online fandom and engagement with the children's animated television programme Bluey. This Australian cartoon has proven extremely popular worldwide with its primary recipients, that is children, and has also received significant attention and positive evaluation from parents, who - we suggest - offer a metarecipient perspective on the series as they tweet about it, both voicing their own opinions and …
HaStatoPutin Affinity Space
This article reports the findings of a diachronic sociopragmatic study on the politically loaded Italian hashtag #HaStatoPutin based on an automatically generated corpus of tweets ( N = 31,334), encompassing two datasets from before and after what Putin originally called Russia's 'special military operation' in Ukraine that commenced on 24 February 2022. #HaStatoPutin appeared on Twitter in 2015 to mark tweets criticizing what Italian users consi…
Caveat emptor
This paper addresses the topic of social media users' polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in the context of a threat of a regime. The focus of attention is political humour on the r/HongKong subreddit, specifically the posts pertinent to the ongoing boycott movement of multiple companies consequent upon their actions in response to the 2019 pr…
Ad libidinem
This article reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative study of seemingly aggressive but inherently benevolent humorous jibes that involve the sexualisation of women in the RoastMe practice performed by a growing social media community on Reddit. Based on a corpus of jocular insults, six forms of sexualisation comments are proposed: hyper-sexualisation, de-sexualisation and meta-sexualisation, each concerning the female body or pract…
Creating and sharing public humour across traditional and new media
Humour and (mock) aggression
This paper postulates a distinction between two types of discursive aggression in the context of humour production. This theoretical argument is supported by a qualitative (meta)pragmatic analysis of posts on the RoastMe subreddit devoted to an online community's original humorous practice based on jocular insults. The study of emic (community members') and etic (outsiders') metapragmatic evaluations of the content on the subreddit yields diverge…
Desperately seeking intentions
This paper addresses theoretical and methodological issues central to the study of insults (realised ad hoc or as rituals) on social media. After revisiting the well-entrenched but problematic distinction between personal insults and ritual insults, a proposal is made to distinguish between genuine insults, which are intended to offend the target (whether or not conveying truthful messages), and jocular insults, which are devoid of this intent an…
You Don't Fool Me
With a focus on the online phenomena of scamming and scambaiting, this article explores users' communicative activities on Reddit's r/scambait subreddit. Drawing on a representative corpus viewed through grounded theory, we establish the basic categories of posts and then unpack those further to reveal the deceptive practices being undertaken by both scammers and scambaiters, as well as Redditors' untruthfulness in their fabricated posts. The ana…
On a Cross-Cultural Memescape
This paper offers a cross-cultural contrastive study of what we term ‘nation memes’. These are humorous internet memes which refer to a particular country/nation. Our analysis of cultural scripts in memes related to Switzerland is based on a tripartite corpus of digital items shared by Polish, Swiss and international communities. By adopting a grounded-theory approach, we examine the prevalent scripts that represent the Swiss and Switzerland from…
Arcana imperii
This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal aggression are the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with President Donald Trump and his f…
To Say the Least
This paper aims to distil the essence of deception performed by means of withholding information, a topic hitherto largely neglected in the psychological, linguistic, and philosophical research on deception. First, the key conditions for deceptively withholding information are specified. Second, several notions related to deceptively withholding information are critically addressed with a view to teasing out the main forms of withholding informat…
Laughter through tears
This paper explores the nature of public tweets posted on the ShitMyReviewersSay (@YourPaperSucks) Twitter account. The focus is on the content of recontextualized extracts from peer reviews, as well as the formal properties and the socio-pragmatic functions of the sharing practice on Twitter. The examination of a corpus of tweets ( n = 397) yields several types of unprofessional review comments which correspond to the academic users’ rationale f…
Covid-19 memes going viral
Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the disso…
"You talking to me?" The viewer as a ratified listener to film discourse
Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction
Risum teneatis, amici?☆
This paper gives the first academic description of RoastMe - a prevalent, but hitherto unexplored, humorous practice formed on Reddit and re-posted on various social media, notably Imgur - in the light of the relevant socio-pragmatic literature on humour and (im)politeness. Taking into account the emic perspective of the RoastMe community of practice (as opposed to recurrent etic "cyberbullying" metapragmatic evaluations), RoastMe is conceptualis…
Covid-19 memes going viral
Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the disso…
Beyond a Joke
The main objective of this article is to list and briefly characterise several semantic and pragmatic types ofverbal humour, primarily those which cannot be reduced to (canned) jokes. First of all, a distinction is drawn between jokes andconversational humour, an umbrella term covering a variety of semantic and pragmatic types of humour, which recur in interpersonal communication, whether real-life (everyday conversations or TV programmes) or fic…
But seriously
Isn't it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony
This paper takes as its bedrock a neo-Gricean definition of the trope of irony, championing two essential conditions for diagnosing its presence: overt untruthfulness (or pretence) arising from flouting the first maxim of Quality, together with evaluative implicature, i.e., implied (negative) evaluation. The paramount aim here is to delineate the boundaries of humorous irony, a term frequently overused both in everyday discourse and in academic r…
The Linguistics of Laughter. A Corpus-Assisted Study of Laughter-Talk
Vigilante disparaging humour at r/IncelTears
This paper gives a comprehensive account of a humorous practice on the IncelTears subreddit, whose aim is to poke fun at, and give a social commentary on, the notorious online community of incels (hateful involuntary celibate men). Based on a representative corpus, the predominant categories of user-generated multimodal items are teased out relative to their form and stance. The central characteristics and socio-pragmatic aims of these humorous p…
Irony from a neo-Gricean perspective
This paper, representing theoretical pragmatics, aims to shed new light on the workings of irony, drawing on the research from the field of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of language. To meet this objective, the present article takes as its departure point the Gricean (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) philosophy, which is endorsed as a tenable basis for a new approach to irony, as long as a number of modifications and extensions…
Desperately seeking intentions
This paper addresses theoretical and methodological issues central to the study of insults (realised ad hoc or as rituals) on social media. After revisiting the well-entrenched but problematic distinction between personal insults and ritual insults, a proposal is made to distinguish between genuine insults, which are intended to offend the target (whether or not conveying truthful messages), and jocular insults, which are devoid of this intent an…
With or without intentions
Humour and (mock) aggression
This paper postulates a distinction between two types of discursive aggression in the context of humour production. This theoretical argument is supported by a qualitative (meta)pragmatic analysis of posts on the RoastMe subreddit devoted to an online community's original humorous practice based on jocular insults. The study of emic (community members') and etic (outsiders') metapragmatic evaluations of the content on the subreddit yields diverge…
Conceptualizing conversational humour as (im)politeness
This paper addresses the methodology and theory of research on conversational humour in the context of (im)politeness theory, focusing on the production and reception ends (the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s evaluation respectively). In the light of a critical overview of the relevant scholarship from both humour and impoliteness studies, several notions are elucidated, such as mock (im)politeness or banter. Generally, conversational humour…
Trolling is not stupid”
This paper aims to distill the essence of Internet trolling, a prevalent intercultural online communicative phenomenon which appears in many forms and guises. However, the label “trolling” tends to be (mis)used in reference to communicative practices which are not trolling in the traditional sense. It is argued that trolling necessarily relies on deception performed in multi-party interactions, which is conducive to (humorous) entertainment of se…
Setting our House in order
The primary objective of this paper is to elucidate the workings of (intentional) impoliteness in multi-party film talk. The departure point is the diversification of hearer types, coupled with the premise that film discourse operates on two communicative levels, namely the inter-character level and the recipient’s level, at which the audience interprets characters’ conversations. It is thus argued that the speaker’s impolite utterance may carry …
Quid rides
This article offers a qualitative and quantitative socio-cultural examination of RoastMe, a peculiar humorous practice deployed on Reddit and reposted on various social media. First, RoastMe is characterized from the emic (user) perspective and conceptualized in the light of humor theory (superiority and incongruity approaches). RoastMe consists in some users’ posting pictures of themselves with a view to being roasted, i. e. pelted with jocular …
Lessons in linguistics with ChatGPT
This paper discusses metalanguage, metadiscourse, metacommunication and metapragmatics testifying to users' conscious awareness enacted in human-AI interactions, based on a corpus of posts sent to Reddit's r/ChatGPT. The emphasis falls on users' foci of attention as they perform linguistic tests on ChatGPT and on how the "meta" practices manifest themselves interactionally on the selected subreddit, where human-AI interactions are showcased for e…
On being roasted, toasted and burned
Fast food chain Wendy's has a reputation for its salient humorous promotional campaign on Twitter involving snappy posts commonly called "roasting". Based on a corpus of tweets posted by Wendy's and duly metapragmatically labelled "roast(ing)", this paper examines the nature of the company's humour on Twitter. It is thus shown that only some part of the tweets that users and/or commentators deem roasting qualify as roasting in a technical sense (…
A burgeoning field of research
The pragmatics of sharing memes on Twitter
This paper explores the interactional pragmatic characteristics of multimodal memetic content facilitated by Twitter affordances, notably the functions of retweeting and quote tweeting. These Twitter affordances enable reposting a previous multimodal tweet (with or without a preceding commentary), which is conducive to nested memetic posts involving entextualised multimodal quotations and/or to memes interwoven into conversational exchanges. Thes…
The landscape of impoliteness research
This article attempts to give a state-of-the-art picture of impoliteness studies and to indicate a few prospective research directions to enrich them. It critically surveys a number of theoretical and methodological problems (impoliteness vs. rudeness; intention; sanctioned face-threat; and impoliteness strategies), as well as the paramount topics of investigation (such as disagreement; arguments; insults, taboo words; or sarcasm), and discourse …
Intention to deceive, bald-faced lies, and deceptive implicature
This paper gives a critical overview of Jörg
Humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse
The paramount goal of this paper is to tease out a number of universal communicative phenomena which carry humour appreciated by the recipient of a drama series, based on data culled from a famous medical drama series, "House". This broad-range study aims to shed light on the humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse, which evinces greater similitude than comedy discourse. It is argued that conversational humour is prevalent in dramatic discourse,…
Creating and sharing public humour across traditional and new media
New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humour
The Linguistics of Laughter. A Corpus-Assisted Study of Laughter-Talk
Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace
Pragmatics and Discourse. A Resource Book for Students, 2nd Edition
Beyond a Joke
The main objective of this article is to list and briefly characterise several semantic and pragmatic types ofverbal humour, primarily those which cannot be reduced to (canned) jokes. First of all, a distinction is drawn between jokes andconversational humour, an umbrella term covering a variety of semantic and pragmatic types of humour, which recur in interpersonal communication, whether real-life (everyday conversations or TV programmes) or fic…
Turning speaker meaning on its head
This article addresses the issue of non-verbal communication in the light of the Gricean conceptualisation of intentionally conveyed meanings. The first goal is to testify that non-verbal cues can be interpreted as nonnatural meanings and speaker meanings, which partake in intentional communication. Secondly, it is argued that non-verbal signals, exemplified by gestures, are similar to utterances which generate the communicator’s what is said and…
Revisiting Goffman's postulates on participant statuses in verbal interaction
Goffman's work on participation marks a watershed in linguistic studies on speaker and hearer roles in interaction, both in everyday conversations and in media discourse. Goffman is thus widely credited for having expanded the dyadic (speaker - hearer) model of communication. Albeit not elaborated in detail, his classification of speaker roles, as well as listeners, the latter divided into ratified hearers (addressed and unaddressed recipients) a…
"You talking to me?" The viewer as a ratified listener to film discourse
Setting our House in order
The primary objective of this paper is to elucidate the workings of (intentional) impoliteness in multi-party film talk. The departure point is the diversification of hearer types, coupled with the premise that film discourse operates on two communicative levels, namely the inter-character level and the recipient’s level, at which the audience interprets characters’ conversations. It is thus argued that the speaker’s impolite utterance may carry …
Humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse
The paramount goal of this paper is to tease out a number of universal communicative phenomena which carry humour appreciated by the recipient of a drama series, based on data culled from a famous medical drama series, "House". This broad-range study aims to shed light on the humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse, which evinces greater similitude than comedy discourse. It is argued that conversational humour is prevalent in dramatic discourse,…
Irony from a neo-Gricean perspective
This paper, representing theoretical pragmatics, aims to shed new light on the workings of irony, drawing on the research from the field of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of language. To meet this objective, the present article takes as its departure point the Gricean (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) philosophy, which is endorsed as a tenable basis for a new approach to irony, as long as a number of modifications and extensions…
Isn't it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony
This paper takes as its bedrock a neo-Gricean definition of the trope of irony, championing two essential conditions for diagnosing its presence: overt untruthfulness (or pretence) arising from flouting the first maxim of Quality, together with evaluative implicature, i.e., implied (negative) evaluation. The paramount aim here is to delineate the boundaries of humorous irony, a term frequently overused both in everyday discourse and in academic r…
Linguistic approaches to (non)humorous irony
Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction
Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
Online discussion boards are a common forum in which everyday users share troubles, elicit various forms of empathy and sympathy, and also seek advice from others. One challenge facing participants, as well as analysts, is the interpretation of expressions of discontent or dissatisfaction as either troubles talk,complaining, seeking advice, or some combination of these, given that each of these social actions/activities invokes a distinct prefere…
The landscape of impoliteness research
This article attempts to give a state-of-the-art picture of impoliteness studies and to indicate a few prospective research directions to enrich them. It critically surveys a number of theoretical and methodological problems (impoliteness vs. rudeness; intention; sanctioned face-threat; and impoliteness strategies), as well as the paramount topics of investigation (such as disagreement; arguments; insults, taboo words; or sarcasm), and discourse …
Intention to deceive, bald-faced lies, and deceptive implicature
This paper gives a critical overview of Jörg
Two layers of overt untruthfulness
This philosophical-pragmatic paper discusses several forms of irony which rest on other figures of speech contingent on overt untruthfulness, namely the figures arising as a result of flouting the first maxim of Quality. It is argued that an ironic implicature may be piggybacked on another implicature, called “as if implicature”, originating from flouting the first maxim of Quality occasioned by metaphor. Metaphorical irony, which is subject to t…
On untruthfulness, its adversaries and strange bedfellows
This introductory paper aims to demystify the concept of untruthfulness. Drawing on the scholarship on deception, the author reports on a distinction between the (objective) truth and (subjective) truthfulness, as well as their respective opposites: falsehood and untruthfulness. An attempt is made to discriminate between truthfulness and sincerity, to notions which capture similar phenomena but have originated in distinct scholarly traditions. Fu…
Comparing and combining covert and overt untruthfulness
This paper aims to differentiate between lying (seen as a type of deceiving) and irony, typically addressed independently by philosophers and linguists, as well as to discuss the cases when deception co-occurs with, and capitalises on, irony or metaphor. It is argued that the focal distinction can be made with reference to Grice’s first maxim of Quality, whose floutings lead to overt untruthfulness (notably, irony and metaphor), and whose violati…
Conceptualizing conversational humour as (im)politeness
This paper addresses the methodology and theory of research on conversational humour in the context of (im)politeness theory, focusing on the production and reception ends (the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s evaluation respectively). In the light of a critical overview of the relevant scholarship from both humour and impoliteness studies, several notions are elucidated, such as mock (im)politeness or banter. Generally, conversational humour…
Trolling is not stupid”
This paper aims to distill the essence of Internet trolling, a prevalent intercultural online communicative phenomenon which appears in many forms and guises. However, the label “trolling” tends to be (mis)used in reference to communicative practices which are not trolling in the traditional sense. It is argued that trolling necessarily relies on deception performed in multi-party interactions, which is conducive to (humorous) entertainment of se…
With or without intentions
A burgeoning field of research
Academics vs. American scriptwriters vs. academics
Psychology (49 works) · Philosophy (42 works) · Linguistics (38 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Humor Studies and Applications (30 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (28 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (25 works) · Political science (24 works) · Social Psychology (24 works)