Is implicit communication quantifiable? A corpus-based analysis of British and Italian political tweets

Bibliographic Data

ID3359411
AuthorsDavide Garassino (0000-0002-6224-4065, University of Zurich, corresponding author), Nicola Brocca (0000-0001-5318-0162, Universität Innsbruck), Viviana Masia (0000-0001-8162-201X, Roma Tre University)
Year2022
Volume194
Pages9-22
Publication date2022-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Pragmatics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0378-2166 • E-ISSN: 1879-1387
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.pragma.2022.03.024
OpenAlexW4224295634
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited16

Twitter is nowadays a powerful means of political propaganda. Its effectiveness can be easily appreciated in the large amounts of messages exchanged by politicians every day. This wealth of data, together with the interactive nature of the social medium, provides an ideal basis for the analysis of a striking feature of political messages, i.e., their implicitness, often achieved using presuppositions, among other strategies. The present work proposes a comparative analysis of British and Italian politicians' use of Twitter by focusing on implicit communication (notably, presuppositions) and the pragmatic functions of tweets. Based on a sample of about 400 tweets, our analysis shows that some of these functions tend to associate either with presuppositional or non-presuppositional communicative devices. Moreover, a critical methodological discussion is offered in order to address the main challenges of quantitative corpus-based pragmatics

Discourse analysis · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics · Linguistics · Media studies · Political communication · Political science · Politics · Pragmatics · Presupposition · Sample (material · Sociology · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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