Konig2023
| Konig2023 | |
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| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Konig2023 |
| Author(s) | Katharina König |
| Title | Response design in WhatsApp chats: contextualising different stances of confirmation and agreement in text-based interaction |
| Editor(s) | Aino Koivisto, Heidi Vepsäläinen, Mikko T. Virtanen |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, WhatsApp, confirmation, agreement |
| Publisher | Finnish Literature Society |
| Year | 2023 |
| Language | English |
| City | Helsinki |
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| Pages | 95–124 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.21435/sflin.22 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Conversation Analytic Perspectives to Digital Interaction: Practices, Resources, and Affordances |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
This chapter analyses the use of the response particle <ja> (‘yes’) and its most frequent variants <jaaa> and <joa> in German WhatsApp chats to investigate the particularities of response design in text-based messenger chats. Drawing on recent research in digital conversation analysis (Arminen et al. 2016; Giles et al. 2015), it focusses on the particles’ use in the coordination of joint activities, in particular in responses to directive-commissive actions (Couper-Kuhlen 2014b; Koivisto, this volume). As texters cannot make use of prosodic or embodied resources to distinguish between different stances of confirmation or agreement, they appropriate textual resources such as the iteration of vowels used to differentiate between <ja> used for simple confirmations and <jaaa(a)> for contextualising a euphoric stance. This is also reflected in the systematic use of different emojis with which the response particles can form ‘multimodal gestalts’ (Mondada 2014): Simple <ja> responses are recurrently appended by 👍; emphatic emojis such as 😍 co-occur with <jaaa(a)> responses. In contrast, <joa> usually contextualises restrained agreement or confirmation. Moreover, sequential analyses show that the choice of a particular response particle is tightly fitted to the initial action; <joa> often follows an initiating action which is framed as preliminary, <jaaa(a)> repeatedly responds to proposals and invitations that are marked as emphatic or enthusiastic. Based on these findings, the chapter develops a multidimensional approach to the study of action formation and ascription in messenger chats that takes activity contexts, sequential trajectories, co-occurring verbal resources, emojis, and the sequencing of postings into account.
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