LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:12 December 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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A Speech Act Analysis of Status Updates on Facebook:
The Case of Ghanaian University Students

Mark Nartey, B.A. (Arts.), M.Phil.

Abstract

In the last half a decade, social network sites (SNSs) have wrought a tremendous impact on interpersonal communication across the world to the extent that it can be postulated, arguably, that such sites/platforms represent the commonest new media in Ghana (Coker, 2012). However, the communicative significance of this new media as a means of articulating varying views and communicating differing intentions is relatively unknown in Ghana.

In this paper, I examine, ipso facto, the various categories of speech acts that manifest in the messages used by Ghanaian university students to update their status on Facebook as well as the pragmatic underpinnings of these messages. Based on a combined framework of Austin and Searle’s speech act theory and Warschauer and Herring’s notion of computer-mediated communication, the analysis on a corpus of 60 online messages indicated that Facebook status updates of Ghanaian university students are characterized by five speech acts, prominent among which are directives and asssertives.

The study also revealed that the messages are informed and conditioned by multiple pragmatic notions, and reflect the socio-cultural variation and culture-specificity of language use in SNSs. These findings bear theoretical implications and hold implications for further research in computer-mediated communication and communication studies.

Key words: Social network site, computer-mediated communication, facebook, status update

Introduction

With the emergence of new media technologies, the means by which people interact or communicate has undergone drastic transformation, with communication becoming more virtual in recent times. As noted by Boyd & Ellison (2008), one of such new media technologies which has captured the attention and interest of the society is the Social Network Site (SNS). The current situation is not alarming given that as Herring & Martinson (2004) and Duthler (2006) intimate, computer-mediated communication (CMC) or the language used online relieves people of the gendered roles assigned them since participants are able to use language to suit their preferences. In this wise, mobile telephony and computer-mediated communication have been studied from multiple perspectives in a variety of disciplines, including behavioral psychology, communication studies, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, social network analysis, and sociology (Sotillo, 2012). Baron (2008) has, for instance, shown how electronically-mediated technologies are changing the way we communicate and relate to one another.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Mark Nartey, B.A. Arts, M.Phil.
Department of English
University of Cape Coast
Cape Coast, Ghana
narteynartey60@gmail.com
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