Photo-sharing communities discourse: Strategies and language

Abstract

The article reports on the results of the research aimed at describing graphic, lexical and pragmatic means used in commentaries on photos posted to Russian and German websites "Yandex.Photos" (htpp://www.fotki.yandex.ru/), "Photo.Life" (htpp://www.lifeisphoto.ru/), "Photo.Sight" (htpp://www.photosight.ru/), "fotocommunity.de" (www.fotocommunity.de/). Theoretically, a lot of contemporary studies in computer-mediated communication do not include the linguistic research of photo sites, although this type of computer-mediated is gaining popularity in our country and abroad, alongside with twitter-communication, studies of youtube, sms-studies and other new media. While some studies indicate that linguists are not much involved in studying pictures, others suggest that the research of Flickr.com and other world-wide known photo-sharing platforms (for ex, Ipernity.com, Yandex photos) could reveal, which strategies users commonly prefer, expressing their comments to photos and which linguistic means they use to express (verbalize) their thoughts, ideas and emotions. The semantic lexical analysis of the replies was applied to reveal the borrowings and colloquial expressions. On the pragmatic level the research is based on the speech act theory to reveal the speech acts and to classify them. The study revealed that commenting on photographs, Russian and German users select one or more of the three communicative strategies: rational, emotional and creative with the emotional being predominant. Empirical evidence confirms, that the three communicative strategies (rational, emotional, creative) realized in a number of speech acts (compliment, advice, congratulation, compliment etc.) differ in linguistic means, levels of representations and concepts implied.