A Pragmatic Analysis of the Language of Facebook Posts and Status Updates

Abstract

This study explores the formal features and the communicative functions of digital discourse through investigating some Facebook posts and status updates. On account of that, the data is analyzed through Searle’s Speech Act framework, together with Grice's principle of cooperative maxims and implicature. The data includes 49 posts and statuses of males and females in the age between 25-34 years collected along a period of 3 years (2016-2018) and categorized according to its semantic domains. The results show that digital discourse has some characteristics. They are classified into formal features, which are related to the form of the posts, and functional manifestations, which are associated with the function of the posts. Mingling verbal and pictorial elements is the most dominant and explicit digital formal feature.