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In:Follow-ups in Political Discourse: Explorations across contexts and discourse domains
Edited by Elda Weizman and Anita Fetzer
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 60] 2015
► pp. 83–108

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Users’ comments in discussion forums

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Published online: 20 August 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.60.04joh
In this paper, I study how comments function as follow-ups in the discussion forums of online newspapers. Follow-ups recontextualize an object of discourse from its prior context to an ongoing context. A follow-up involves stance-taking, positioning, and negotiation of meaning. The data were obtained from one major French online newspaper called lemonde.fr. They consist of ten editorials with political and social topics, along with their subsequent comments. The first objective was to find out how, and by which linguistic means, writers express their stance and evaluate the editorials. It was found that they do it through axiological adjectives, explicit positioning, and various communicative acts, as well as by affective, epistemic, and ironic expressions. The second aim was to examine how the discussion forum posts target the prior discourse, and open up a negotiation, i.e., what types of responsive and initiative properties are used to negotiate the meaning. Findings indicate that the comments target either the content or the stance expressed in the editorial. By using them, users imply that they know more about the issue or they share the same view.
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