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Article published In: Internet Pragmatics
Vol. 2:1 (2019) ► pp.112–135

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Evidentiality and stance in YouTube comments on smartphone reviews

 | Universidad de Belgrano
 | University of Augsburg
Published online: 20 May 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00025.par
Abstract
Online participatory environments have become saturated spaces in terms of the opportunities that they offer for the display of different viewpoints and ideologies. YouTube, as a popular video-sharing and networking site, constitutes a new media space that invites both individual and collaborative stance-taking by participants who gather, virtually, to address a particular topic, issue or event depicted visually and discussed textually through the comments that are posted on the site. This interactional dynamics triggers a dialogic sequence of follow-ups through which stances are formulated following up on previous stances or counterstances. Against this background, this paper reports on a case study of individual and collaborative, and interdiscursive and intradiscursive stance-taking in participants’ comments to an online review focusing on the strategic use of direct (tactile) and indirect (inferential) references to evidentiality and their co-occurrence with argumentative markers. In this multilayered context stance-taking does not only contribute to evaluation but also to the construction of collective identities.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The communicative act of follow-up
    • 2.1Stance-taking
    • 2.2Argumentation and argumentative markers
    • 2.3Evidentiality
  • 3.The interactional context of You Tube reviews
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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