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Article published In: Concepts and Context in Relevance-Theoretic Pragmatics: New Developments
Edited by Agnieszka Piskorska and Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics 33:3] 2023
► pp. 418–435

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Deceptive clickbaits in the relevance-theoretic lens

What makes them similar to punchlines

ORCiD logo with link | Jagiellonian University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 6 September 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.22003.jod
Abstract
This paper explores the nature of clickbaiting as a form of viral journalism from a relevance-theoretic perspective (Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The focus is on deceptive clickbaits, i.e., manipulative internet headlines whose interpretation, based on the way they are worded, leads to opening an information gap, thus luring the reader into clicking on the link provided with a view to increasing the website traffic. It is highlighted that such headlines exploit linguistic underdeterminacy, and unlike felicitous headlines, which provide an accurate representation of the article content and therefore play the role of relevance optimizers (Dor, Daniel. 2003. “On Newspaper Headlines as Relevance Optimizers.” Journal of Pragmatics 351: 695–721. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), deceptive clickbaits induce recipients to generate interpretations which arouse their intense curiosity but are ultimately incompatible with the article’s content. The paper shows how relevance theory can explain the interpretation bias that the reader of deceptive clickbaits falls prey to and advances the idea that there is affinity in this respect between deceptive clickbaits and jokes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Major functions of headlines
  • 3.Clickbait headlines: Characteristic features
  • 4.Deceptive clickbaits: A relevance-theoretic analysis
  • 5.Deceptive clickbaits and jokes
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
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