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Pragmatics and cultural institutions

Typology of questions as strategies for online communication

ORCiD logo with link | University Complutense of Madrid
Published online: 24 April 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23022.her
Abstract
This article presents a pragmatic analysis of the different types of interrogatives used in the tweets posted on the official accounts of five Spanish cultural institutions (museums and film archives) and how these form part of these institutions’ strategies to foster interactivity in their online communications. To this end, the work aims to determine: (a) what types of interrogatives appear most frequently; (b) identify where they appear in a tweet; and (c) how this affects their formulation and also their functions within the speech act set constituting the tweet. The corpus for analysis comprises 430 tweets collected using the T-Hoarder system during a single year, 2020. An examination of on one hand the flow of tweets (numbers of tweets, retweets, and replies) for each institution throughout the year of study and on the other, the numbers of interrogatives they employed suggests that interrogatives contribute to increased levels of interactivity.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Twitter and cultural institutions
  • 3.Questions as relevant pragmatic strategies in the communication of cultural institutions
  • 4.Data and methodology
    • 4.1The corpus
    • 4.2The methodology
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Questions as relevant pragmatic strategies in the communication of cultural institutions
      • 5.1.1Real questions
      • 5.1.2Didactic questions
      • 5.1.3Hypothetical questions
      • 5.1.4Informative questions with Sabías que+ ‘Do/Did youTS know that+’
      • 5.1.5Invitations and offers
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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