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Article In: Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

😮#油宝知道 (Baby of Oil knows)#

Translanguaging in playing cute on corporate social media

 | University of International Business and Economics
 | China Railway International Multimodal Transport Co., Ltd.
 | University of International Business and Economics
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Abstract
Playing cute has become a corporate branding strategy, but its integration with translanguaging on social media remains underexplored. This study proposes an analytical framework for playing cute as a pragmatic act on corporate social media and conducts a cross-platform analysis of how a leading Chinese corporation adopts translanguaging resources to play cute strategically. Findings show that the dominance of the strategy orienting towards playing babyishly cute across both Weibo and Twitter underscores its universal appeal, and the preference of playing whimsically and kindly cute on Weibo than on Twitter is attributable to linguistic-cultural proximity in intracultural communication and linguistic-cultural complexity in intercultural communication. Similarly, hashtag and text are employed more significantly on Weibo while emojis are deployed more significantly on Twitter, and mono-resource translanguaging pattern is more used than bi-resource and N-resource patterns. This study enhances understanding of playing cute and sheds light on globalized digital governance of Chinese state-owned corporations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Analytical framework
    • 3.1Three dimensions of playing cute
    • 3.2Strategies orienting towards playing cute
    • 3.3Translanguaging realization of strategies orienting towards playing cute
  • 4.Research methods
    • 4.1Research questions
    • 4.2Data collection
    • 4.3Data analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Strategies orienting towards playing cute
      • 5.1.1Strategies orienting towards playing babyishly cute
      • 5.1.2Strategies orienting towards playing whimsically cute
      • 5.1.3Strategies orienting towards playing kindly cute
    • 5.2Translanguaging realization of strategies orienting towards playing cute
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
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