Pragmatics and cultural institutions: Typology of questions as strategies for online communication

María Isabel Hernández Toribio
University Complutense of Madrid

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.

Publication history

Date received: 11 May 2023

Date accepted: 27 August 2024

Published online: 24 April 2025

Table of contents

There is increasing interest in analysing the online communication taking place between the public and cultural institutions such as museums and film archives. This trend has consolidated a line of research that offers ever more avenues of investigation into the online affordances and strategies employed by cultural institutions to create spaces for interactions with visitors. Critical museology and new curatorship practices have created an inflection point in traditional concepts of museums and similar cultural institutions whereby we now speak of these as “participatory spaces” (Simon 2010, 349) for “learning and discovery” (Fernández-Hernández et al. 2021, 115). In this way, the affordances of social media (SM) contribute to the construction of a dialogic communication (Capriotti and Losada Díaz 2018, 642) and promote the design of attractive experiences (Antón, Camarero and Garrido 2018, 1406) that reinforce engagement, and ultimately, foster emotional commitment or involvement.

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