Integrating metapragmatics into genre analysis: Does the analytical toolkit need an upgrade in the digital era?

The aim of this article is to (further) theoretically and analytically integrate metapragmatics into genre analysis. Metapragmatics broadly refers to any reflexive activity, reflexive awareness, and reflexive knowledge on the part of social actors as to how the language is/should be used, as well as to the study of such reflexive phenomena. One way such phenomena are manifested and become “visible” is through so-called metapragmatic discourse - discourses or discourse fragments referencing the pragmatics of other discourses or, in effect, of their own fragments. It is contended that at least part of what such discourses consistently do is reflect on various generic properties of discourses they have as objects of their metasemiosis. Thus, from a more practical standpoint, the aim was to explore several instances of metapragmatic discourse vis-a-vis possible generic references used by the actors and to reveal what such usage can contribute to our understanding of genres and how they “work” in contextualized communicative events. With this end in mind, seven YouTube videos and their accompanying comments sections have been analyzed. The results indicate that a certain percentage of the exchanges the members of the community engage in is indeed related to the generic properties of the original discourse. This can vary from simply using a generic label to (metapragmatically) refer to the discourse in question (as a token of a certain type/genre) to actually discussing the generic characteristics of the genre it instantiates. Interestingly, many references to genres are evaluative, projecting a certain attitudinal stance of the actor(s). Another observation is that different wordings used by the discourse community to refer to generic models can be, as it were, “proper” generic labels, but they can also be words and phrases that would hardly qualify as proper names of genres from the standpoint of a genre analyst. This emphasizes the idea that to a “lay” actor using (proper) generic labels is but one way of regimenting discourses metapragmatically and that the borderline between these and “improper” ways of typifying discourse is not well defined. A third observation is that metapragmatic acts (whereby metapragmatic/generic labels are used) are also metasemiotic: actors routinely evoke elements of other semiotic modalities as indexing a certain genre (or a genre-like metapragmatic model discussed above). In a broader perspective, this research emphasizes yet again the social nature of genres and the increasing demand to explore contextualized discourses, with the “embeddedness” of the (original) discourse in comments produced by the discourse community being one of the possible angles on such contextualization. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References