Acting out on Twitter: Affordances for animating reported speech in written computer-mediated communication

Abstract

Quotative be like is a construction associated with informal spoken contexts and, especially, with various forms of embodied enactments. This study examines instances of quotative be like in a corpus of Twitter data (1,000,000 tweets; 1,113 quotative instances). Special attention is paid to how users of Twitter employ the platform's affordances to animate their speech reports-i.e. to represent voices, enact body language, or otherwise 'dramatize' the speech reports. The aim is to investigate how a linguistic format which is richly embodied in face-to-face interaction gets 're-embodied' on Twitter. The study finds that animation of reported speech on Twitter is visually, and predominantly typographically, afforded. In the material, oral practices are more frequently reconfigured and remediated rather than directly reproduced. That is to say, even when users are not reproducing spoken utterances, they often employ graphical strategies that are mainly understandable by analogy to spoken and embodied face-to-face interaction. However, users also draw on emergent online repertoires with no face-to-face analogues, such as 'pure' typographical play and the recruitment of established online memes. Thus, the findings suggest that orality lingers as a trace, but is not a necessary component, in bringing reported speech to life in a text-based computer-mediated setting.