The pragmatics of political messages in twitter communication

Abstract

The aim of the current paper is to formulate a conception of pragmatic patterns characterizing the construction of individual and collective identities in virtual communities (in our case: the Twitter community). We have explored several theoretical approaches and frameworks and relevant empirical data to show that the agents building virtual communities are 'extended selves' grounded in a highly dynamic and compressed, linguistically mediated virtual network structure. Our empirical evidence consists of a study of discourse related to the Latvian parliamentary elections of 2010. We used a Twitter corpus (in Latvian) harvested and statistically evaluated using the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) algorithm and complemented with qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Special emphasis is given to opinion leaders (journalists, politicians, public relations specialists, academics etc.) in Twitter communication, instead of attempting to cover the entire body of discourse including all Twitter participants. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.