Dalarna University's logo and link to the university's website

du.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Vicious or Misunderstood?: A Pragmatic Analysis of YouTube Comments
Dalarna University, School of Language, Literatures and Learning.
2024 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a relatively new field made even more difficult to investigate by the continuous progress and changes of the digital world. There is a multitude of research on CMC from a linguistic perspective; however, the vastness of the online world makes it difficult to determine to what extent it is a welcoming or hostile environment. The existing studies of polite and impolite language use in CMC provide some insight into the type of environment found online though there is a notable lack of information regarding the overall proportionality of impolite language use, specifically violent and aggressive language use. This study aims to explore to what extent violent and aggressive language use is present in user generated comments found on the social media platform YouTube by investigating the semantic fields of violence and aggression. It is a corpus-based study of the topmost comments collected from the most popular videos in the year 2023 in the YouTube category of Reviews. The quantitative content analysis reveals that both violent and aggressive language use is present in the comments though infrequently with violent language use having a normalized frequency of 2.1 times per thousand words and aggressive language use 2.6 times per thousand words. The qualitative pragmatic analysis of the observed instances shows that only one instance carries out the illocutionary act of violence in addition to the locutionary act. Based on these findings it appears violent and aggressive language use is relatively infrequent concerning more neutral topics and in most cases the communicators do not have violent or aggressive intent in their messages.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024.
Keywords [en]
computer-mediated communication, impolite language use, semantic fields, pragmatics
National Category
Specific Languages
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:du-48905OAI: oai:DiVA.org:du-48905DiVA, id: diva2:1880334
Subject / course
English
Available from: 2024-07-01 Created: 2024-07-01 Last updated: 2025-10-09

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(5492 kB)686 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 5492 kBChecksum SHA-512
d52a375a96379b274133f074675d55d2b00379388532142940090a71c50b1998d85f13eeb78e59778b323017c40d69c16ff074305ab71cb4d9dd8397a38bc033
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

By organisation
School of Language, Literatures and Learning
Specific Languages

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 686 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 1281 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf