Jordanian Facebookers' Attitudes: A Speech Act Analysis

Rula Abu-Elrob, Ahmad Tawalbeh

Abstract


Nowadays, Facebook is considered one of the most popular network sites that people use to follow up local and international pages for the latest news. Facebook status updates tackle different social aspects that followers would like to comment on to express their feelings and opinions. Driven by the motivation to study the speech acts of the followers' comments, the researchers sought the types of speech acts that occurred in the comments on Jordanian status updates. The researchers also analyzed the role speech act sequence can play. The analysis revealed the occurrence of most of Searle's speech acts in addition to swearing, sarcasm, and accusation. Moreover, No gender differences was noticed in the use of the appeared speech acts expect for swearing. The analysis of speech act sequence shows how commenters establish an interaction between themselves either when they agree or disagree with each other. The findings spot light on how Jordanians deliver their thoughts in different life aspects to reflect different cultural aspects.


Keywords


Facebook comments, Searle's taxonomy; Speech acts; speech act sequence; gender differences.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v15i1.55984

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