Analysing speech acts in politically related Facebook communication

Abstract

Internet-mediated communication has revolutionized the world at large, attracting millions of people from similar and different sociolinguistic backgrounds to communicate and express their thoughts, feelings and needs. On the other hand, multilingualism in Congo-Brazzaville is a real issue with over sixty living languages spoken across the country. The aim of the present study is to examine speech acts in politically orientated Facebook interactions. In applying Weigand's taxonomy to a dataset of over 265,147 words, Facebook interaction as a whole is regarded as a set of speech acts purposely performed by users. As such, every Facebook update is taken as a speech act performed by users, and Facebook communication in its entirety is a dialogically organized interaction, entailing that Facebook updates appear as communicative actions, and comments stand for reactions to those initiative actions. The findings suggest that any utterance is a goal-orientated speech act, and no illocutionary force could exist per se without its perlocutionary counterpart effect. Every speech act is complete as long as both forces – illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect – are considered indispensable parts of the utterance. The findings, furthermore, indicate that both Facebook updates and comments are important components of a complete dialogic speech act.