Outlining the challenges involved in the study of social media discourse that includes social interaction, relationality, intersubjectivity, and intermodality, this book takes a social semiotic approach to offer a useful reconceptualisation of existing tools and introduces new methodologies to help those studying in this area.
Drawing on a range of corpora that feature tweets, Instagram photos, YouTube comments, and emoji, this book is essential reading for students studying modules on discourse analysis and language and media.
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her major research interest is in exploring ambient affiliation in the discourse of social media using social semiotic, multimodal, and corpus-based methods. She is a co-editor of the journal Visual Communication. Key books include Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse (2018) and Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (2012). Recent co-authored books include Researching the Language of Social Media (2014; 2022, Routledge), Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics (2021), and Emoji and Social Media Paralanguages (2024).
Andrew S. Ross is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canberra. His research focuses on the use of (multimodal) critical discourse analysis in social media discourse. His work includes the edited volumes The Sociolinguistics of Hip-Hop as Critical Conscience: Dissatisfaction and Dissent (2018) and Discourses of (De)Legitimization: Participatory Culture in Digital Contexts (2019, Routledge). His work has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society; Discourse, Context & Media; Language and Communication; and Social Media + Society.