2015/01/09 by Michele Zappavigna · 9 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Digital Communication and Language #Discourse Analysis in Language Studies #Wikis in Education and Collaboration
paper · doi:10.1080/10350330.2014.996948
openalex publication_date 2015/01/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
An important dimension of social media discourse is its searchability. A key semiotic resource supporting this function is the hashtag, a form of social tagging that allows microbloggers to embed metadata in social media posts. While popularly thought of as topic-markers, hashtags are able to construe a range of complex meanings in social media texts. This paper uses the concept of linguistic metafunctions, to explore how hashtags enact three simultaneous communicative functions: marking experiential topics, enacting interpersonal relationships, and organizing text. Corpus-based discourse analysis of linguistic patterns in a 100 million word Twitter corpus is used to investigate these functions and how they relate to the notion of social search.