Abstract
In this paper, we analyze how a political blog author (Spanish Alejo Vidal-Quadras) establishes the reference to self and other in his blog entries. We furthermore look into how the commentators to this blog react and establish reference to self and other in the digital public sphere. More concretely, we show that they not only take up the references established by the main blog author but also create new references. These allow, on the one hand, for profiling themselves as part of a group and, on the other hand, identifying their interlocutor among the variety of possible interlocutors in the digital public sphere. By addressing different interlocutors, the commentators turn the comments section into a dialogic space, a dimension that is lacking in the main blog entries. However, the fact that they almost invariably identify interlocutors other than Vidal-Quadras but address Vidal-Quadras without explicitly identifying him, shows that Vidal-Quadras remains the main ratified interlocutor in view of his ownership of the blog. This paper shows then how participants in the digital public sphere create a complex relationship of self and other reference in political blogs.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We are grateful to Javiera Muñoz Guerrero and Christian Pardo Gamboa for coding the examples.
References
Bazzanella, C. (2002). The significance of context in comprehension: The ’We Case’. Foundations of Science, 7, 239–254.
Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2011). Políticos en conflicto: una aproximación pragmático-discursiva al debate electoral cara a cara. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Bock, K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177–192.
Castells, M. (2006). Galaxia Internet. Madrid: Arete.
De Cock, B. (2010). La funcionalidad discursiva del esquema construccional: Los españoles hemos hecho historia en Europa. Linguistica Espanola Actual, 32, 173–195.
De Cock, B. (2011). Funciones pragmáticas de la referencia de persona en el lenguaje coloquial y en el discurso político. Oralia, 12, 247–266.
De Cock, B. (2012). El debate parlamentario frente al lenguaje coloquial y al debate televisivo: una caracterización lingüística basada en el uso de la referencia de persona. In E. del Río Sanz, M. del Carmen Ruiz de la Cierva, & T. Albaladejo (Eds.), Retórica y política. Los discursos de la construcción de la sociedad (pp. 729–743). Logroño: Colección Quintiliano de Retórica y Comunicación.
De Cock, B. (2014). Profiling discourse participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates (Vol. 246). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series.
De Cock, B., & Roginsky, S. (2015). Identités discursives sur Twitter: construction de l’identité de député européen en période pré-électorale. Comparaison entre la France, l’Espagne et le Royaume-Uni. In F. Liénard & S. Zlitni (Eds.), Communication électronique: enjeux, stratégies et opportunités (pp. 137–148). Lambert-Lucas: Limoges.
Goffman, E. (1979). Footing. Semiotica, 25, 1–29.
González, C. (2014). El metadiscurso en columnas de opinión y en los comentarios de lectores en un ambiente virtual y público. Spanish in Context, 11, 155–174.
González Arias, C., & Rodríguez, J. (2014). Interacción en cibermedios: la reacción de los lectores ante noticias y columnas de opinión. Calidoscópio, 123, 305–313.
Kluge, B. (2010). El uso de formas de tratamiento en las estrategias de generalización. In M. Hummel, B. Kluge, & M. Vázquez Laslop (Eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico (pp. 1107–1136). México/Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität.
López, L., & González, C. (2013). Las expresiones agresivas en los comentarios de los usuarios de blogs periodísticos: un análisis por medio de la teoría de la valoración. Tonos Digital, 24. www.tonosdigital.es.
Mühlhäusler, P., & Harré, R. (1990). Pronouns and people: The linguistic construction of social and personal identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Travis, C. (2005). The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In S. Randall, & E. Rubin (Eds.), Theoretical and experimental approaches to romance linguistics. Selected papers from the 34th linguistic symposium on romance languages, Salt Lake City, March 2004 (pp. 329–349). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Travis, C. (2007). Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change, 19, 101–135.
Yus, F. (2011). Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Acknowledgements
This study has been carried out with support of the Fondecyt Project No. 1140912, funded by the by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) of the Government of Chile (for Cristian González Arias). This study has also benefited from a research stay at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, funded by the Université catholique de Louvain (for Barbara De Cock).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
De Cock, B., González Arias, C. Reference to Self and Other in the Digital Public Sphere: The Case of Political Blogs. J Psycholinguist Res 47, 343–354 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9537-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9537-4