LINGUIST List 22.148 Sat Jan 08 2011 Diss: Disc Analysis: LeBlanc: '1337 \/\/4YZ 0F $p34K1NG: Toward a ...' Editor for this issue: Mfon Udoinyang <mfonlinguistlist.org> To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm. Directory         1.     Tracy LeBlanc , 1337 \/\/4YZ 0F $p34K1NG: Toward a Unifying Pragmatic Theory of Virtual Speech Community Building Message 1: 1337 \/\/4YZ 0F $p34K1NG: Toward a Unifying Pragmatic Theory of Virtual Speech Community Building Date: 05-Jan-2011 From: Tracy LeBlanc <tfont11lsu.edu> Subject: 1337 \/\/4YZ 0F $p34K1NG: Toward a Unifying Pragmatic Theory of Virtual Speech Community Building E-mail this message to a friend Institution: Louisiana State University Program: Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2010 Author: Tracy R LeBlanc Dissertation Title: 1337 \/\/4YZ 0F $p34K1NG: Toward a Unifying Pragmatic Theory of Virtual Speech Community Building Dissertation URL: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11152010-220929/ Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis Dissertation Director: Mary Jill Brody Dissertation Abstract: Building a speech community requires building a shared history of communicative interaction. Within a virtual medium, speech community members employ accommodations for the lack of shared physical space that face-to-face interactions provide. These accommodations, amassing through extended discourse, bring to light the communicative strategies that virtual interlocutors employ in order to build community. Drawing from a corpus of unscripted, naturally occurring discourse of a particular virtual speech community, I engage three frames of linguistic analysis in order to recognize the communicative strategies that constitute speech community building. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) accounts for the individual cognitive work involved in asserting membership in a speech community. (Im)politeness Theory (Culpeper 1996) accounts for the negotiation of membership in a speech community via impolite interactions. Stance Theory (Du Bois 2007) accounts for the intersubjectivity of said negotiation, where members situate themselves within the community through their discourse. Each of the three models serve to highlight particular aspects of speech community building but fall short of accounting for the intricate endeavors of entering, maintaining membership in, and negotiating place in a speech community that exists with other speech communities within a larger culture. I propose the ethnopragmatic method, or EPM, which emphasizes the importance of each level of the discourse world (the EP world) - the individual, interlocutors, speech communities, and the larger culture. Each level of the EP world contains histories of interaction, which ultimately inform discourse meaning. While the EPM is too cumbersome for utility as a discourse analytic model, it nonetheless serves to showcase the multi-faceted and interdependent phenomena involved in communicative interaction. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 08-Jan-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.