A Pragmatic Analysis of Stancetaking Towards Facebook Posts in Popular Iraqi Pages
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Abstract
Social media programs play a major role nowadays in the communication process among social interactors; one fatal program is the Facebook. No doubt that popular Facebook pages seek to attract people’s perception in one way or another. It seems that those pages enforce people to show their alignment/disalignment with the propositions of their posts. It is hypothesized that those posts tell you something but hide something else which, in turn, affect the way people evaluate them to give their final stances in a form of a comment. For this reason, this study connects stancetaking with pragmatics. The main aim of this study is to find out how do Iraqi people react to such posts, and to prove that those Iraqi popular Facebook pages really cause Iraqi people to be divergent with each other.
The data of this study includes the analysis of two famous popular pages (Khan Jgan خان جغان and Baghdad بغداد), one post and three stancetakings for each. The participants are chosen randomly to arrive at successful results, taking into account that only those comments which have sub-comments are chosen to be analyzed. The data is qualitatively analyzed using Du Bois’s (2007) “The Stance Triangle” model. The results in the findings and discussions show an agreement with the hypotheses of this study, they are highlighted within the conclusions of this study.
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