Speaker
Description
Twitter as a digital mode of communication is used by political leaders to express emotions, give information and report happenings to a huge audience, instantly. Since there are no clear models for analyzing political tweet genres, a genre analysis of political tweets becomes difficult. Having such models, empowers analysts in revealing the purposes and strategies behind the politicians’ tweets. Therefore, this study builds upon Abdelsamie (in prep.) who believes that Twitter is a communicative mode which contains genres, and proposes a model for analyzing political tweets based on the examination of the tweets’ purposes and structures combined. According to Abdelsamie, there are six political tweet genres, one of which is the Recounting genre which is the focus of this study. The study pinpoints the substantial generic choices employed by the officials who are framed within their social roles (president vs vice-president/prime minister), political affiliations and idiolects.
For this reason, Abelsamie’s model, inspired by Martin (1985) and Swales (1990) definitions of genre, is the one adopted for this study. Also, by carrying out a transitivity analysis of the Recounting tweets, the various lexicogrammatical strategies for realizing the generic components of this genre are demonstrated. This study uses the UAM CorpusTool (O’Donnell, 2008) to annotate the purposes, structures and processes within the Recounting tweets posted by the current and former Egyptian and American presidential officials.
The results of this study validate the proposed model (Abdelsamie, in prep.) by showing the American and Egyptian presidential use of Recounting tweets for the purpose of identifying their political identities.
References:
Abdelsamie, Y. (in prep.). Genres of Political Tweets. PhD Dissertation in preparation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Martin. J. (1985). Process and text: two aspects of human semiosis. In J. D. Benson and W. S. Greaves (Eds.), Systemic Perspectives on Discourse, (pp. 248-74). New Jersey: Ablex Publications.
O’Donnell, M. (2008). The UAM CorpusTool: Software for corpus annotation and exploration. In Proceedings of the XXVI Congreso de AESLA, Almeria, Spain (pp. 3-5).
Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. New York: Cambridge University Press.
