Search

This study analyses how affective stance is used for evaluation and positioning in fan discourse. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the paper focuses on affective stance verbs in an English-speaking popular media fandom on three social media platforms, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit. Fans use affective stance to construct positions in relation to the popular media franchise, in this case a popular Japanese manga and anime series. By combining quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis the study shows that stancetaking verbalises fans' investment in the fictional world of the narrative media, in the franchise production, and in the context of fan productivity. The discursively constructed positions reflect common fan practices such as publicising fan affect and emotions, reviewing the franchise critically, and sharing textual fan productivity. The analysis associates platform differences with the social norms of the fans and the technological affordances that enable their interaction. Because hashtag-based interaction on micro-blogs is primarily indirect, the study argues that the interactive functions of stance can be understood in relation to the general fandom affect. • Stancetaking in a narrative media fandom marks investment in fictional world. • Social media platforms vary in frequency and function of stance verb constructions. • Positions taken through stancetaking reflect the practices of the online community. • Stance as an interactive process occurs in relation to the general fandom affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates hyperbolic expressions of emotion in Mandarin Chinese conversations in Taiwan for two dimensions: how hyperbole is realized via a variety of syntactic devices based on metaphor, and how hyperbole takes affective stance to evidence speakers’ intersubjectification. It is shown that syntactic devices utilized to render hyperbole include polysyndeton, extreme case formulation, resultative verb construction, and four-word idiomatic construction. Highly understood in metaphorical senses, hyperbolic expressions of emotion have rich data revealing that hyperbole draws on metaphor as a bedrock mechanism. This paper argues that it is the analogical and imaginative capacities of metaphor that opens up possibility for speakers to talk about exaggerative interpretations of events, which further increase speakers’ intersubjectification to indicate their stance for interactive purposes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]