Cyberpragmatics

Abstract

The term cyberpragmatics was coined as a proposal to study Internet-mediated communication from a cognitive pragmatics point of view and, more specifically, from the theoretical framework of relevance theory, although other theoretical approaches were also addressed where appropriate. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics article “Relevance Theory.” One of its aims is to analyze why users often find relevance in certain discourses even though several “richer” options of contextualization (e.g., free video calls) are also available. It also analyzes how users fill the gap between what is coded (typed, recorded as audio file, etc.) and what is eventually interpreted (i.e., inferred) and the role of technological aspects of Internet communication (i.e., app interfaces on smartphones) in the eventual assessment of relevance. Other cyberpragmatic claims and research issues include the following: In Internet communication, just as in face-to-face communication, the addresser users have communicative intentions and have to devise their messages in such a way that the intended interpretation is selected by their addressee users. Similarly, Internet users resort to inferential strategies when interpreting messages on the Net, but these do not differ from the ones that they use in the interpretation of utterances in F2F communication with physical co-presence. The characteristics of the different applications for Internet communication affect the quality and quantity of contextual information accessed by users, the mental effort devoted to interpretation, and the choice of an interpretation. For example, there is a link between relevance and the usability of interfaces of programs for Internet communication: The assessment of relevance when interpreting Internet discourses can also be altered by the qualities of the program interface, often by gratuitously increasing the users’ mental effort, since very often they have to devote supplementary cognitive resources to using that interface, besides the effort of selecting an interpretation. Besides, much of cyberpragmatic research focuses on the users’ ability to connote their messages with different attributes of orality, typically found in the vocal (e.g., repetition of letters and creative use of punctuation marks) and the visual (e.g., emojis, stickers, GIFs) channels of oral interactions. Another area of research is the way Internet communication is used to sustain and assess group membership and (personal) social networks. In these cases, the “social benefit” obtained from these forms of Internet communication offsets the effort required to keep this level of commitment to the other users. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Communication article “Computer-Mediated Communication.”